Landless Workers' Movement - Media Coverage

Media Coverage

The role of the MST as a grassroots organization engaged in "charter schools" activity has attracted considerable attention from the Brazilian press, much of it accusatory. In an issue of the magazine Veja, Brazil's largest (known for its militant hostility against social grassroots movements in general) dated September 8, 2004, titled "The MST's Madrassas", journalist Monica Weinberg tells about her visiting of two of the MST's schools in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. In her report, the MST is said to be "indoctrinating" children between the ages of 7 and 14 - a conclusion reached by the journalist after a quote from the MST publication "Education Notebook, no. 8" stating that one of the MST's stated goals for the children is to "develop class and revolutionary conscience". According to the same story, children in the schools were also shown what the journalist calls propaganda films, and were allegedly taught that GMO products contain "poison" and told not to eat margarine for fear of containing GMO soybeans. The conclusion reached by Ms. Weinberg was such as the Brazilian government has no control over most of the schools, and that they do not follow the curriculum set forth by the Ministry of Education which calls for "pluralism of ideas" and "tolerance". In the journalist's analysis, the allegedly "preaching" of Marxism in these schools is to be taken as analogous to the preaching of radical Islam found in Middle-Eastern Madrassas.

There is a long history of mutual and very bitter animosity between the MST and Veja: already in 1993, the magazine described the MST as "a peasant organization of leninist character" and charged its leaders and activists with faking a homeless condition. This accusatory stance only raised pitch throughout the years: in February 2009, one finds the magazine opposing public support to the "criminal" activities of the movement and the MST in turn, for instance, charging the magazine, a year later, with "vandalizing" both journalism and truth itself. In its latest mention to the MST, Veja calls it outrightly "a criminal mob". This case-history in journalistic mud-slinging has justified the writing of at least two academic monographies wholly dedicated to it.

In general, the relation of mainstream media towards the MST has been ambiguous: 1990s media tended to support the goal of land reform in general and to present it under a sympathetic light. One ready example is provided by the fact that, between 1996 and 1997, TV Globo broadcast the telenovela O Rei do Gado ("The cattle baron"), where a beautiful female sem terra, played by actress Patricia Pillar, fell in love with a male landowner. In the same telenovela, the wake of the fictive Senator Caxias, killed while defending an MST occupation, offered the opportunity for two real senators from the Workers' Party, Eduardo Suplicy and Benedita da Silva, to make cameo appearances as themselves praising their fictive colleague's agenda. The same media, however, tends to disavow what it sees as the MST's violent methods - a trend that became more markedly as the movement gathered strength. While not outrightly disawowing the movement's struggle for land reform as such, it has been noted that Brazilian media assumes a moralizing instance towards the MST: "to deplore the invasion of productive land, the MST's irrationality and lack of responsibility, the ill-using of distributed land parcels and to argue for the existence of alternate peaceful solutions".