Landless Workers' Movement - The MST Resumes Direct Action: From 2005 On

The MST Resumes Direct Action: From 2005 On

Lula's election to the Presidency raised the hypothetical banner of active government support to land reform, to which conservative Midia reacted by means of increased efforts towards branding the MST's activities as felonies. In May 2005, the MST was reported by the Veja magazine to have helped the PCC, the most powerful prison-gang criminal organization in the State of São Paulo. The evidence offered by the magazine was a Police phone tap recording depicting a conversation between PCC leaders during which one of the members of the gang said that he had "just talked with the leaders of the MST" who were going to "give instructions" to the gang about the better way of staging what was to be the largest prisoner's relatives protest in Brazilian history, on April 18, 2005, with more than 4,000 prisoners' relatives protesting against prevailing conditions in São Paulo State correctional facilities. The MST "leaders" to which the tape refers were not named. No MST activist, actual or alleged, intervened in the taped conversations. The MST denied the link with a formal written statement implying the supposed evidence offered was only hearsay, supplied as an attempt to criminalize the movement. In the wake of 9-11, much of Brazilian Midia showed a tendency to describe the MST as "terrorist" by lumping it together loosely with various historical and midiatic happenings and thereby following an international post-9-11 trend of relegating any political movement seem as contradictory to existing glabalization outside the boundaries of permissible political discourse.

It's commonly assumed that the MST's activities are continuously surveyed by military intelligence. Association by proxy between the MST and terrorist movements is assumed by various intelligence organs, Brazilian as well as foreign, the MST itself being regarded as a source of "civil unrest".

In late 2005, a parliamentary inquiry commission where landowners-friendly congressmen had a majority issued a report classifying the activities of the MST as "terrorist" and the movement itself as a criminal organization. The report, however, met with no support from the Workers' Party MPs in the commission, a senator ripping it up before TV cameras, saying that those who voted for it were "accomplices of murder, people who use slave labor, who embezzle land illegally". Neverthless, based on this report, a bill was presented in 2006 to the Chamber of Deputies by Congressman Abelardo Lupion (Democratas- Paraná), which proposed to consider "invading others' property with the end of pressuring the government" as a terrorist action and therefore as a heinous crime(a "heinous" crime being a felony, designed as such in a 1990 Brazilian law, whose suspects are ineligible for pretrial release).

In 2008, a group of public attorneys from the State of Rio Grande do Sul, workingly jointly with the State's Military (uniformed) Police, elaborated a report charging the MST of working in colusion with various international terrorist groups - such a report being used in the State's courts, according to Amnesty International, as a justification for eviction orders carried out by the Police with what AI deemed to be "excessive use of force". At the same time, the said group of attorneys made public a formely classified report of the State's Council of Public Attorneys which asked the State to press charges at the courts for banning the MST by having it declared as an illegal organization, a task for which the report considered further investigations useless, "as it was public knowledge that the movement and its leadership were guilty of engaging in organized criminality".The report proposed also that, in municipalities where the presence of MST activists could "cause electoral disequilibrium", said activists' franchise was to be withdrawn by striking them from the voters' registry. Conversely, declarations issued at the same time by the State's Association of Military Policy Commissioned Officers went into an open Red Scare vein, declaring the MST outrightly to be "an organized movement striving at instituting a totalitarian state in our country".

In April 2006, the MST broke into the farm of Suzano Papel e Celulose, a large maker of paper products, in the state of Bahia, due to the farm having over six square kilometres devoted to eucalyptus growth. Eucalyptus, a non-native plant, has been blamed for environmental degradation in Northeast Brazil, as well as reducing the general avaliability of land for small production, in what is called by some "cornering" of said producers (encurralados pelo eucalipto). In 2011, Veja described such activities as plain theft of eucalyptus wood, quoting an estimate from the state's military police that 3,000 people earned a living in Southern Bahia from this wood thieving.

Between September 27 and October 7, 2009, the MST occupied an orange plantation in Borebi, State of São Paulo, owned by orange juice multinational Cutrale, the said corporation claiming to have suffered losses worth R$ 1.2 million (roughly US$ 603,000) in damaged equipment, missing pesticide, destroyed crops and trees cut by MST activists. The MST replied by declaring the farm to be government property, illegally embezzled by Cutrale, and that the occupation was intended as a protest against this state of affairs, the concomitant destruction being the work of provocateurs.- such questioning of the formal legality of existing private property by denouncing landowers as helding land in adverse possession being one of the movement's main political tools.

During the same period, the MST also repeatedly created roadblocks, blocking highways and railroads. That was part of a strategy of creating media events in order to call the general public's attention to landless workers' plight.