The Landless Workers' Movement (Portuguese: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST) is a social movement in Brazil aimed at land reform. Inspired by Marxism, it is the largest such movement in Latin America, with an estimated informal membership of 1.5 million across 23 of Brazil's 26 states. MST defines its goals as access to the land for poor workers through land reform in Brazil, and activism around social issues that make land ownership more difficult to achieve, such as unequal income distribution, racism, sexism, and media monopolies. MST strives to achieve a self-sustainable way of life for the rural poor. The MST differs from previous land reform movements in its single-issue focus; land reform for them is a self-justifying cause. The organization maintains that it is legally justified in occupying unproductive land, pointing to the most recent Constitution of Brazil (1988), which contains a passage saying that land must fulfill a social function (Article 5, XXIII). The MST also notes, based on 1996 census statistics, that a mere 3% of the population owns two-thirds of all arable land in Brazil. In 1991, MST received the Right Livelihood Award "for winning land for landless families, and helping them to farm it sustainably."
Land reform before the 1988 Constitution Land reform has a long history in Brazil, and the concept predates the MST. In the mid-20th century, Brazilian leftists reached a consensus that the democratization and widespread actual exercise of political rights would require land reform. Brazilian political elites actively opposed land reform initiatives, which they felt threatened their social and political status. Political leaders of the rural poor then attempted to achieve land reform from below, through grassroots action. MST broke new ground by tackling land reform itself, by "breaking...dependent relations with parties, governments, and other institutions," and framing the issue in purely political terms, rather than social, ethical, or religious ones. The first statute to regulate land ownership in Brazil after its independence, Law 601 or Lei de Terras (Landed Property Act), took effect 18 September 1850. A colonial administration, based on Portuguese feudal law, had previously considered property ownership to stem from royal grants (sesmarias), and were passed through primogeniture (morgadio). In the independent Brazilian state, the default means of acquiring land was through purchase, from either the state or a previous private owner. This law strongly limited squatter's rights, and favoured the historic concentration of land ownership, which became a hallmark of modern Brazilian social history. The Lei de Terras left in place the colonial practice of favoring of large landholdings created by mammoth land grants to well-placed people, which were usually worked by enslaved people. Continuing the policy favored economies of scale, given the limited number of landowners, but simultaneously made it difficult for small planters and peasants to obtain the land needed to practice subsistence agriculture and small-scale farming. The consolidation of land ownership into just a few hands had ties to the advent of capitalism in Brazil, and opposition and insurrection in the 19th and early 20th century (for example, the Canudos War in the 1890s, and the Contestado War in the 1910s) idealized older forms of property, and revitalized ideologies centered on a fabled millenarian return to an earlier, pre-bourgeois social order. Advocated by groups led by rogue messianic religious leaders outside the established Catholic hierarchy, these ideologies seemed heretical and revolutionary. Some leftist historians, following the tracks of the groundbreaking 1963 work by journalist Rui Facó (Cangaceiros e Fanáticos), tend to conflate early 20th-century banditry in northeastern Brazil (cangaço) with messianism as a kind of social banditry, a protest against such social inequalities as the uneven distribution of land assets. This theory developed independently in English-speaking academia around Eric Hobsbawn's 1959 work Primitive Rebels. It was criticized for its unspecific definition of "social movement," but also praised for melding political and religious movements, previously separately examined. This blend was later the basis for the MST's emergence. Both messianism and cangaço disappeared in the late 1930s, but in the 1940s and '50s, additional peasant resistance broke out to evictions and land grabbing by powerful ranchers:
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
