Mistica at Congress Opening Revives the 30-year history of the MST
By Pedro Rafael Ferreira
Photos by Leonardo Melgarejo
February 10, 2014
A story that does not fit in a book. Unless this book is as great as the people who know how to write their own history. And from the giant pages of a book, open in front of 15 thousand people, leaped out memories of a unique trajectory of political and social struggle in Brazil.
The Sixth National Congress of the MST officially began on Monday February 10.
The opening mistica, always a much anticipated moment for the energy which it unleashes, thrilled the thousands of people who packed the Nilson Nelson gymnasium in Brasilia.
Men, women, youth and children from 23 states and the Federal District, and more than 200 international guests, watched the people turn the pages of a process of rare historical importance.
Organized by the state coordination of MST Paraná, the historic birthplace of the movement, the opening involved more than 1,500 participants and was divided into five acts. Each act was announced by a huge book, about four meters tall, whose pages could only be turned through a collective effort.
From military repression to the organization in the countryside
The story is told starting from the 1980s, when the military government in its death throes was still trying to subjugate the people. Workers and urban workers, indigenous and landless peasants in the countryside and in the city, develop new organizations. On the other side, the repressive state with its military tries to impose itself. The people are stronger, expelling the armed forces from power.
The population of the countryside organizes itself once again. In 1984 the MST is born. Painted bodies, now the subjects of history write their destiny themselves. Under the slogan "occupy, resist and produce" the landless workers shall break, literally, through land occupations, the fences of the latifundios. The struggle for agrarian reform is taken up with great force in the country's political agenda.
The MST inaugurates a form of organization with a popular character, based on four key pillars: collective leadership, unity, and bonding with the base and study and work. This configuration makes the movement a reference of political struggle. Fearless, but feared by the ruling forces.
Struggle and resistance
Land occupations, political gesture and transformative action. Economic power could not hold up and physical resistance erupts across the country. Machine gun bursts reach hearts, but the people always stand together: "Our nerves are ice, but our hearts spew fire. The comrades who died in blood go on in eternal remembrance." How to forget the massacres of Carajás, Corumbiara and Felisburgo, or the struggle of comrades such as Debra Nunes, Dorcelina Folador Fusquinha, Keno, Cicero, Egidio Bruneto and many other men and women...
Solidarity
The presence of over 200 international guests is an indication of support, prestige, and especially the solidarity that the MST creates in various parts of the world, but also among other popular organizations in the country. The flags of Latin American, African, European countries, the peasant people associated with La Via Campesina.
The MST reaffirms its struggle and internationalist vocation as a key page in its history. "Solidarity is the concrete construction of our movement, established with the people of Brazil and of the world. We need it to confront transnational capital in agribusiness and fight for another model of agriculture", said Diego Moreira, a member of the national leadership of the movement, in his greeting to the Congress.
In fact, the meeting that goes until Friday February 10, actually started at least two years ago, with discussions and reflections that led the main mass movement in the country to direct their forces in favor of the issue of people’s land reform issue, the theme of the last mistica. Hopefully this people’s agrarian reform returns to the people the most precious things on the planet that donot belong to individuals: water, air, healthy soil, seeds, forests. Democratizing access to land, to transform the economic model that destroys the earth.
This is how the MST looks at itself and renews and expands its commitments to the defense of food sovereignty, healthy food production, agro-ecology, nature conservation, the right of indigenous peoples and the afro-descendant communities. Equality between men and women, freedom for the youth.
Translated by Mirna de Oliveira