News and Updates: Agrarian Reform
Dear Friends of the MST,
Agrarian Reform is blocked in our country. The concentration of land is growing, the settlements are not receiving effective support, violence against the landless is on the rise and the estate owners and agribusinesses are operating with impunity. The massacre of Eldorado dos Carajas is the main symbol of the...
Dear friend of the MST,
Forty-eight year old Almerinda Marques says that he has begun to understand the world. Vilma Pereira da Silva, 50 years old, says that she now has the opportunity to do what she couldn’t do before: study. Both are landless workers. Both live in encampments, one in Minas Gerais and the other in Paraná. Both...
Stora Enso's Brazilian Imbroglio by Maurna Desmond, Forbes.com Paper maker Stora Enso is catching heat from activists in Brazil who recently invaded its factory and blocked major roads. The Finnish-Swedish company wants to plant roots in South America, but the locals haven't been very welcoming. On Wednesday, Brazilian land rights group...
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 24 (IPS) - Joao Pedro Stédile thinks that the World Social Forum (WSF) should remain a debating arena for civil society, because with all its breadth and variety, to attempt to agree on resolutions is "an illusion." The Brazilian landless movement activist is also in favour of holding the WSF every three years, instead of...
Esteemed Friends of the MST,
The year 2007 is coming to an end and we would therefore like to communicate to you a political assessment of our struggle. We would like to provide accounts of what we are doing in our trenches, which is the struggle for Agrarian Reform. We would like to share with our companions who are active in other...
by Juan Reardon NACLA News
Brazil lags far behind her left-leaning neighbors in government initiatives that bring privatized national resources back into the public domain. In recent months, however, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and other groups have launched mass actions that demand similar moves toward national resource...
On Nov. 29, shock troops from the Military Police of Sao Paulo state in Brazil invaded the Elizabeth Teixeira encampment of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) in the Tatu Forest Plot in Limeira municipality near Campinas. The police agents destroyed makeshift homes and violently evicted the 250 families living on the encampment, which...
Dear Friends of the MST,
We express complete solidarity with the protest of Bishop Luiz Flávio Cappio, who has been fasting for more than 10 days against the proposed transposition of the São Francisco River. The Bishop is truly a committed and courageous Brazilian. We want to publicize the letter that La Via Campesina sent out this week...
Current global modes of production, consumption and trade have caused massive environmental destruction including global warming that is putting at risk our planet’s ecosystems and pushing human communities into disasters. Global warming shows the effects of a development model based on capital concentration, high fossil energy consumption,...
Dear Friends of the MST, On October 21 at 1:30 p.m., a Via Campesina encampment located at Syngenta’s 127-hectare farm used for field trials of genetically modified crops in Santa Tereza do Oeste, in Paraná, Brazil, was attacked by an armed militia. During the brutal attack, a leader and activist from the Movement of Landless Workers (MST) and...