By Joana Tavares
Portal Minas Free
It was in November of 2004. Armed gunmen invaded the Promised Land Camp (Terra Prometida), in Felisburgo, in Jequitinhonha Valley, and killed five workers. Another twenty were seriously injured, and huts and crops burned. Nearly nine years later, accused of being the...
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Occupy Brazil: The Landless Dig In
Brazilian Government | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | General | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | Worldwide Peasant Struggles | Agrarian Reform | MST Campaigns | MST News and Events | MST Informas
Seventeen years have passed since that fateful April 17. On that day in 1996, a march of rural workers organized by the MST was blockaded and attacked by military police in the city of Eldorado dos Carajás, Pará state. 19 people were killed on the spot and 2 others died days afterwards. The day of the Eldorado dos...
by Wesley Lima
On April 8, the MST in Bahia started a state march fighting for Agrarian Reform. The march, which had close to five thousand rural workers without land from nine regions of the state, started in the municipality of Camaçari and continued in the direction of Salvador.
The march was named “The Fábio Santos Silva State March”, paying...
MST leader Fábio Santos da Silva, assassinated on April 2 by 15 shots fired by gunmen in Iguaí, in the Southwest of Bahia, was buried on April 3.
The vigil for the body began in the Rural Community of Ribeirão das Flores and afterwards the body was taken to the City Hall of Iguaí, where the city can follow and share this moment...
The People of Latin America Lost a Leader and a Builder of Ideas!
The death of Hugo Chávez represents an irreparable loss to all the peoples of Latin America.
His humble origins, his path as a military nationalist and his...
Brazilian Government | General | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | Plans and Theories | Agrarian Reform
The Friends of the MST has translated three recent interviews with MST leaders on the state of agrarian reform in the face of the intrangience of the Brazilian government and the onslaught of international capital and agri-business.
João Pedro Stédile, a founder and coordinator of the MST estimates that the current moment is an ebb of the popular movement.First, an interview with João Pedro Stédile with ABCD Maior. Read the full interview...
Agribusiness | Agritoxins | Brazilian Government | General | Monoculture | Neoliberalism | Agrarian Reform
Br
azilian society faces, in the rural milieu, distinct problems needing different solutions. We have serious problems and emergencies that require urgent action. There are about 150,000 families of landless laborers living under black tarps, camping, fighting for the rights that are in the Constitution to have land to work. For this problem, the...
Agribusiness | Brazilian Government | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | General | Agrarian Reform | Brazilian Politics Society and Economy
The Brazil Rainforest Movement launched an internet petition against the appointment of Senator Katia Abreu (PSD - TO) for the 
agriculture ministry of President Dilma Rousseff.
"The appointment of Katia Abreu would represent another step toward the interests of landowners and multinational agribusiness. If this action is confirmed it would be construed by us...
Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | Plans and Theories | Worldwide Peasant Struggles | MST and Working Class Unity
By José Coutinho Junior
More than 200 people from various social movements, political parties and NGOs gathered this past Sunday (12/9), at the National School Florestan Fernandes (ENFF) for the Meeting of Friends and Friends of the MST. João Pedro Stedile, MST leader, began the meeting with an analysis of the forces acting on the...
By Nick Olle
September 20, 2012
In Brazil, less than two per cent of the population owns more than half of the nation’s territory. Over almost...
Niemeyer was a sage, a comrade, and a communist!The Brazilian people and all of humanity have lost one of their best friends who lived through the twentieth century.
Niemeyer was more than an architect: he was a lover of life and a tireless defender of equality for all human beings.
He...
The rural social movements that gathered this week at the Unity Meeting of Workers and Peoples of the Countryside, Waters, and Forests
in Brasilia released a joint statement...
Under the Brazilian Constitution, landless families have the right to occupy arable land that is not being used in order to grow food to feed themselves.
The small farmers and their families occupying underutilized land on the Serro Azul farm in Pernambuco have been facing ongoing threats and acts of violence. Since mid-April when...
A federal court in Brazil has ordered the immediate suspension of work on the huge Belo Monte hydro-electric dam in the 
Amazon.
The court says local indigenous people have not been properly consulted. Officials point...
By Bianca Pyl
Agência Repórter Brasil
The Movement of Landless Workers (MST) agreed to withdraw the families camped outside the headquarters of Fazenda Cedro (Cedar Farm) until next Sunday (July 8).
The property located in Eldorado dos Carajás (PA) in the southeast of the Pará state,...
América Latina,
Quatro e Zamponhas
Cordilheiras e florestas,
Uma América que sonha
Mescla de tanta gente,
Lutadores e idealistas,
Nesta terra de Guevara
Por um sonho socialista
Venezuela segue em frente...
Brazilian Government | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | Agrarian Reform | Oppression of MST and Social Movements | MST Urgent Actions
Representatives of the State Secretariat for Human Rights, the State Program for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and the Ombudsman of the Department of Social Defense visited, on Tuesday (July 3, 2012), the Gregório Bezerra encampment in the city of Altinho, rural...
Agribusiness | Agritoxins | Brazilian Government | General | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | GMOs | Monoculture | Neoliberalism | Agrarian Reform
By Jose Coutinho Junior
The Minister of Agrarian Development (MDA), Pepe Vargas, in an interview with Carta Maior declared the decrease in the coming years of the number of families settled pursuant to agrarian reform.
The minister also claims that the number of families living in the encampments has decreased. For Alexandre Conceição, from the National Coordination of the MST, the statements mask the reality of the Brazilian countryside.
Check out the...
May 31, 2012 by Brasil do Fato
The three words above are not mere propaganda. Over the past ten years Brazilian agribusiness has taken over as the form of production in agriculture. It is a model of agricultural production, now subordinated to the interests of finance capital and transnational...
Agribusiness | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | Plans and Theories | Neoliberalism | Worldwide Peasant Struggles | Agrarian Reform | MST Informas
FINAL DECLARATION OF THE PEOPLES’ SUMMIT AT RIO+20 FOR SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IN DEFENSE OF THE COMMONS, AGAINST THE COMMODIFICATION OF LIFE
Social and popular movements, unions, peoples and organizations of civil society from all over the world who were present at the Peoples Summit...
Dear Friends of the MST,
On behalf of my brothers and sisters of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, I salute you.
I write to tell you about the grave threats we are facing here in Pernambuco, Brazil, and ask for your help.
Armed thugs hired by large landowners are shooting at landless...
Relying on the absence of the state and on the collusion between judicial powers and local police, farmers in Pernambuco are intensifying violence against Landless rural workers in Pernambuco. The MST and human rights organizations, such as the ‘Terra de Direitos’, are widely denouncing the violence which is taking place in the state’s countryside: the hiring of gunmen...
by Luiz Zarref
Leader of La Via Campesina Brasil
The bill that amends the Brazilian Forest Code, voted on this week in the Chamber of Deputies, represents the maximum agenda of the ruralists. The caucus that supports agribusiness and defends those who commit environmental crimes showed their unity and succeeded in approving language so...
By Felipe Milanez in Washington
The Embassy of Brazil in Washington, a modernist building that contrasts with the classical properties of the beautiful Embassy Row, the sector of embassies of the U.S. capital, hosted on Monday April 9th a march that brought together about one...
The rural social movements, which held a meeting earlier this week in Brasilia, launched a manifesto in defense of agrarian reform, rural development with the end of inequality, production and access to healthy foods, for agro-ecology and ensuring expansion of social rights for rural workers.
...
By Luiz Zarref
After the vote on the rural manifesto, the text, written by Congressman Aldo Rebelo in the House of Representatives in June 2010 that details the deconstruction of the Forestry Code, was forwarded to the Senate.
Last December, a new text was approved in the Senate, which had...
By Vanessa Ramos
It was just after 5:30 am when Francisco Pereira, his hands showing signs of years of hard labor in construction, was getting ready for another day's work when he was surprised by five police officers (MPs). His wife and three children were violently torn from their beds without explanation. The police pushed his daughter, who was a few months...
During the reoccupation of the Rio dos Santos estate in Bom Jesus das Selves in Maranhão last Saturday (25), a pregnant woman of six months was knocked down by estate owner and land thief, José Osvaldo Damião. She ended up losing her baby.
An elderly man of 72 years was among other workers assaulted by the landowner and his gunmen.
Fagnea was taken to the municipal hospital...
The votes are in! Vale, the Brazilian mining company, has been voted the worst company in the world. Vale received 25,042 votes edging out Tepco, Japan’s large energy company which blatantly disregarded structural safety of its nuclear plants resulting in the post-tsunami disaster.
Transcription of the talk by João Pedro Stedile, of the MST, in the meeting between Dilma and representatives of civil society held on January 26 2012 during the Thematic Social Forum in Porto Alegre.