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...
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Occupy Brazil: The Landless Dig In
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 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...
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...
MST leader Elias Araujo was in the US to accept, on behalf of the MST the Food Sovereignty Prize for 2011, given by the Community Food 
Security Coalition. On November 9 2011, Elias was ased to address...
Agribusiness | Agritoxins | History | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | GMOs | Monoculture | Agrarian Reform | MST and Working Class Unity
By Bianca Costa
On the morning of March 8, 2006, 1,800 women from Via Campesina carried out a major action against the monoculture of eucalyptus in Rio Grande do Sul.
Organized, women occupied the nursery tree farm of Aracruz Celulose, in Barra do Ribeiro,...
The MST comes to the cities this week to ask for support from all workers, once again, in defense of Agrarian Reform. We want to present a proposal for a new model for Brazilian agriculture, one that actually distributes the land, helps to generate jobs, and produces quality foods at prices affordable to Brazilians. The Movement has as its principle objective the struggle for the democratization of the land. Brazil has one of the largest land concentrations in the world: more than 43% of...
Nearly 30 years ago, the Movement of Landless Workers (MST) began to organize nationally with a purpose: to promote agrarian reform in Brazil. The years passed, the movement has consolidated, thousands of activists formed settlements, and the focus of the MST has expanded.
Joao Pedro Stedile, one of the national leaders of the movement, said it was time for the landless to struggle for a more fraternal and sustainable agriculture. He said the militants should now pursue different...
One hundred years ago, Clara Zetkin, director of the German Social Democrat Party, successfully proposed the establishment of March 8th as International Womens Day. This historic reference alone would be enough to mark the date in its primary sense: struggle. It was on this path that women so often went out into the streets in every part of the world: for the right to vote, to equal wages, to denounce the daily violence that they experienced, from domestic humiliation to the most brutal...
To transform the unequal and unjust structures of our society was always one of the objectives of the Movimento Sem Terra, in order to build a sovereign nation and win a dignified life for the workers. It is for that reason that we have dedicated our energies to bringing about an effective agrarian reform that would democratize access to land and ensure food production. But over the course of our 25 years, we have also joined the ranks of those who fight to defend and expand rights of...
We are mobilized all over Brazil to defend the education of the countryside, an achievement of the social movements that fight for Land Reform in our country. Our challenge is big. We learn through the struggle that Land Reform goes beyond the simple conquest of the land/earth, and necessarily becomes a serious educational policy. Our country figures among the worst in the world in this sense. Statistics from the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education show that there are 35...
The Friends of the MST presents two articles on Augusto Boal. The first is an excerpt from an interview from June, 2007 by Amy Goodman, but only recently aired on Democracy Now. The second is a memoriam from the MST. FROM DEMOCRACY NOW: AMY GOODMAN: Augusto Boal, the legendary Brazilian political playwright and popular educator, died this weekend at the age of seventy-eight. He was the founder of the Theater of the Oppressed, a popular international movement for a participatory form of...
Indians celebrated the ruling as a confirmation of land rights they were granted in 1988 [AFP] The Amazon's indigenous groups have won a major victory with Brazil's Supreme Court upholding the integrity of a vast native reserve. Friday's ruling paves the way for the expulsion of white farmers living in the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve the government created in 2005. The court voted 10-1 against a petition by two senators who wanted the 17,000 square kilometre area in the north of the...
The City that Ended Hunger A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger. by Frances Moore Lappé Published on Friday, March 13, 2009 by YES! Magazine "To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer." CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a...
Director-General of United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Commends the Struggle of Women of Via Campesina MST Press Release (March 10, 2009) On the second day of mobilization of the International Women's Day by Via Campesina, a committee of farmers has been received in Brasilia by the Director-General of FAO (UN Food and Agriculture), Jacques Diouf. At the meeting, Diouf heard a report of the actions that the peasants held this week to denounce the Brazilian government's...
The Landless Workers Movement (MST) announces its sorrow at the death on Thursday February 5 of the Federal Deputy Adão Pretto and extends its solidarity to the family at this time of loss for Brazilian society.
Since the beginning of his social activism in the Ecclesiastical Base Communities and in the rural union movement, Adão Pretto was a non-stop defender of agrarian reform, playing a leading role in the network of landless families and supporters from the first occupations in...
João Pedro Stedile In January 1984, there was a process of re-ascension of mass movements in Brazil. The working class was reorganizing, accumulating organic forces. Underground parties, such as the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), the Communist Party of Brazil, etc., were in the streets. We had achieved a partial amnesty, but the majority of the exiles had returned. The Worker's Party (PT), the Central Workers' Union (CUT) were taking shape, as well as the National Congress of the Working...
Brazil’s civil society needs to start having a major discussion: a discussion about the exploration, production, and use of oil found in the pre-salt layer. The management of our natural resources – our oil, our minerals, our water, our land, and the like – should be controlled by the people, and administered on the basis of national interests.
Rich discoveries in the pre-salt layer have the potential to produce between 50 and 100 billion barrels of oil. The most optimistic experts...
Agribusiness | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | Neoliberalism | Agrarian Reform | MST and Working Class Unity
The Associated Press Tuesday, June 10, 2008 SAO PAULO, Brazil: Thousands of landless rural workers invaded dams, railways, plantations and corporate headquarters in a wave of protests across eight Brazilian states on Tuesday. Rogerio Homm, a coordinator with the Via Campesina activist group, said the protests are aimed at large corporations that benefit from Brazilian policies favoring agribusiness over small farmers.
"This is a big demonstration on a...
MST Occupations and Demonstrations | Worldwide Peasant Struggles | Agrarian Reform | MST and Working Class Unity
RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) — Rural landless workers in Brazil stepped up their campaign for agricultural reform Thursday by holding several demonstrations and occupying a hydroelectric plant and freeway toll stations, their organization said. The protests were part of the Landless Farmworkers Movement's "Red April" operation to force the government to give them land grants and easier access to public loans for some 150,000 dispossessed families living in shantytowns around the country....
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 annually, he said in an interview with IPS correspondent Mario Osava. A member of the group that founded the WSF in the southern Brazilian city of...
Dear Friends of the MST, As we conveyed in the most recent MST Informa, many NGOs and social movements in Brazil are against government's plan to redirect water from the São Francisco river. According to some estimates, the project will spend billions out of the public coffers, drastically change ecosystems, cause migration of peoples, and bring few benefits for those who most need the water.
The beneficiaries will be the big agricultural companies.
Two years ago, the Catholic...
General | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | Agrarian Reform | MST and Working Class Unity | MST Informas
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 in support of the Bishop’s struggle.
On December 4, La Via Campesina and the National Forum of Agrarian Reform and Justice in the Countryside...
General | Worldwide Peasant Struggles | Agrarian Reform | MST and Working Class Unity | MST Informas
Dear friends of the MST,
Today is the 40th anniversary of the death of the revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara. In countries around the world and especially in Latin America, activists from the left and social movements are carrying out events to commemorate the man who has been transformed into one of the greatest symbols of struggle for the freedom of Latin Americans, Africans, and people of the Caribbean.
It was obvious that the bourgeoisie and the imperialists would also not...
BELEM, Brazil, Sep 19 (IPS/IFEJ) - Devastation, violent land conflicts and rapid -- but short-lived -- economic growth are the traces left by deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon over the last 30 years, according to a new study...This dynamic was revealed by researchers Adalberto Veríssimo and Danielle Celentano, of Imazon (Institute of Man and Environment of the Amazon) in a study published in August, "The Advance of the Frontier in the Amazon: From Boom to Collapse", which analyses the...