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
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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 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...
Agribusiness | Brazilian Government | GMOs | Monoculture | Seed Control | Agrarian Reform | Oppression of MST and Social Movements
At 88 years of age, the bishop emeritus of Goiás, Dom Tomas Balduíno, lives in the Dominican Monastery of St. Jude Thaddeus in Goiânia, but travels throughout the world at the invitation of groups who ask him to speak about the latifúndio, monoculture, and water....
By Benjamin Dangl
Early in the morning on May 24, in the northern Brazilian Amazon, José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva got onto a motorcycle near the nature reserve they had worked on for over two decades. As the couple rode past the jungle they dedicated their lives to protecting, gunmen hiding near a bridge opened fire, killing them both.
Brazilian law enforcement officials said that the killing appeared to be the work of hired gunmen...
Military Police (PM) resorted to fierce and brutal measures on Wednesday May 18 in their efforts to clear a section of land in the Nova Esperança neighourhood in Barra do Riacho, Aracruz. The Nova Esperança neighbourhood was formed following the occupation of an area in the Barra do Riacho district, and it now contains 330 families (1,600 inhabitants), among which 550 are children.
The war-like measures to which the PM resorted were realized...
By João Márcio (Marabá, Pará)
After an overnight vigil, peasant movements, students, teachers from the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) and settled families of the MST sealed off the Carajás railway bridge this Thursday. The bridge stands over the River Tocantins...
By Maurício Hashizume
An increase in the number of killings, a high incidence of land conflicts in the Northeast region, a fall in the number of...
Brazilian Government | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | Agrarian Reform | Oppression of MST and Social Movements
In the early hours of Wednesday, about 200 police officers took a violent action and raided the camp Antônio Irmão in Itaquiraí, Mato Grosso do Sul (MS).
The police had no warrant, but invaded the camp and entered the homes of the encampment, searched families and seized material for working in the fields.
The camp has 670 families, including 'brasiguaios' who were expelled from their lands by large landowners in Paraguay and Brazil and who live on the border of both countries...
The MST is demanding justice and is calling for the killers of farmers Vanderlei das Neves and José Alves dos Santos to be punished. Both were brutally murdered in ambush on the farm Pinhal Ralo, 16 January 1997, in the city of Rio Bonito do Iguaçu (PR).
“The MST regards the case as one among many which, in more than a decade, have left 19 rural workers dead in Paraná. They are political crimes, committed by the latifúndios [large landed estates] and agribusiness,” reads a release...
Natalia Viana, 22 December 2010, 14.00 GMT
New cables published by Wikileaks reveal that the U.S. embassy and consulates in Brazil are deeply concerned about the Landless People’s Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST). The diplomats claim that the three decade old movement is losing power because of outgoing...
1. The History
The month of April has become a symbol of the fight for democratization of land in Brazil, and the world. On the 17th of April of 1996, 19 rural workers who participated in a protest march, were brutally murdered by the Military Police of the Brazilian state of Pará, in the municipality of Eldorado do Carajás.
The governor of Pará was Almir Garbiel (PSDB). The President of Brazil was Fernando Henrique Cardoso. According...
A Terra de Direitos - Organization for Human Rights (http://terradedireitos.org.br/) published a case study on the various human rights violations by Syngenta Seeds, multinational agribusiness corporation which produces genetically modified seeds and pesticides. The actions that violate include murder, physical and moral violence against landless rural workers, maintenance of private armed militias, carrying...
From: Sócio-Environmental Fórum of the Extreme South of Bahia and the Alert against the Green Desert Network With this statement, we express our enormous outrage about the death of 24-years old Henrique Souza Pereira, who was killed on 16 March 2010. According to Fibria´s press release (Fibria is the former Aracruz Celulose and partner of Stora Enso in the Veracel Celulose company), a team of GARRA, the private ‘security’ company of Fibria, shot Henrique, alleging that he was stealing...
Agribusiness | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | Worldwide Peasant Struggles | Agrarian Reform | Oppression of MST and Social Movements | MST Campaigns
Join the International Day of Peasant Struggle: Say ‘No!’ to Corporate Control of Agriculture and Food!
To commemorate the International Day of Peasant Struggle on April 17th 2010, the international peasant movement La Via Campesina calls upon member organisations, allies and supporters to unite against transnational corporations (TNCs), which seek complete control over food and agriculture systems around the world. On April 17th 1996, nineteen landless Brazilian peasants...
Agribusiness | Brazilian Government | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | Agrarian Reform | Oppression of MST and Social Movements | MST Informas
La Via Campesina launched a petition suggesting that the Mixed Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPMI) recently installed to criminalize the fight for agrarian reform and the MST should be used to investigate agribusiness crimes. The text states, “the restriction of the CPMI’s work to investigate only the agreements of the groups that partner with the MST will only represent another parliamentary initiative for criminalization of the social movements, and not a contribution to the...
Agribusiness | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | Brazilian Politics Society and Economy | Oppression of MST and Social Movements
The Military Police took action on the Buriti homelands Brasil do Fato, December 2, 2009 Today, 19 November, a group of landowners accompanied by armed security guards evicted without a court order the Terena (indigenous) community of 300 who had taken over part of the Buriti land in the municipality of Sidrolândia in Mato Grosso do Sul. A battalion of about 50 police participated in the military action. According to the Terena leadership, the eviction was made by the Military Police in...
Regarding the latest reports that have reverberated in the media, the MST national directorate would like to make the following public announcement. 1. Our struggle is for the democratization of property, which is constantly becoming more and more concentrated in our country. The 2006 census, disclosed this past week, revealed that Brazil has the highest concentration of land in the world. There are lefewer than 15 thousand large landowners with estates of over 2,500 hectares and who...
Brazilian Government | General | Agrarian Reform | Oppression of MST and Social Movements | MST Informas
We would like to thank everyone who has shown their solidarity with our movement and contributed towards the denunciations against the attack on democracy, promoted by the reactionary sectors of the country. The announcement of the dismissal of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry against the MST is a sign of the isolation of rural parties, represented by Senator Kátia Abreu (DEM-TO) and the federal deputies Ronaldo Caiado (DEM-GO) and Onyx Lorenzoni (DEM-RS). Frightened by the...
MST Victories | Brazilian Politics Society and Economy | Oppression of MST and Social Movements | MST Informas
Just the fact that we carried out another campaign—demanding the fulfillment of a list of demands presented to the Lula government in 2005 including the demand that the productivity indexes be brought up to date as the Federal Constitution requires— was enough to generate a reaction. The most conservative sectors of Congress and of society, led by Senator Kátia Abreu (DEM/TO) and the Federal Deputies Ronaldo Caiado (DEM-GO) and Onyx Lorenzoni (DEM-RS), began to orchestrate a new offensive...
We have demonstrated throughout the whole country and set up a pre-land occupation encampment in Brasilia in defence of Agrarian Reform, accomplishing important successes regarding solutions to the problems that agrarian workers have. The day of struggle brought about a series of fundamental measures granted by the government, even though we are still far from achieving Agrarian Reform and the consolidation of a new agricultural model. Moreover, it showed society and people in general, that...
The Superior Court of Justice (STJ) denied the appeal of the police officers convicted of killing 19 landless workers in 1996 in Eldorado dos Carajás (PA). The defense requested a mistrial, in 2002, but the ministers of the Court, unanimously, considered the legal formulation of the questions (questions about the crime) presented to the jury. With this, the court maintained the sentences imposed on Colonel Mario Colares Pantoja, 228 years, and Major José Maria Pereira de Oliveira, 158 years...
The struggle for land has more victims in the Brazilian countryside. This time, five workers were killed. The murders happened on the night of last Monday (July 6th), the Garrote settlement, located in the district of Santo Domingo in Brejo da Madre de Deus (PE). The national coordination of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (MST) did not discard the hypothesis that the crimes were motivated in retaliation to the struggle for agrarian reform. João Pereira da Silva, Juarez...