Marches, actions, and encampments in defense of Popular Agrarian Reform will be held in memory of the martyrs of the MST's April Struggles...
MST Reaffirms Anti-Imperialist Struggle and Calls on the Brazilian People for People’s Agrarian Reform
In a meeting with Lula, the MST reaffirms People’s Agrarian Reform as the basis of democracy and food sovereignty
MST Adopts Bio-inputs as a Strategy to Advance the Massification of Agroecology
April 17, internationalized as the International Day of Peasant Struggles: A planting in memory of the global peasant struggle!
Rural Murders Double in 2025; Landless Workers Remain on the Front Lines of Resistance
The number of murders in Brazil's rural areas doubled in 2025. According to the *Conflicts in the Countryside Brazil* report, released this Monday (April 27) by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), 26 deaths were recorded in the country's agrarian conflicts—up from 13 the previous year. Of the 26 victims, 16 were located in the Legal Amazon region. Pará and Rondônia top the death toll rankings, with 7 fatalities each; it was in these two states that the two massacres recorded during the period took place, each resulting in three deaths.
Although the overall number of conflicts fell by 28% compared to 2024—dropping from 2,207 to 1,593 incidents—the data reveals that this decline in recorded cases did not signify a retreat of violence. On the contrary: the violence became more lethal.
Among all groups involved in rural actions in 2025, landless rural workers were the most active in their mobilization. In total, 72 land occupations and 9 encampments were recorded as part of a larger total of 100 acts of resistance—including encampments, occupations, and land repossessions—which account for a portion of the 1,286 land-related conflicts documented during the period.
Land disputes remain the primary form of rural violence: 75% of all incidents—or 1,186 recorded cases—are related to conflicts over land occupation and possession. Maranhão leads the list with 190 cases, followed by Pará (142), Rondônia (111), and Bahia (101).
The MST: Agroecology and Reforestation
Program of Plantar Árvores: Plant 100 million trees in ten years in rural schools, cooperatives, technical training centers, squares, avenues and cities, strengthen the production of healthy food in MST settlements and encampments, denounce the destructive model of agribusiness and its impacts on the environment.
These are some of the objectives of the National Plan to Plant Trees, Produce Healthy Food, launched in 2020 by the MST throughout Brazil.
The Plan is a space for articulation, training, political organization and broad debate, reaffirming:
• People’s Agrarian Reform* and the defense of their territories and family farming;
• Food Sovereignty as a radical change in the direction of food production and distribution, providing access to healthy food especially for the most vulnerable populations, as a way of promoting preventive health in the country that uses the most pesticides in the world;
• Agroecology, which is based on sociobiodiversity, the solidarity economy and respect for traditional knowledge and local/regional cultures; and
• The care of Common Goods, such as water, minerals, land and biodiversity, which are finite natural resources and, therefore, common to all human beings (environmental preservation).
Read more on the MST's Tree Planting Program
Eldorado do Carajás Massacre Marks 30 Years as a Symbol of Resistance in the Struggle for Land
Thirty years after the tragedy at the "S-curve," the state of Pará still leads the nation in rural conflicts, even as agribusiness expands its frontiers across the country.
It was a Wednesday of intense sunshine in southern Pará—the date, April 17, 1996—and approximately 1,500 rural workers were marching peacefully along highway PA-150, heading toward Belém. They were men, women, children, and the elderly—all landless workers—united by a single plea to the Brazilian State: access to land so they could work and live with dignity. But what the state Military Police troops—commanded by Colonel Mário Pantoja—had in store for them at that bend in the road, on the outskirts of the municipality of Eldorado do Carajás, would be captured by local news cameras and go down in history as the largest massacre of rural workers in the history of the Brazilian Republic.
The projectiles recovered from the bodies of those workers told a story that no official narrative could ever erase, even after 30 years. With numerous bodies bearing wounds to the back of the head and the back, the evidence documented by forensic experts from the Legal Medical Institute (IML) revealed a clear intent to carry out summary executions—acts committed while the victims were already wounded or had surrendered, attempting to flee into the woods and vegetation lining the highway. At least seven of the 19 people killed at the scene bore marks consistent with point-blank gunshot wounds.
News from FMST
Conjunctural analysis shows that the slow pace of Agrarian Reform and the prioritization of agribusiness deepen rural inequalities and worsen the food crisis in Brazil
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