Solidarity with the Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil

The Steering Committee of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) expresses its solidarity with the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil, in the face of the increased criminalization of its political struggle in defense of the land and popular agrarian reform for peasant families and rural workers.

This year, the MST faces a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) initiated by the parliamentary bloc linked to agribusiness, under the pretext that they are terrorists and invaders of private property. This refers to the occupation, by landless families, of unproductive large estates and other rural properties where environmental and labor laws are violated, and/or where titles are fraudulent. These occupations are carried out on properties that do not fulfill the social function and other regulations governing land use, according to legal frameworks and the Federal Constitution, and are part of an MST strategy to pressure the Brazilian State to comply with the law and implement a comprehensive agrarian reform.

The MST is one of the most prominent peasant movements not only in Brazil but also in Latin America. In its nearly four decades of existence, the MST's Agrarian Program has facilitated the creation of hundreds of rural agrarian reform settlements throughout the country, with an organizational process based on the principles of collectivity and cooperativism. Its commitment is to strengthen the social function of land, which consists of: guaranteeing peasant and rural worker families the opportunity to live with dignity in the countryside, producing and marketing healthy, agroecologically based food, maintaining biodiversity, and other aspects of peasant social life.

In times of authoritarian obscurantism and the rise of the far right in Brazil, the MST has been an essential movement in the daily struggle in defense of democracy and in denouncing the political coup that culminated in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the illegitimate imprisonment of President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.

The social, educational, and political history of the MST has been analyzed in numerous scientific studies carried out by researchers from the extensive CLACSO network, which makes it possible to reveal the tremendous political relevance of this movement for Latin America and the Caribbean with respect to food sovereignty, agroecology, popular agrarian reform, peasant and popular feminism, and the defense of rights.

That is why, as the Steering Committee of CLACSO, we reaffirm our solidarity with the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) and denounce the anti-democratic and anti-popular nature of this CPI, created with the objective of destabilizing the democratic reconstruction in Brazil and to make invisible the advance of violence in the countryside perpetuated by agribusiness itself and the concomitant process of deterritorialization of indigenous, peasant and traditional populations.

CLACSO Steering Committee