Landless Workers Movement (MST) Brazil

JOHN L. HAMMOND; FEDERICO M. ROSSI

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements

Wiley-Blackwell

Año: 2013; p. 680 - 683

The Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra, or MST), for many years the largest and most active social movement in Brazil, organizes unemployed and landless farmworkers to take over idle, absentee-owned farmland. It challenges landowners and authorities and agitates for a broad agrarian reform. It grew out of land occupations beginning in 1978 in Brazil´s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, led by activists from the Catholic Church´s Christian base communities and some Protestant churches under the inspiration of liberation theology. The movement was formally founded in 1984 near the end of a 21-year military dictatorship. It acts nationwide in a huge country with a great variety of local social, economic, and agricultural conditions, so its practice varies from place to place. Typically, however, the movement´s collective action can be described in three phases: occupation, camp, and settlement.