Beyond the Politics of Protest: The Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil within the context of development and globalization. The MST is pursuing the genuine democratization of Brazil's power structures, which have excluded the poor for centuries. Comprehensive land reform is the starting point in this process. The MST is implementing the stagnant National Plan of Agrarian Reform (PNRA) from the bottom up through the direct occupation of uncultivated private or public lands. It is using non-violent means to seek social justice and is funding its operations with little foreign aid. More significantly, this movement is linking micro-politics to macro-politics to advance the democratization of the polity and economy. Its political praxis reveals great potential for devising alternative, but concrete, counter-hegemonic discourses to neo-liberalism.