Resistance and Social Reform in Latin America: Speaking with João Pedro Stedile of Brazil's "O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra" (the MST)

Abstract

For those concerned with social resistance and civil society, Brazil's O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (the MST) stands out as one of today's most intrigu ing social movements. Having emerged towards the end of Brazil's military dictatorship period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the MST was initially formulated to address the concerns of Brazil's campones1 population. As Brazil moved towards a more decen tralized form of state democracy, many on the left doubted whether federal legislation alone would ever sufficientiy address the country's issue (where millions of agricultural workers lived as peasants, having no ownership of the land on which they lived and worked). The primary objective of those within the movement was not merely to petition, but to force the federal government to implement what was perceived as long overdue agrarian reform measures. The MST quickly gained international fame for their land occupation strategies, in which landless campones families often squatted on unused sections of agricultural land in an effort to obligate federal agencies to enact constitutionally provisioned land reform policies (Fernandes 2000). Currentiy, as the MST still continues to push for agrarian reform in nearly every region of Latin America's largest country, the movement has also become deeply involved in a multitude of other political and social debates pertaining to issues of globalization. The most publicly-recognized figure witiun the MST today is writer and critic Joao Pedro Stedile. The author and editor of numerous books regarding agrarian reform and the MST (Stedile 1997, 1999, 2002, 2005), Stedile has become increasingly critical in recent years of neoliberal economic policies, globalization discourses, large-scale agro industrial practices, and the consolidating networks of global capitalism. We met with Stedile at the MST headquarters in Sao Paulo in July of 2006 to discuss the contemporary state of the movement. What follows is an expanded excerpt from that conversation, one begun in truncated form in the journal Antipode (Garmany and Maia 2007). That