ABSTRACT
In Brazil, progressive forces have used popular social movements to challenge entrenched decision-making elites and force policy change. Brazil's economy grew and exports flowed, and by the twenty-first century, Brazil was one of the up and coming economies in the world that formed part of the newly classified rapidly developing BRIC countries. A new postneoliberal capitalist model of development was being implemented in Brazil. In 2016, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians again took to the street to protest governmental corruption and to call for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, and they were met by another social movement resisting what those supporting the government said was a coup. From 1984 on, the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) mobilized thousands of poor rural workers and others marginalized by the economic system to create what came to be the largest social movement in Latin America. The interaction between the MST and the PT is also instructive.
