ABSTRACT
The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST-Movement of Landless Rural Workers) in Brazil was established officially as an organization in January 1984 in the state of Paraná in the south of the country. Its existence is the materialization of a long process of mobilization whose roots lie in the country’s history. Predominantly rural up to the beginning of the 1970s, Brazil founded its development in part on an extremely unequal economic system, in which a small number of large owners derived their wealth as income from the land, while those who farmed the land had neither rights nor status and were reduced to misery and even to slavery. The conditions of poverty and above all of domination of these rural workers were extreme and not those found amongst the groups with poor means in most states under the rule of law, particularly in Europe. Here, we are talking about individuals often proletarianized as strictly defined by that term-that is they only had their labor on which to subsistand whose social and financial capital was virtually non-existent. Even if the situation of the most disadvantaged had improved somewhat since the return to democracy in 1984, their vulnerability was total. In Brazil, the assassination of a peasant regularly went unpunished and unfortunately formed part of normality. Over 30 years, it is estimated that more than 1,700 of them were killed, because their militant activity harmed the interests of the propertied class (Stédile 2013). The struggle of the landless laborers was thus a question of life or death, against the pillage and the arbitrariness of which they were often, and had for a long time been, victims. Historically, the judges, lawyers, solicitors, and rich family landowners formed a cohesive community in Brazil. It was not rare for those who wished to become a landowner to submit false documents and compel peasants to leave their premises by force. Depending on the periods, the State was more or less complicit in these practices, but the usual collusion between the economic and political elites in the country left little room for peasants to assert their rights.
