Rural unions and the struggle for land in Brazil

Studies of Brazil’s agricultural labor movement have generally neglected its relationship to the struggle for land, but this is neither fair nor accurate (Price 1964; Medeiros 1989; Ricci 1999; Welch 1999; Martins 2002). Since its conception in the early twentieth century, the rural worker movement has been concerned with peasant reproduction, land access and usage. Since the rural union movement pre-dates the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST, in its Brazilian acronym) and all other contemporary land struggle organizations in Brazil, the latter movements cannot be understood without considering the former. Despite a reluctance to adopt direct action tactics in the 1980s, when land occupations – one of the most ancient forms of land access – became the signature tactic of the MST, the largest rural labor movement, represented by the National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture (CONTAG, in its Brazilian acronym), supported a significant number of these actions from the second half of the 1990s (NERA 2013).