- Founded by peasants and progressive members of the Catholic Church, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) advocates for a fair distribution of land ownership, agrarian reform and agroecological practices in Brazil.
- To achieve its goals, MST occupies rural lands lying idle to force the Brazilian state to implement its constitutional duty to expropriate and redistribute such lands if they aren’t serving the public good.
- On May 21, 2024, Brazil’s lower House of Congress passed a bill that would penalize people occupying public or private land by excluding them from receiving any public benefits, including those related to agrarian reform programs.
Comuna da Terra Irmã Alberta, a small oasis of green fields and trees, sits on the outskirts of São Paulo and is home to 65 small farmers who help supply Brazil’s largest city with fruits and vegetables free of agrichemicals.
The enclave, founded in 2002, is named after Alberta Girardi, an Italian nun and human rights activist who for half a century fought for Brazil’s poor and landless people. She died in 2018 at the age of 97.
“I knew Sister Alberta through the Catholic Church and her work in the east of São Paulo, where I used to live,” says community member Roseãngela Filomena, a silver-haired 62-year-old with a generous smile. “She introduced me to the Landless Workers’ Movement [MST] and encouraged me to take part in a rural occupation.”
MST was founded in 1984 by peasants and progressive members of the Catholic Church, aimed at pushing for fairer land distribution and drastic agrarian reform across Brazil.
With some 1.5 million members, MST is currently one of the biggest and most controversial social movements in Brazil, as it seeks to achieve its goals by occupying idle-lying rural lands — an act many see as criminal. MST says it attempts to force the state to implement Article 184 of the 1988 constitution, which requires the state to expropriate a rural property “which is not performing its social function, against prior and fair compensation.”
In 1996, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ruled that land occupations that aim to hasten agrarian reform are “substantially distinct” from criminal acts against property.
“It is mandatory for the state to expropriate land which does not fulfill its constitutional social function,” Sérgio Sauer, a professor of sociology at the University of Brasília, tells Mongabay. “Land occupation becomes a social struggle pushing the state to fulfill its obligation and move reform ahead. It’s a bit like civil disobedience.”
Through occupation, expropriation and compensation, MST has helped some 450,000 Brazilian families acquire a plot of land, while some 65,000 families continue to live in rural occupations still awaiting a final solution. Among the latter are the people of Terra Irmã Alberta.
Becoming land stewards
On July 21, 2002, Roseãngela and some 600 other MST members and sympathizers occupied a former eucalyptus plantation spanning some 120 hectares (300 acres) west of São Paulo. After the owner failed to pay taxes, it became the property of SABESP, the water and waste management company for the state of São Paulo, which planned to transform it into a landfill.
“We entered around midnight,” says Roseãngela, sitting in the town’s communal house. “A local NGO helped us to build makeshift shelters. That would give us time, as the police cannot enter a ‘home’ without legal permission.”
But the police didn’t show up the next day. Nor the following ones. According to Roseãngela, the occupation enjoyed strong unofficial support from the church, including the local bishop himself, and from nearby towns and villages, as people nearby didn’t want to see a landfill on their doorstep. It was Roseãngela’s sister Iris who, at first, made things difficult.
“On the first day she forced me to go back with her,” Roseãngela tells Mongabay. “She thought I was mad to live in the middle of nowhere with a 2-year-old child. I went back with her by car to calm her down. But the next morning I immediately returned by bus. Now my sister Iris lives here as well.”
In 2006, SABESP came to an agreement with MST. While the state-owned firm remains the legal owner of the land, in practice MST manages it. It gave each family half a hectare (1.2 acres) to build a home and carry out eco-friendly farming. They’re not allowed to sell the land or subdivide it. A communal garden grows fruits and vegetables that are sold in the city, with the profits used for the community.
When reached by Mongabay, SABESP agreed to comment on its current agreement with MST regarding Comuna Irmã Alberta and its plans for the enclave. But it hadn’t responded by the time this story was published.
Roseãngela turned her half-hectare into a garden growing medicinal plants. She sells the herbs or uses them to make natural elixirs. “I’m a white witch,” she laughs. She’s also a beekeeper. And a teacher. All MST members are encouraged to get an education. Roseãngela studied pedagogy. Comuna da Terra Irmã Alberta is currently building a school that will be open for all to learn about agroecology.
Roots of inequality
Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world when it comes to land ownership. According to the 2017 agricultural census by IBGE, the national statistics and geography agency, 81% of farms are up to 50 hectares (124 acres) in size, yet represent only 12.8% of the total rural land area. Nearly a third of the country’s rural area is held by just 0.3% of agricultural establishments, each owning an average of more than 2,500 hectares (about 6,200 acres).
USAID estimated in 2011 that 1% of the Brazilian population owned 45% of all land, while nearly 5 million families were landless and nearly 100 million hectares (247 million acres) of rural lands — an area half the size of Greenland — remained uncultivated.
The roots of this inequality go back to the colonial era. In the early 16th century, Brazil was divided into 15 rectangular-shaped “captaincies,” each run as fiefdoms by Portuguese noblemen.
“The so-called Sesmaria system distributed large areas of land to ‘friends of the king,’” Sauer tells Mongabay. “The system was meant to make the land productive, yet generally only managed to concentrate [ownership of] the land.”
The system was abolished in 1824, but the situation didn’t improve, Sauer goes on. The 1850 Land Law stated that the only way to gain access to public lands, formerly owned by the Portuguese crown, was through purchase. Yet, in a country steeped in colonialism and slavery for centuries, few people could afford to do so.
From the mid-1960s onward, the inequality only grew, as Brazil’s military regime pushed for agricultural growth and modernization by offering state incentives such as cheap credit to encourage farmers to invest in land, machinery and chemical input.
“This mainly enabled big landowners to acquire even more land, especially on the agricultural frontier,” Sauer says. “It further added to the concentration of land [ownership] and further widened the ownership divide.”
Despite Article 184 of Brazil’s Constitution, land and even buildings in many states across the country have lain empty for decades, according to the USAID. In São Paulo alone, there were some 280,000 abandoned properties and 130,000 homeless families in 2017, according to USAID estimates.
In rural areas, USAID flagged a similar paradox: 74% of farmers own 24% of all arable land, while agribusiness controls 76% of the arable land, yet employs only about 26% of farmers. Two million farming families have an average monthly income of just $15 and need government aid.
Political resistance
The struggle for land has long been a dominant feature of Brazilian politics. According to historians, a proposal for land reform was a major reason for the military coup that toppled President João Goulart in 1964.
On April 15, 2024, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva passed a decree creating the Terra da Gente (Land of the People) program. By 2026, it aims to help 295,000 farming families acquire land or legalize their informal situation. INCRA, the national land reform institute, received 520 million reais ($88 million) to expropriate and allocate land in 2024.
But with Congress dominated by the agribusiness lobby, Lula still faces an uphill battle when it comes to reforming farming, experts say. On May 21, 2024, the lower House passed a bill that would penalize people occupying public or private land by excluding them from receiving any public benefits, including those related to agrarian reform programs.
The bill, now awaiting Senate approval, is the brainchild of Ricardo Salles, former minister of environment under Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s predecessor. “This is the beginning of the end for MST,” Salles said.
The massacre of Eldorado do Carajás
On the same day that Lula launched Terra da Gente, MST occupied a 200-hectare (500-acre) area outside the city of Campinas, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of São Paulo. Owned by a real estate developer, the land had gone unused for years.
Nearly a decade earlier, in 2015, the developer requested Campinas municipal authorities to alter the land’s designation in the zoning plan from “rural” to “urban,” which would allow it to build a multistory apartment block.
The 2024 occupation didn’t last long. Within hours, the police showed up, forcing some 200 MST families to leave. The occupation was partly symbolic, as every April the MST commemorates the massacre of Eldorado do Carajás.
On April 17, 1996, about 1,500 people assembled on a highway near the town of Eldorado do Carajás in the state of Pará to march on the provincial capital, Belém, in support of MST.
Instructed to prevent a blockade of the highway “at all costs,” local police opened fire with automatic rifles, killing 21 people and injuring dozens.
Land conflicts aren’t a relic of Brazil’s past. According to data from the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic Church-affiliated advocacy group, in 2023 Brazil recorded 1,724 rural land conflicts, the highest number since the organization began keeping records in 1985.
Facing threats
Roseãngela is no stranger to violence. One day during the COVID-19 pandemic, a young man showed up in her garden, put a gun to her head and told her to leave, telling her she had no right to be there.
“He was a follower of Bolsonaro who used to refer to MST as a ‘terrorist organization,’” Roseãngela tells Mongabay. “I was scared, of course, but eventually managed to make him leave. I made it clear to him that I’d rather die than go anywhere else.”
Past several small farms surrounded by fields of lettuce, banana trees and towering cacti, as well as numerous structures under construction, Roseãngela’s sister Iris lives in the heart of Irmã Alberta. But at the beginning, 22 years ago, she didn’t like it at all, she says.
“I was worried about my sister,” says 64-year-old Iris. “At the time there was a plantation of eucalyptus trees that had just been cut. All you could see were little stumps. What was my sister going to do in the middle of nowhere?”
But Roseãngela had made up her mind. To help her and her 2-year-old son, Iris returned every week to pick up their laundry and bring clean clothes and food. After two of her own children died in a tragic car crash, she decided to move and join her sister. “I needed a fresh start away from the city,” she says.
Today, Iris and her husband have a lush garden where they grow acerola, banana, pitaya, lemon and grapes. They also have mango trees, some coffee plants, a huge cinnamon bush, and “a tree the birds like.” No irrigation needed; the rains are enough.
Iris says she’s happy living off her garden, although sometimes it’s hard work, especially as she gets older, she tells Mongabay. It’s not easy to live without a sense of security, she says. Because she doesn’t officially own the land, everything she’s built over the last 22 years could be gone tomorrow if SABESP changes its mind.
“But I think SABESP and MST will reach an agreement before the end of the year,” she says.
Another problem is that, since the outbreak of COVID-19, dozens of people not affiliated with MST have moved into the enclave. “They just build homes,” Iris says. “They don’t grow anything. Once there is a deal with SABESP, they hope to benefit too.”
Despite the insecurity and hardships, sisters Iris and Roseãngela say they have no regrets about moving away from São Paulo and helping establish Irma Alberta.
“We are not rich,” Roseãngela says. “But we are free. And no one here is hungry.”
Banner image: Image by Júlia Dolce, courtesy of MST_Flickr.
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