The Rural Landless Workers Movement of Brazil: New Direction in a Time of Crisis The MST, or the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra ( the Rural Landless Workers Movement) is the largest social movement in South America, with about 5000,000 supporters (Epstein 2). Under the slogan of "Ocupar, Resistir, Produzir" ("Occupy, Resist, Produce"), the MST uses non-violent civil disobedience to pressure the government to speed up agrarian reform and close the gap between the rich and the poor. The goal of the MST is to provide land to the millions of landless peasants who can cultivate and subsist on what appears to be a highly disproportionate amount of unproductive and under utilized land. The current economic crisis in Brazil could translate to more support for the MST movement and signal a change in the percentage of land use and landless workers as they currently stand.The tradition of Brazil's unequal distribution of land dates back to early colonial times. Between 1534 and 1536, the king of Portugal set up a system of land distribution through which he divided the territory of Brazil into 12 captaincies drawn from the coastline of Brazil to the line established by the Treaty of Tordesillas that separated Spanish from Portuguese land claims. The captaincies were given to those who were in favor of the crown and who agreed to send back one sixth of any accrued revenue to the crown. This was in response to a perceived need to occupy the territory to prevent French and Dutch from occupying the land and claiming it for their countries. This was the beginning of the tradition of single owners possessing large tracts of land, sometimes as large as small European countries, and this tradition continues in modern Brazil.The MST carries out its non-violent protest in a unique and, fairly often, successful manner. It's modus operandi is to organize land invasions by occupying up to 2000 people at a time on idle government or pr...
