. V I N C E N T B E V I N S
If you went to a trendy restaurant in são paulo in 2021 or 2022,
you were likely to see the red hat. If you went to Mamba Negra,
the underground rave with DJs visiting from Berlin, or to enough
art gallery openings—in short, if you hung around the country’s
progressive cultural elite—you were likely to see the red hat.
The hat in question is a scarlet baseball cap depicting a man
and a woman emerging from a green map of Brazil. The man
raises a machete high above his head—ready to tend to the crops
or, if you prefer, to go to battle. The image has been the logo of
Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), known in English
as the Landless Workers’ Movement, since shortly after its founding in 1984.
The MST pushes for land redistribution by occupying plots controlled by the
country’s traditional elites or by upstart capitalists profiting from an agricultural
boom. The group depends on an article in the Brazilian Constitution that mandates
that land must fulfil a “social function”; if its members deem that land is
unproductive or being misused, they set up camp and fight
for legal recognition of their settlements. Over four decades,
the MST has become the largest social movement in Latin
America and perhaps in the world. It comprises as many as
2 million people across the country and has been a consistent
presence on the radical left wing of Brazilian politics.
During the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, from 2019 to
2023, the popularity of the red hat grew. Nearly everyone in the
MST comes from the poor margins of society, and almost all
of its activities are rural—and yet the downtown city kids were
decked out in its gear. “Nah sis,” one person wrote in a tweet.
“That hat is becoming an accessory to wear at the clubs.” The
MST Communications Sector replied to the viral post with a
press release: “Land reform requires the support of all of society.”
The MST was proud to have people wearing its symbols.
“But don’t forget!” the statement continued. “We must also be
committed to supporting the people’s struggle.”
The hat’s proliferation was, in fact, the result
of a carefully laid plan to forge links between the
MST and broader forces in society during a dangerous
period for the Brazilian left. Bolsonaro’s
administration oversaw the rampant destruction
of the rainforest, promoted gun ownership in
the country, and was explicitly hostile toward
the MST. (Bolsonaro’s environmental minister
published a pamphlet suggesting that a pack of
bullets was the solution to both wild boars and
the Landless Workers’ Movement.) During his
presidency, the MST chose to slow down its land
occupations to protect its members. Meanwhile,
it made a tactical alliance with progressive elements
of the urban bourgeoisie and used its existing
encampments to become a major organic
food producer. The strategy worked: By selling
radical attire to the rich and helping to feed the
poor, the MST gained support in the cities.
There is perhaps no organization with a better
reputation among leftists around the world
than the MST. Its admirers will tell you that the
group has managed accomplishments that elude
progressive movements elsewhere: It maintains
a radical approach, pushing for revolution in the
long term while providing food for working-class
Brazilians in the short; it has adapted
to shifting conditions without suffering major
rifts; and it fought to get Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva, Brazil’s once and current president, out
of prison in 2019 and back into
power, all while keeping its independence
from the ruling Workers’
Party. “We have been very inspired
by the MST as a political and social
movement,” Enzo Camacho, from
the ALPAS Pilipinas, a group that
works to organize the Filipino diaspora
in Berlin, told me. Belén Díaz,
a sociologist and a member of the
left-feminist Bloque Latinoamericano
collective, put it more bluntly:
“The Landless Workers’ Movement
is the most respected social movement in the world.”
In October 2022, the Workers’ Party won back the keys
to the presidential palace and, despite a January 6–like coup
attempt by Bolsonaro and his supporters, Lula took up residence
the following year. With democracy secured and the
reactionaries out of the executive branch, the MST shifted
into a more offensive posture: It began to seize more unused
land and to occupy illegal farms once again. The movement’s
return to its pre-Bolsonaro form seemed to surprise Lula’s
administration, and it generated some mainstream attention.
In 2023, a New York Times headline read “If You Don’t Use
Your Land, These Marxists May Take It.”
Though Bolsonaro was defeated in 2022, his Partido Liberal
won the largest bloc of seats in Congress. Lula must work
with the right-wing forces funded by rich landowners and
rapacious agribusinesses, lest his administration risk impeachment
or abuses of the legal system—such as the crusades
that brought down Dilma Rousseff, the previous left-leaning
president, in 2016 and put Lula himself behind bars in 2018. The Bolsonarista
movement has also continued to use its power, inside official institutions and
on the ground, to target the MST. To deliver for its members in a country of
continental proportions, the MST must nimbly weave between these powerful
contradictory forces. On the one hand, it is being called on to serve as a model
for left-wing organizations around the world. On the other, the forces of national
reaction remain bent on its extermination.
In 2023, the first year of lula’s current term, i attended the mst’s
fourth National Land Reform Fair in São Paulo, held to showcase its
members as well as its products. It was the celebration of an organization
that had, remarkably, seemed to
emerge from the Bolsonaro years
even stronger than it had been before
them. Gilmar Mauro, a longtime member
of the national directorship, told the gathered
press to get used to the MST’s return
to active pressure. “We have to set aside
this idea that there is a good MST and a
bad MST, or that the MST of the past is
not the MST of the present,” Mauro said.
“If you like our food, if you like our organic
rice and our butter and our outreach
to the hungry in the cities, then you have
to understand that everything we have has
come through occupation.”
Mauro and I met later at the offices of
the National Secretariat in São Paulo, next
door to the shop where the MST sells stacks
of its red hats. We sat across a big wooden
table, surrounded by a small library of books in
Portuguese, Spanish, and English. It’s not only
Mauro’s dark red tan, cut off by the sleeves of a
faded blue button-up, that gives him away as a
farmer. He speaks with the rounded twang that’s
common in Brazil’s agricultural interior. He is
from a family of landless farmers, and he rose
through the movement over decades to become
one of its public-facing leaders. Academics in
the United States or Europe who read a lot of
Antonio Gramsci might call Mauro an “organic
intellectual,” someone from the class whose interests
he defends. Members of the MST might
call him that, too, because they also read a lot of
Gramsci in their political education programs.
While precise figures are difficult to come
by, there are hundreds of thousands of families
in the MST. Some live on legalized farms
(assentamentos, or settlements) or on occupied
land (acampamentos, or encampments) that’s
awaiting recognition from the land-reform authorities,
and some are full-time militantes (activists
or militants, as you prefer). Spread across
a country twice the size of the European Union,
they hammer out decisions in group chats and
at periodic meetings that require long bus trips.
Mauro attributes the resilience of the movement
to its organizational structure. A given “political
line” is arrived at democratically, and once a decision
is made, everyone adopts it, even those who
never liked the idea. Paraphrasing the Marxist
theorist Rosa Luxemburg, Mauro explained, “It
is much better for all of us to discuss, plan, and
make a mistake collectively than for each of us to
do the right thing as individuals.”
It was nearly sunset, but Mauro drank an
alarming amount of black coffee as we talked. On
the wall to his left was a picture of the Mexican
revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and to the right,
a photo of the MST marching against Lula’s imprisonment
in 2018. Outside, a large photo of the
Indigenous rights defender Bruno Pereira and
my friend Dom Phillips, a British
journalist, hung on a wall.
They were murdered while
working together in the Amazon
in 2022, as retribution for
Pereira’s work defending tribes
from illegal land invasions. It is
the kind of violence that stalks
the MST, too.
Jocelda ivone de
Oliveira, 42, does
her best to keep
up with national
and geopolitical
developments. She lives in the
state of Paraná, on one of the
movement’s encampments, and
follows MST debates on her
phone. Sometimes she heads into the local capital, Curitiba, for a meeting. But most of her time is devoted to day-to-day matters at home, deep in Brazil’s agricultural heartland. De Oliveira is on the coordination directorship of her encampment, where more than 1,000 people live on and work the land.
It took me a few hours to get to the site from the nearest city. I had to swerve and tumble on red-dirt streets between tall eucalyptus trees. But the horizon opened after I entered the encampment and made my way down to a little village, where a few dozen small buildings clustered around an intersection. The locals shuffled me into the green shack they had built for visitors—I would be staying there with some teachers—and then de Oliveira came to take me to the school.
“Every day I wake up, make breakfast, take care of my family, and we tend to the encampment,” she told me. “But every day I am worried that we will be forced off this land, that the government will kick us out, and once more we won’t know what to make of our future.”
De Oliveira and I walked up a hill to the encampment’s schoolhouse; it’s now part of the national public education system, which gives it access to state resources. On that day, government officials from the local school district were visiting, and militantes working in MST’s Education Sector served them cake and sweet coffee as they inspected the new PCs in the computer lab. Down the street, the little Mercado Che Guevara, featuring a painting of the Argentine revolutionary, was about to close, and the bar across the road was about to open. At both, you could buy locally produced food, or you could buy mass-produced products brought in from the city.
The encampments have a complex organizational structure. Ideally, responsibilities are assigned based on ability. The Discipline Sector enforces the rules; domestic violence and child abuse, for example, lead to automatic expulsion. Drug use is prohibited, mostly to protect the encampments against accusations of trafficking or criminal activities. The MST requires at least 50 percent women in its national directorship, but in the encampments, the percentage is often higher.
The MST also assigns political tasks. Lula was held in jail in Curitiba, and during each of his 580 days behind bars, the MST sent members to stand in front of the prison, demanding that he be freed. (In 2021, the Supreme Court threw out the corruption charges against him.) During the vigil, the MST set up on-site ideological training, and psychiatrists offered free therapy to the militants and families camped out there.
Many MST members jump at the chance to head to the city for movement activities. Others, used to the quiet life, drag their feet. But the encampment is structured collectively, and some tasks are not optional. “Technically, no one is required to do anything,” a high school geography teacher named Roberto Soares joked as his students polished off a free after-school dinner of chicken and polenta. “Just like no one is required to live on an encampment as part of the MST.”
Even though the group has been here a long time and has formed deep connections with the local community, de Oliveira has reason to worry. Paraná is a major outpost of Bolsonarismo. It is not just that private agribusiness is strong here and that voters are conservative. Paraná was the center of the US-backed and now-discredited anti-corruption crusade that dogged the Workers’ Party for years. The judge who sent Lula to prison, whom the Supreme Court ruled to have acted impartially, immediately joined Bolsonaro’s government in 2019; now he is a senator representing the state. Surviving here has required a delicate, cautious dance around reactionary forces. “What did Bolsonaro want?” de Oliveira asked as we sat near her house one evening. “He wanted a provocation, so he could use it as justification to massacre us. We could not beat him in direct confrontation. So we did the opposite, and we focused on what we do best: producing food.”
This strategy proved crucial during the pandemic, when, despite the agricultural boom that now powers so much of the country’s GDP, thousands of Brazilians began to starve. In response, the MST shipped 7,000 tons of food for distribution in the cities. On this encampment, each family produces subsistence crops—cassava, pumpkin, rice, and beans, for example, alongside a wide selection of fruits and some livestock. But they also cultivate a plot of land for cash crops. With that income, they buy tractors, cars, cell phone plans, and cool sunglasses.
Miriam Barino, a soft-spoken middle-aged woman, oversees the encampment’s subsistence farming. She has children who work at jobs in the city, and her next-door neighbor, Marilda Silva Pereira, has a daughter who works as a chemist in Germany. “I used to be a tenant farmer, but now I don’t have to pay any rent to any landlords,” Barino told me as two residents tended the soil next to her under the low winter sun. She supervises a complicated arrangement of allotments, mapped out in ink on a weathered piece of
paper she showed me in her kitchen. “The way we see it, most people living in the favelas in the cities were kicked off the land when big farmers replaced them with machines,” she told me. “Their place is here.”
Sometimes the MST’s occupations turn into settlements quickly; sometimes they take decades; and sometimes they are judged illegal or dispersed by force. This one in Paraná should work out eventually, if the land-reform authorities can arrive at a suitable government payment to the landowners. But even though the MST moved onto the land 20 years ago, de Oliveira, Barino, and the others remain occupiers, not permanent residents. There is a group on guard at the only entrance from the nearest highway. The day I arrived at the encampment, I had
to identify myself to make it past the five or six people who were sitting there watching the barrier as their big red flag, with the same logo as the hat, flew overhead.
The mst traces its roots to two different movements in Brazilian history. The Ligas Camponesas—or Peasant Leagues, organized by the Brazilian Communist Party in the 1950s—are its most obvious antecedent. After the US-backed coup in 1964, the military dictatorship crushed the Leagues, made up of sharecroppers and other landless workers. The movement also traces its history to parts of the Catholic Church inspired by liberation theology; many of its oldest members have some connection to the Comissão Pastoral da Terra, a rural church group born during the dictatorship. (This dual lineage, to both priests and Marxists, is not uncommon in Brazil: Progressive Catholic factions and former guerrillas made up the early ranks of Lula’s Workers’ Party.)
But in its books and its cadre-formation programs, the MST places itself within a much longer story, one that reaches back to ancient Rome and winds through European feudalism. It sees Brazil’s land struggles as foundational: The country was born as a colony that exported agricultural products, with land awarded to aristocrats in the Portuguese system and kept productive by Indigenous and enslaved people. Hundreds of years later, as the MST sees it, that system remains more or less intact—except that many of the descendants of those workers have been thrown off the land and forced into the poverty and dangers of urban life.
In this account, there are a series of missed opportunities. After the abolition of slavery in 1888, the monarchy provided no reparations to the people who had been working on the farms, and the country never enacted land reform. The MST points to the land distribution programs under President Abraham Lincoln as part of the reason the United States jumped ahead of Latin America—with some major caveats, including the United States’ neglect of formerly enslaved communities and its destruction of Indigenous nations (the movement fiercely defends the recognition of Brazilian tribal lands). Then, in the 20th century, Brazil’s bourgeoisie proved too weak to effectively push for the land reform that would have allowed the country to industrialize. Brazil’s natural resources remained in the hands of a tiny, predatory elite, which was both ruthlessly extractivist and stupidly inefficient.
As a result, Brazil slid into underdevelopment; MST literature emphasizes that it was precisely the push for land reform, by the left-leaning president João “Jango” Goulart, that led the rich to unite behind the US-backed coup in 1964. The military government that followed came up with a plan to distribute small plots to Brazilian families, but powerful landowners blocked its implementation.
Starting in the early 1980s, as the country
began moving toward democracy, landless
workers began agitating for plots to be awarded
to them, especially in the South. Their method
was occupation, and they coalesced into
the MST in January 1984. In 1988, the new
Constitution specified that land could, under
the right conditions, be handed over to families.
Much of the legality and legitimacy of
the MST’s activities hinge on the wording of
Article 186, which establishes the minimum requirements
for private landowners: They must
“make rational and adequate use” of the land
and “preserve the natural environment,” while
complying with all rural and labor regulations;
and the state must pay them if their holdings
are taken away. But just as with protections for
the Amazon and for Indigenous people, these
promises collided with private economic power.
In the absence of additional pressure, officials
at the National Land Reform Institute never
seemed to do anything. For the MST, the solution
was occupation.
During Lula’s first two terms, from 2003 to
2010, the economy surged, thanks in part to commodity
exports to China, only to slow as prices
dropped and the country was consumed by political
crises between 2015 and 2018: Dilma Rousseff
was replaced by Michel Temer, the unelected
pro-business president; Lula was imprisoned;
and by the time Bolsonaro ran in 2018, the good
times were long gone for lower-middle-class
Brazilians. With Bolsonaro’s victory, the wealthy
landowners gained a full-throated supporter in
the presidential palace. João Pedro Stédile, long
the MST’s most prominent intellectual, was surprised
at just how few people—other than the
MST—came out to defend the Workers’ Party
when Lula was imprisoned. “There was a lack of
popular support,” Stédile told me, “because the
workers had already been defeated as a class.”
Paulo Teixeira, Lula’s minister
for agrarian development,
has been given the task of dealing
with both pressure from
the left and attacks from the
right. “This government listens
to social movements, and
we filter,” Teixeira told me late
one night, as he prepared for
a meeting with land-reform
authorities in the capital. He
believes that the MST’s occupations
are a legitimate form
of pressure, but he also doesn’t
think they’re necessary now
that his ministry is pushing forward with land
reform—focusing on distributing public lands
and the land of owners in debt to the state.
There were at least three instances in 2023
in which the MST had gone too far, Teixeira
said—including its occupations of lands owned by a paper
and cellulose company and a state-run agricultural research
corporation. If the movement occupies land that, it turns out,
is being used legally, then the courts will not recognize the
settlement and will order the encampment to disperse. Sometimes
the wrong target is chosen,
and the MST moves on. But the
occupations of a productive company
and of state facilities were more
of an intentional “protest,” Teixeira
explained, though he said he wished
the MST could have made its point
a different way. “Everything that
has been done, all the land reform
that has been carried out, has taken
place within existing legislation and
within the Constitution.”
After Lula’s first two terms as
president, as the Workers’ Party’s
popularity began to wane, some activists (and members)
thought the MST had gotten too close to the government and
publicly left the group. In the dark years of far-right extremism,
however, many came to appreciate the MST’s structure, pragmatism,
and institutional links. Now that Lula is back, MST
leaders complain that well-meaning leftists (including those in
government) tell them that occupations are no longer necessary,
or that the group’s intense focus on radical land reform is
less relevant in an urbanizing country, or that it must find a way
to live alongside major agribusiness rather than try to replace it.
The mst, of course, does not agree. its frente
de Massas, or Mass Front, sector engages in
constant outreach to recruit working-class
Brazilians.
A few hours from Brasília, in the conservative state of Goiás,
a well-known local recruiter known as Frangão, or “Big Chicken,”
had been part of the campaign to do exactly that. By asking around in the community,
he found dozens of people interested in obtaining their own piece of land, and
he assembled a cadre of would-be revolutionaries. I met the women in this group
on the poor outskirts of the state capital, Goiânia.
One morning in March 2023, they woke up very early and, joining a group
that consisted of approximately 600 families, set out to occupy a large farm outside
Goiânia. Packing into cars and vans, they
made their way onto the property and hoisted
the MST flag on a pole made of sugarcane.
They came prepared for months, if not years,
of encampment.
Marlene Pereira de Morães, 65, one of the
new recruits, told me that she had hoped that
the rest of her family could join her on a successful
encampment. They figured they had a
pretty good chance with the property, since its
owner had been convicted of trafficking women
for the sex trade. But the state governor had
other ideas: He had promised in his campaign
that there would be no new “invasions” of private
farmland. He sent in the military police and
used state forces to intimidate many of the families into staying away. Ueber Alves,
an MST lawyer, told me that this tactic is illegal. But when a governor breaks this
kind of law, it’s not clear who is supposed to hold him to account.
De Morães and four other recent MST recruits sat with me as they waited
in judicial limbo to find out whether they would be able to set up their
encampment. Some had farming
experience, and some did not; all of
them had been busy learning about
the MST’s philosophy. “I threw
myself into the movement, body
and soul,” Avelice Pereira de Sousa
told me. “We want to win a piece of
land, and we want a place to grow
and produce and grow old. And
our larger goal, of course, is land
reform across the nation.” Francisca
Rocha Costa, 68, asked me,
very politely, whether they could also record the interview
themselves. Someone had warned them that unscrupulous
journalists might twist their words.
On my last day at her encampment in paraná,
de Oliveira was whiling away the afternoon
with her daughter Heloisa as they chopped
up a pig. As often happens, the conversation
turned to the history of land reform. “It’s
clear that Mao only finally triumphed in the civil war because
he had the support of the peasants, the backing of the
people, against the big landowners,” she said. Her neighbor
Edna Santos, the director of the on-site Education Sector—
meaning she oversees the schools the MST has built and
integrated into the publicly funded national system—joined
in, trying to recall a particular word. “What was it that they
called the type of servitude they had in Russia?” she asked.
“Serfs. Yes, they lived under serfdom, while in China it was
different. They were simply very poor peasants.”
João Pedro Stédile, that had a college degree.”
After a seven-hour drive back across Paraná
toward the Atlantic coast, I met Sara da Lila
Wandenberg dos Santos, the 37-year-old coordinator
of a smaller encampment. She received
a degree in pedagogy from the nearby state
university, paid for by the MST, and then traveled
to São Paulo to attend the Escola Nacional
Florestán Fernandes, the most important of the
MST’s political education schools in the country.
There she took the Latininho, a short course on
the history of social movements offered for activists
from all around Latin America. “They spoke
in Spanish, and all the Brazilians could basically
understand. The other way around would not
have worked,” dos Santos said with a laugh.
While de Oliveira’s encampment is in the
flat and brown middle of the state, dos Santos’s
smaller settlement is located in what is left of
the thick, misty Atlantic rainforest. As you cross
this state, in the relatively developed part of
southeastern Brazil, you can drive on highways
and stop at upscale burger joints at rest areas
that are reminiscent of contemporary Arizona,
or you can take a turn down a long road and
find something closer to the American West 150
years ago—a boomtown powered by illegal land
grabs and whose laws are enforced by cowboys
and hired guns. Dos Santos was looking intently
through her black-framed glasses as we talked in
her apartment, waiting for her daughter to come
home from school and her son to return from
table-tennis practice. If she wants to move up in
the MST, it probably helps that her encampment
won an award for its innovative efforts to recover
the local ecosystem.
“In reality, the process of
formation begins the moment
that people set up an encampment,”
said Geraldo Gasparin,
one of the two members
overseeing the MST’s national
political education program.
“You learn an incredible
amount simply by doing. All
of the old generation have got
white beards,” he added. “Our
job is to train a new generation
of militantes.”
The day I paid a visit to
the political education school
in São Paulo, a group of MST cadres from all
around the country had just finished a course
on woman thinkers—brasileiras like Nise da Silveira,
Vânia Bambirra, and Lélia Gonzalez, who
deserve a place in the canon alongside Brazilian
men. I confessed to Ruth Teresa Rodrigues dos
Santos, a coordinator at the MST warehouse
in Rio de Janeiro, that I hadn’t heard of all the
names before. “Neither had I,” she replied.
“That’s one of the things we intend to change.”
Santos, 55, likes to wear a military cap with the Cuban flag—another one that
the MST sells in shops in the cities. She came to the encampment in 2019, after
a failed attempt to gain recognition for a settlement that was named after the famous
Quilombo dos Palmares, a community in colonial Brazil formed by escaped
enslaved Africans. In addition to helping run
the school, she serves as DJ at the encampment’s
Saturday-night dance parties. “At first
I play gaucho music, but as the night goes
on, we switch to harder electronic music,”
she told me. The concert is held in the “big
tent,” more of a hangar, from whose roof
hang several giant red MST flags and one
rainbow flag that reads “Toda forma de amor é
valida”: All love is valid. “I put that one up,”
she told me proudly.
Interest in the revolutionary mission varies
widely across the movement. There are people
who care mainly about getting their own
plot of land and some peace from the violence
of the city. The MST has a program to teach
members to read and write, modeled on one developed in Cuba, but it is easy to
find members who haven’t gone through it and just want to farm. On the other
hand, anyone who shows particular interests or a particular set of skills is likely to be
nominated for a leadership position or provided with opportunities for further education.
They may get a scholarship to pursue an advanced degree in agronomy or in
teaching, studying part-time at a major university nearby. “If it weren’t for the way
that it had revolutionized education, if not for the way that it also occupied the formal
education system, the MST would not still exist in the way that it does today,”
said Rebecca Tarlau, a professor at Penn State who has written about the MST’s
pedagogy. “Back in 1998 or so, there was not a single leader, except for maybe
João Pedro Stédile, that had a college degree.”
After a seven-hour drive back across Paraná
toward the Atlantic coast, I met Sara da Lila
Wandenberg dos Santos, the 37-year-old coordinator
of a smaller encampment. She received
a degree in pedagogy from the nearby state
university, paid for by the MST, and then traveled
to São Paulo to attend the Escola Nacional
Florestán Fernandes, the most important of the
MST’s political education schools in the country.
There she took the Latininho, a short course on
the history of social movements offered for activists
from all around Latin America. “They spoke
in Spanish, and all the Brazilians could basically
understand. The other way around would not
have worked,” dos Santos said with a laugh.
After lula returned to power, the Bolsonarista right did not wait long to launch a counterattack. Some of its leading politicians quickly opened a parliamentary inquiry into crimes allegedly committed by the MST. For months, it provided a stage for right-wing members of Congress to denounce the social movement.
The commission heard from farmers complaining about their land being taken over and the endless ensuing legal battles. A member of one of these farmers’ families that I spoke with referred to the United States and then immediately asked me not to attribute the quote to him. “This kind of thing would never happen in your country, because you respect the rule of law,” he said. “And you have a law of your own for people who cross the line—how does it go? ‘Go ahead, make my day.’”
I noticed similar comparisons to vigilante justice in the United States throughout my reporting. Waiting to meet with Luciano Lorenzini Zucco, the commission’s president, I sat in the congressman’s office next to a camouflage tactical backpack decorated with the US flag and a Punisher patch, the skull logo often worn by US troops and police. “The right to property is respected in the United States,” Zucco told me once he arrived. “The laws are rigorous and applied if they are broken. Farmers are valued. That’s why we see the US as a model.”
By the end of 2023, the parliamentary inquiry had fizzled out without even producing a final report. But throughout 2024, it had become increasingly clear that the MST was also limited by institutional forces on the left. Though Lula’s government always signals that it is on the side of land reform, the recognition of new settlements has come slower than the MST’s farmers would like. The movement’s leaders understand that Lula has limited resources and little room to maneuver in Congress, but they also complain that he could be doing more. In an interview last year, Stédile said the movement was “really pissed off with government incompetence.”
Over the past 15 years, the movement has relied on its organization and its mass support to flex its political muscle, playing much-needed defense for Brazil’s democracy, saving its citizens from starvation, and connecting the rural poor and urban proletariat in shared struggle. But these achievements, while impressive, are distinct from the radical transformation of landholdings that is its raison d’être.
Once the trend of wearing MST gear had indeed become a trend, it inevitably began to fade. You don’t see the hat as often; it is not as fresh as it once was in edgy downtown spaces. During the height of the anti-Bolsonarista united front, some militants had joked that many of the models and DJs sporting the cap probably had parents who owned big farms that funded their lifestyles. But the movement remains far more popular than it was five or 10 years ago.
There hasn’t exactly been a rightward “vibe shift” among Brazil’s cultural elites—as the rabid support for the anti-dictatorship tearjerker I’m Still Here demonstrated—but the moment is different. While in 2021 and 2022, all hands were on deck for the desperate effort to prevent another authoritarian regime from forming, progressives here spent most of the past year watching a left-of-center government muddling through and making the best of difficult circumstances. At the end of the year, MST candidates won elections across the country.
And then Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. For the past two years, the Bolsonarista movement has made no secret that it sees the Republican as a crucial ally in its quest to retake power. At the beginning of 2025, I sat down again with Gilmar Mauro, now 58. He had just arrived in São Paulo after planting an olive tree dedicated to Palestine on his own farm.
“The United States is an empire in decline, the way we see it, and when empires go into decline, they can become more aggressive,” he told me. Trump, of course, is both the expression of this decline and the vehicle for its accompanying aggression. If he had been in power in 2022, when Bolsonaro launched his violent assault on the presidency, the coup attempt may very well have succeeded. Mauro believes that the new Trump administration will accelerate the climate catastrophe; that it seeks not only to deport migrants but to subject the United States’ remaining foreign workers to conditions approaching those of slavery; that it will attack left-wing governments in the region; and that the right-wing oligarchs who control the world’s Internet will use their platforms to manipulate elections. “Any world leaders with a few working brain cells should be quickly developing alliances to contain these dangerous forces,” he said.
On the domestic front, Mauro rattled off
a series of threats to Brazil’s ecosystem. Lula’s
government has dedicated only a fraction of
the money that’s needed to resolve
pending land-reform claims, he said.
“That doesn’t mean there have not
been advances. There have been.”
He pointed to the battle against the
extreme right as the most important
world-historical task for the Lula administration.
Perhaps the same goes, in recent years, for the MST.
“The movement has become an organizational force.
It is now an instrument that can go beyond its central mission.”
On the night of january 10, 2025,
in the city of Tremembé in the
interior of São Paulo State, a
local man showed up at the
Olga Benário MST community,
which was named after the German Brazilian
communist executed by the Nazis. According to
witnesses, he believed that he had purchased a
piece of the land and could use it as he wished.
This is legally impossible—land-reform authorities
had designated this area an assentamento—and
representatives from the movement told him so.
He left and then returned with a group of armed
men. Valdir do Nascimento, 52, stepped forward
to parley. The men opened fire, peppering the
encampment with bullets, residents said.
“Once the shots started, they didn’t stop. It
was one bullet after another. Then I saw a spark
from one of the guns. After that, it was a horror
scene,” said Roseli Ferreira Bernardo, whom everyone
calls Binha. She told me the story outside
of do Nascimento’s house. “I heard my daughter
yell for me, yelling for help. But I turned and I
said, ‘I can’t help. I can’t walk. I can’t walk.’”
Binha had been shot in the foot. Do Nascimento
and another man, Gleison Barbosa de
Carvalho, 28, were killed; four more people were
wounded. The MST has always faced down the
threat of violence. But this attack occurred just
two hours from the largest city in South America,
in a rapidly developing region. Teixeira, the
minister for agrarian development, opened an
investigation and said the attack was the “fruit of
the seeds planted by far-right hate speech.”
The MST responded immediately. It activated
a network of militants in nearby encampments,
progressive allies in the cities, contacts
in the media, movement lawyers, and sympathetic
elected officials.
During my visit that month, the community
was on high alert. Among other reinforcements,
the movement had sent Thalita Carvalho, who
lives in a nearby encampment and had just finished
her overnight watch. Growing up, she had
believed the media portrayal of the MST as a
violent group that invaded and stole property. “Look at me now,” she said, “wearing
boots and with a machete hanging from my belt.” Carvalho spent many years as a
sex worker in the city and was often the victim of violence. She told me this must
have toughened her up. “When I entered the MST, I got in trouble for drinking
and fighting. I calmed down a bit when I learned I could trust everyone,
and they decided to put me on the security team,” she continued,
smiling. “I think I’m the only trans woman in the security corps.”
Over the years, I stayed in contact with the women in Goiás,
those recruited by “Big Chicken” and the Mass Front. After months
of waiting, they received good news: They could return to the land
they had occupied. Things moved quickly, and land-reform authorities
announced that they could permanently settle there. Unlike the
case on Jocelda Ivone de Oliveira’s property, the legal situation on property used
for trafficking was relatively easy to resolve, and Avelice de Sousa soon assumed a
leadership position in a legal settlement. She sent me a photo of her son playing
around a patch of cassava plants that were just beginning to sprout.
“We are back, and we are happy,” she said. “But we’re not done. We want to bring
more people onto the land. Right now, we are digging ourselves a bigger well.” N
THE NATION
