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  • Resistance and Social Reform in Latin America:Speaking with João Pedro Stedile of Brazil’s “O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra” (the MST)
  • Jeff Garmany and Flávia Bessa Maia

For those concerned with social resistance and civil society, Brazil's O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (the MST) stands out as one of today's most intriguing social movements. Having emerged towards the end of Brazil's military dictatorship period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the MST was initially formulated to address the concerns of Brazil's camponês1 population. As Brazil moved towards a more decentralized form of state democracy, many on the left doubted whether federal legislation alone would ever sufficiently address the country's "landless" issue (where millions of agricultural workers lived as peasants, having no ownership of the land on which they lived and worked). The primary objective of those within the movement was not merely to petition, but to force the federal government to implement what was perceived as long overdue agrarian reform measures. The MST quickly gained international fame for their land occupation strategies, in which landless camponês families often squatted on "unused" sections of agricultural land in an effort to obligate federal agencies to enact constitutionally provisioned land reform policies (Fernandes 2000). Currently, as the MST still continues to push for agrarian reform in nearly every region of Latin America's largest country, the movement has also become deeply involved in a multitude of other political and social debates pertaining to issues of globalization.

The most publicly-recognized figure within the MST today is writer and critic João Pedro Stedile. The author and editor of numerous books regarding agrarian reform and the MST (Stedile 1997, 1999, 2002, 2005), Stedile has become increasingly critical in recent years of neoliberal economic policies, globalization discourses, large-scale agroindustrial practices, and the consolidating networks of global capitalism. We met with Stedile at the MST headquarters in São Paulo in July of 2006 to discuss the contemporary state of the movement. What follows is an expanded excerpt from that conversation, one begun in truncated form in the journal Antipode (Garmany and Maia 2007). That [End Page 137] interview focused upon the spatial politics of the MST in relation to agrarian reform, while this one concerns the MST's current position within the social, political, and economic landscape of modern Brazil.

Jeff Garmany and Flávia Bessa Maia:
Considering, as you've said before, that many of the social problems in Brazil are interrelated, and that the root causes for social inequality in the country (rural space) are the same as the ones in the city (urban space), then do you think that the MST's current model of social resistance should also work in the city, that it would be effective?

João Pedro Stedile:

Well, the biggest challenge we have in constructing a social movement in the city is that the traditional forms of urban organization are already insufficient. It's not that they are disappearing, but that they are insufficient. How do the people organize during this period of industrial capitalism? Unions, neighborhood associations, and political parties: these three tools, however, are insufficient to organize the poor people of the city. So our greatest challenge is to find what forms of organization, particularly for young people, will develop a powerful alliance. This appears to be the problem that we have in the camponês movement: we have to unite with the city, but when we come here to the city we find that there is no organization in the city. We have to first help them organize in order for us to join with them.

JG/FBM:
Well, the movement is growing enormously today, perhaps because it is so open to many people. It has even been said that it's the largest social movement in Latin America, which clearly is a sign of success, but does this not also create problems and have some drawbacks?

JPS:
Well, first, we don't like this type of adjective: if it's the largest in the world, the largest in Latin America, this doesn't do any good...

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