Land

Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement

Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST) sustains landless families through occupations, camps, settlements, education, cooperatives, and nested territorial bodies. Its durability comes from joining local self-organization to national pressure and state-facing brokerage; its central accountability problem is whether discipline, representation, and settlement institutions remain answerable to families carrying the risks, people already using contested land, neighboring communities, public agencies, and affected ecologies.

How can landless rural workers turn dispersed need into enough durable collective power to obtain land, govern settlements, and sustain a political project across generations?