The MST was not born out of nowhere. It was born of the historical struggle of the Brazilian people!

It was born from important and often forgotten antecedents, in this country without memory. But in fact it was, and is, not only the oldest of them, that is, the one that has been carrying out the struggle the longest, but also the one that has achieved and continues to achieve the most, in concrete terms.

Let’s talk only of the last sixty years in this country where the question of land tenure goes back centuries.

To begin with, it is worth remembering that one cannot speak of a struggle for agrarian reform in Brazil without mentioning LeonelBrizola.

In 1961, when he was governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Brizola took over MASTER, the Landless Farmers’ Movement, which was the first concrete step taken in Brazil to implement a long-awaited agrarian reform.

Brizola came from the countryside, from the violence of the countryside, the misery and the inequalities of the Brazilian countryside. And that, in a rich state.

He had married a powerful heiress, Dona NeuzaGoulart, sister of JangoGoulart, a family of estancieros, that is, of big landowners.

To prove his support for agrarian reform in his state, Rio Grande do Sul, he donated 45% of the land his wife had inherited.

It was certainly a gesture designed to have an impact on public opinion. But it was also the first step of the first attempt of agrarian reform implemented in Brazil.

During his rule in Rio Grande do Sul, thirteen thousand new land titles were delivered to the landless. Perhaps a small number. But it was the first and an exemplary attempt to implement an agrarian reform in our country.

There was another antecedent of which it is impossible not to speak: the Peasant Leagues, a kind of peasants’ association first established in Paraíba, and then extended to Pernambuco – where it had its main focus – and also to Goiás and Rio de Janeiro.

From 1955 to 1964, the Peasant Leagues played an active role in Brazil. In the MASTER in Rio Grande do Sul supported by Brizola we had two leaders Joao Landless and JairCalixto, but they had only a local impact. But in the Peasant Leagues there were two great leaders that had national impact: Gregory Bezerra and, later, Francisco Julião.

I met Juliao – who for my generation was a mythical name – in Lisbon in 1979. We talked a lot, that first time. And many times later, when I moved from Spain to Mexico, where he lived in the harsh condition of exile.

And then here, in Brazil, when he came back, after amnesty, from decades of exile. I always heard from him the same thing: until there is a real, deep, agrarian reform, Brazil will not exist.

He said this with the gentleness of someone who is cordial and with the conviction of those who have unsurpassed and unbreakable faith.

Well, the MST knew how to take over this essential inheritance and to advance, to advance very far. Today, it is one of the most active and significant social movements not only in Brazil or in Latin America, but in the world.

Its roots are where they should be: in the landless, in those who claim land to plant, to produce. For living. To be what they should always be, from their most ancient roots, if this were not a country of abnormal inequalities and injustices.

Throughout its history, the MST has established new parameters for the struggle for land, for agrarian reform, all of which are ignored by the big media conglomerates and, often, by governments, always aligned with the other side of the coin, the latifundio.

There are innovative cooperatives in the system of agro-ecological production, and the only cooperative in Latin America that produces agro-ecological vegetable seeds. The MST is the largest Latin American producer of organic rice.

There is a phenomenal school – I am referring to FlorestanFernandes, created starting with donations from Sebastiao Salgado, José Saramago and Chico Buarque -, it was a national school, now it is Latin American and international, where students from all over the world come to study. It was there that the police of those who plotted the coup tried to invade in November 2016.

I know the MST takes pride in using the “Yes I can” method of adult literacy, and now it is helping the Maranhão government with illiteracy there. There are endless positive examples worthy of duplication, of initiatives that indicate and prove the viability of positive actions.

All this is hidden from public opinion by a media conglomerate that tries to defend, at any price, an unjust, immoral and indefensible scenario. That’s how things go.

However, the MST goes far beyond occupying and claiming land and demanding, with absolute justice, an agrarian reform that at least tries to reduce the abnormality of rural property in Brazil.

I have been in occupations, I have been in lands legally conquered, I have been in the dream reached by those who have always been abandoned.

No, no, the MST is not just a bunch of crazy people invading other people’s lands. This is what the mainstream media, newspapers, magazines, national television and radio networks say.

The MST, in addition to restoring dignity to the poor of the land, develops, in fact, a kind of project of life for the nation. Many of their cooperatives, it is worth reiterating, could serve as a model for transforming the current structure of rural production. And of course, of coexistence in society.

At this point in my life, I consider myself to be a respectable man: I was born in 1968. I came from a generation that launched itself into every dream, that at certain moments felt that it could touch the sky with their hands, while others thought that at least they could graze this sky.

I understand that this country where I fit in the lottery of life, Brazil, an immense and painful country, will never even begin to be what it can and should be, as long as the land issue remains as it is.

It remains unacceptable to me that such a small number of people hold in their hands such a large amount of land. Incomprehensible.

This is the first injustice, the most unjust of all, the birthplace of all others.

I do not know, really, if the root of all our evils is the question of the land. But I really know that this is one of the roots. Perhaps the most profound of all. Perhaps.

And that is where I see the main, most profound action of the MST.

Not in the occupations (in the vast majority of cases justified), not in the most spectacular gestures, but in their daily action, formation, awareness, finally, in the sowing of a possible country, that world that, repeating the words of Eduardo Galeano, “may be everyone’s house, not the house of a few” that are always the beneficiaries to the detriment of the immense majority of the abandoned, of the ones that are always forgotten.

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