The movement of landless rural workers' (MST) and democracy in Brazil

Abstract

This paper reviews the Movement of Landless Rural Workers’ (MST) relations with democracy in Brazil. The MST is Latin America’s premier grassroots organization and one of the most significant social movements for land reform in world history. Contrary to influential views, this essay argues that the MST is not an “anti-state” or “anti-democratic” organization. MST engagements with Brazil’s political institutions are multifarious and dynamic. These include public activism and acts of civil disobedience, lobbying and bargaining, ad hoc societal corporatism, electoral participation, and manifold relations with the rule of law. Given the crude realities of Brazil’s agrarian struggle –and the actual options available to the MST—the movement’s oppositional demeanor and pressure politics must be understood, first and foremost, as grounded on practical considerations rather than any dogmatic ideology. The MST’s contentious edge has been necessary to advance Brazil’s agrarian reform and improve the quality of its democracy by: (1) strengthening civil society through the organization and incorporation of marginalized sectors of the population; (2) highlighting the importance of public activism as a catalyst for social development; (3) facilitating the extension and exercise of basic citizenship rights among Brazil’s poor; and, (4) engendering a sense of utopia and affirmation of ideals imbued in Brazil’s long term, complex and open-ended democratization process by virtue of birth and necessity, the MST’s distinct mark on Brazilian democracy has been that of the “tough touch.”