The Landless Workers' Movement (MST), founded in 1982, is built around three central objectives: the struggle for land, agrarian reform, and broader social
transformation in Brazil.
Brazil is one of the countries with the highest levels of land concentration in the world and is home
to some of the planet's largest private landholdings.
This unequal distribution is rooted in centuries
of history and remains one of the main drivers of the country's deep social inequality.
According to Brazil's most recent Agricultural Census, conducted in 2017, just 1% of rural landowners control nearly half of all agricultural land in the country.
The MST advocates for Popular Agrarian Reform,
a project that seeks to redistribute land on a large scale to landless rural workers. Its goal is to democratize land ownership by ensuring that land
fulfills its social function and is cultivated by those willing to work it productively.
Land occupations have become the movement's principal form of political action.
Once an area is occupied, the MST engages in a legal process with INCRA (Brazil's National Institute for
Colonization and Agrarian Reform), seeking official recognition of the land for agrarian reform and
the establishment of permanent rural settlements.
Inspired by a long tradition of peasant resistance dating back to the nineteenth century, the MST
emerged in 1982 and grew into one of the world's largest and most influential social movements.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, it expanded significantly, organizing hundreds of thousands of rural families across Brazil.
In recent years, the MST has adopted an increasingly confrontational stance, intensifying land occupations, political mobilization, and public campaigns in defense of agrarian reform.
Beyond the debate over land ownership, the Brazilian countryside remains marked by persistent land conflicts and political violence. In many rural regions, disputes involving large landowners, land grabbers, private security forces, and armed groups continue to result in threats, forced evictions, and assassinations of rural leaders and environmental defenders.
Within this context, the MST has become one of the principal organized forces challenging these local power structures and advocating for the rights of landless workers, traditional communities, and small-scale farmers.
Germano Pereira Costa, 65, known as Germaninho, is a survivor of the Carajás massacre. He was shot with an AR-15 rifle during the march for land rights.
At the time, he was treated in Marabá and underwent several surgeries.
Thirty years later, he lives in a brick house in the 19 de Abril Settlement, which was secured after years of struggle on land near Eldorado dos Carajás. To this day, he still suffers from the aftereffects of his injuries and still has a bullet lodged in his knee.
Dominga Ferreira dos Santos, 69, is also a survivor of the massacre.
At the time, she was 39 and pregnant. When the military police crackdown began, she fled into the dense forest with the few belongings she could carry.
On that day, 21 landless workers were killed and another 69 rural workers were injured during the operation carried out at the request of large landowners.
Today, Dominga lives with her daughter in a modest home in the 19 de Abril Settlement, near Eldorado dos Carajás.
This work was displayed in a solo exhibition "The Landless Workers Movement" at the Zoom Photo Festival
in La Pulperie Regional museum, Chicoutimi, Canada and as a solo exhibition "LONA PRETA" in the Federal Justice Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro.
- September 2023 -
https://zoomphotofestival.ca/en/exhibits/la-pulperie-de-chicoutimi-regional-museum-3/
- November 2024 to February 2025 -
https://ccjf.trf2.jus.br/programacao/lona-preta
