I have some very good memories of the activities of the movement. I also have some painful ones. Among the best is April 15, 1996, when we organized the greatest land occupation in the history of the MST. We had 6,000 families camped all night by the side of the road; there were so many people we couldn’t find transportation for them all. Then we walked together to an 85,000 hectare (230,000 acre) farm, the largest landed estate in the state of Paraná, and we took it. We were lucky to be accompanied by the photographer Sebastião Salgado, who documented the operation.
Another good moment was our arrival in Brasilia on April 17, 1997, after a three-month march of 1,500 kilometers (950 miles). We knew we had popular support, but we didn’t know how strong it was. When we arrived in the city, our reception had the feeling of a general strike. More than 100,000 people came into the streets to receive us. It was awesome.
Among the bad moments, the most painful was the massacre of Caracajas, when the police killed 19 of our compañeros, one of them was a 19-year-old activist who was made to shout “Viva the MST” as they shot him.
Our movement was born in a historical confluence of several factors. It was at the end of the 1970s when the model of dependent industrialization and modern agriculture was entering into crisis. Also, society had risen up against Brazil’s dictatorship and had lost its fear of struggle. And years of work in the Church culminated in a pastoral letter on the land, based on liberation theology. That pastoral letter helped raise the consciousness of the campesinos so that they could organize and struggle.
My participation dates from those beginnings. I had been active in the wine-producers unions in my family’s home region. Because of my links with the pastoral letter I was invited to organize the landless campesinos who lived in another region of my state, Rio Grande do Sul. That’s how I got my start and here I am today, still in the struggle.
The MST had the good luck to be born in a historical period that permitted us to build on the experience of many movements that had preceded us. We have always tried to learn from others. We have learned from the historical struggles of Brazil. We have learned from the peasant movements coming before us that were defeated by the military dictatorship. We have learned from Latin American campesino movements, which have an historical tradition of struggle. The campesino class in Brazil is only 100 years old, very young in terms of human history, and we have learned from the historical experience of the working class.
From all we have learned from history, we realize that the health of the social movement depends on a large degree of political and ideological independence. We have always understood that only they who travel on their own feet and think with their own heads can go far. Therefore, we always insist that the MST and other social movements have to be autonomous in their relations with political parties, the government, the state, the Church and all other institutions.
To be autonomous does not mean that we can’t enter into alliances and relationships. We have alliances with other sectors that are fighting for the same causes, and also with political parties. We are in permanent negotiations with the governments in search of our objectives. But we always set our own goals and methods.
The structures of domination are very strong in our society. First of all, we face the economic and political power of the large landowners. Second, the Brazilian state always acts to maintain the privileges of the dominant classes. In Brazil we haven’t gone through a true bourgeois revolution. Third, we have to deal with the nature of the governments that utilize the state and its laws in order to maintain the privileges of those same dominant classes.
Another problem lies in the difficulty of organizing millions of poor people who are still at a low level of political and ideological consciousness. Low levels of political understanding and cultural development make it hard to broaden mass organization.
But the true history of humanity is based on solidarity, equality and social justice. So sooner or later, I know we will win.
