Thirty Years of Struggle for Agrarian Reform: The 2014 National MST Congress

On Sunday, February 9, 2014, hundreds of buses carrying thousands of peasant farmers from across Brazil arrived in the capital city of Brasília. These farmers travelled to the capital to participate in the Sixth National Congress of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), the largest and most well-known agrarian reform movement in Latin America. Over the past 30 years, through occupations of privately and publically owned landed estates, the MST has succeeded in forcing the government to redistribute land rights to approximately 150,000 landless families. In addition, tens of thousands of families are still camped out illegally across the country, living for years at a time under the now-iconic black plastic makeshift tents, waiting for land.