REVIEW: To Inherit the Earth
Terra for the People
A detailed and inspiring account of the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil

Reviewed by Constantine Markides

June 23, 2004: In a 2003 speech delivered at the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, Brazil, the eminent linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky called the MST—or Landless Workers' Movement—the most important and exciting popular movement in the world. To Inherit the Earth tells the astonishing story of that movement, a grassroots, family-oriented effort of about a million Brazilian poor seeking land on which to live with dignity and security. It is an agricultural movement, one of farmers and farm workers, built on the idea that agrarian reform is a necessary step towards a just and fraternal society.

The MST, short for Movimiento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra, was formed in 1984, a year before the collapse of the military dictatorship that throttled Brazil for over two decades. From its inception until 2002, the MST won a total of over 20 million acres for over 350,000 Brazilian families. MST’s strategy is to occupy land in peaceful protest of the unjust distribution of land in Brazil and of the government’s failure to carry out land reform as promised. Brazilian law states that landowners must put their land to good use or lose it. The actual practices of the landowners fall heinously short of this ‘good use’ requirement. That’s where the MST comes in. Families camp out, sometimes for years, until the government either violently forces them off or offers them land.

Like Brazil itself, To Inherit the Earth is hefty but never dull. Wendy Wolford and Angus Wright, professors of geography and environmental studies respectively, present the MST within the context of Brazil’s history of slavery and inequality. They write of a Brazil where helicopters transport the wealthy between skyscraper rooftops while below them, in diseased and overpopulated slums, new arrivals flood in from the country, often bribing truckers to fill marshes with garbage on which they might construct shacks of cardboard and metal siding. It is a Brazil where landowners have expanded their estates by forging land deeds and then dropping them into a box of hungry crickets to give them an aged (or at least nibbled) look. Wolford and Wright touch upon more history and facts about Brazil than one would expect in a single book (from the rise of liberation theology to the fact that ants make up 20 percent of all animal weight in the Amazon). But the authors are not armchair academics: they traveled frequently to Brazil, visiting various MST settlements, including one that was burnt down by privately hired gunmen two days before their arrival. Much of the book reads like fine journalism, and we hear directly from the MST activists about their achievements and setbacks.

The setbacks are major. Because MST challenges the holdings of Brazil’s corrupt and powerful landowning elite, they pay a severe price. The government has sent in spies and provocateurs to cause division among them. The press often slanders them, calling them illegal occupiers of land, subverters of democracy or violent troublemakers, though the violence is almost entirely inflicted upon the landless workers. Local bosses hire private gunmen to assassinate organizers. In some cases, there are outright massacres, as in the 1996 El Dorado dos Carajas massacre where military police opened fire on a peaceful MST march, killing nineteen people and injuring many more.

But MST is well organized, its members committed to winning a decent life. Inspired by the enlightened educational philosophy of Gilberto Freyre, they have focused on establishing progressive schools and educational programs throughout Brazil. The MST has gained increasing national and international acclaim—even receiving Sweden’s The Right Livelihood Award (‘The Alternative Nobel Prize’)—and it is no longer as easy for the landowners to use force against them. But the MST still faces challenges. Brazil’s legacy of patronage, hierarchy, and poverty has a crippling effect on the decentralized structure MST strives for. Also problematic is the tendency of people to withdraw from the MST once they gain land. Meanwhile, landowners remain immensely powerful and maintain legal impunity—as San Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero said: “Justice is like a snake: it only bites the barefooted.” Throughout To Inherit the Earth, the authors give a balanced perspective, neither shying from criticism out of sympathy to the cause, nor shying from praise where it is due.

The United States, making its sentiments felt through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, is not particularly fond of the popular agrarian reform efforts of the MST. Extractive, multinational corporations benefit from the very same conditions—low wages, a landless and dependent workforce, weak regulation—that impoverish Brazilians and wreak havoc on the environment. In 1997 the World Bank offered an alternative to MST efforts by implementing a “market land reform” project, offering low-interest loans with which people could purchase land. The trouble was that the landowners, aware that these loans were available, would just bargain harder. It did benefit some families, but it did not approach the level of MST successes. Some of the more irreverent Brazilians began to call the project the “agrarian reform through virgin birth.”

To Inherit the Earth is a good book, and an important one. This very moment, tens of thousands of families throughout Brazil are taking direct part, at no small risk to themselves, in a non-violent, revolutionary movement for a more egalitarian Brazil. For those of us who feel helpless before the seemingly insoluble problems of the world, and for those of us who do not live in acute poverty with gunmen and military squads at our backs, understanding the accomplishments of movements like the MST should be both humbling and invigorating.

Constantine Markides is a freelance writer and novelist living in Portland, Maine. Between writing stints, he plants trees in Vermont and sterns on a lobster boat off Maine's Monhegan Island.