News and Updates: all

From information published by the National Association of Plant Protection (ANDEF) - an employers' organization that brings together companies in the agribusiness like Basf, Bayer, Down Agrosciences, Dupont, Monsanto and Syngenta – we prepared a summary on the use of poisons in Brazilian agriculture. The figures are worrying. While...

By Diego González | June 11, 2009 Along with the United States and Argentina, Brazil is now one of the strongest bastions of agribusiness on a global level. The world’s tenth largest economy, Brazil is now the nation which suffers the greatest inequality, on a subcontinent which, in its turn, experiences the greatest wealth gap. Just 1.6% of...

The struggle for land has more victims in the Brazilian countryside. This time, five workers were killed. The murders happened on the night of last Monday (July 6th), the Garrote settlement, located in the district of Santo Domingo in Brejo da Madre de Deus (PE). The national coordination of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (...

The trial of the colonel of the Military Police of Pará who commanded the massacre of Eldorado de Carajás, Mário Pantoja de Oliveira, has been postponed once again. The postponement was granted by the Minister of STJ Laurita Vaz. In 2002, Pantoja was sentenced to 228 years imprisonment by jury trial in Belem. The crime was committed in 1996...

“If we silence ourselves, the stones will cry out” (Pedro Tierra) The Fifth Session of the Superior Court of Justice (STJ) will rule this week on the appeal presented by Colonel Mario Colares Pantoja, one of the commanders of the Massacre at Eldorado dos Carajas, which asks to overturn the verdict by which he was condemned to 228 years in...

We are mobilized all over Brazil to defend the education of the countryside, an achievement of the social movements that fight for Land Reform in our country. Our challenge is big. We learn through the struggle that Land Reform goes beyond the simple conquest of the land/earth, and necessarily becomes a serious educational policy. Our country...

Dear Friends of the MST,

Including the 2009 May/June bimonthly, the Sem Terra Review has published 50 editions. For this reason, we would like to thank each and every reader for their support of the MST. This publication is an achievement, not only in the struggle for agrarian reform and for rural landless workers, but for the working...

The Friends of the MST presents two articles on Augusto Boal. The first is an excerpt from an interview from June, 2007 by Amy Goodman, but only recently aired on Democracy Now. The second is a memoriam from the MST. FROM DEMOCRACY NOW: AMY GOODMAN: Augusto Boal, the legendary Brazilian political playwright and popular educator, died this...

Isabella Kenfield | May 26, 2009 Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP) americas.irc-online.org On April 18, seven members of the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST) were shot by private security guards on a farm in the Amazon that belongs to Agropecuária Santa Bárbara Xinguara S/A, a company controlled by...

The concentration of land in Brazil continues to be among the highest in the world. In the past few years, the agro-exporter model, based in agribusiness, not only compounded this concentration, but also aggravated the economic and social problems generated by it. For the sake of the monocultural farming of sugar cane for combustion, eucalyptus...

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