MST Campaigns

by Maíra Kubík Mano

Every day in front of the Embassy of Ecuador in London, a group of five people meet for a protest. With some posters and a hand-sewn banner, they are demanding the release of Wikileaks found Julian Assange who is confined in the building. "We are organizing a big action on June 19, can you participate?" they ask passersby. The Embassy is located in a tourist area of the city, right next to a large department store and the protest draws lots of attention.

In one of many protests on Thursday April 17, around 500 MST workers  from the Brazilian Federal District (state to which Brasilia, nation's capital, belongs to) and its surroundings blocked sections of the BR 020 highway, between the Planaltina (DF) and Formosa (GO) municipalities, at the height of kilometer 43 and the BR 070 highway, in direction towards Águas Lindas de Goiás. 

By Igor Carvalho and Glauco Faria

With a presence in 23 states and the Federal District and with more than 900 settlements with 150 thousand families, the MST celebrates its 30th anniversary this week.

According to the judge, the request that the accused be arrested is appropriate given so many defensive maneuvers to delay the trial; this is the third time that the jury trial is postponed

By Joana Tavares
Portal Minas Free

It was in November of 2004. Armed gunmen invaded the Promised Land Camp (Terra Prometida), in Felisburgo, in Jequitinhonha Valley, and killed five workers. Another twenty were seriously injured, and huts and crops burned. Nearly nine years later, accused of being the mastermind of the crime, Adriano Chafik, who publicly confessed to be present on the day of slaughter, will face his first jury. The trial, originally scheduled for January this year, has finally been re-scheduled for May 15 in Belo Horizonte.

Seventeen years have passed since that fateful April 17. On that day in 1996, a march of rural workers organized by the MST was blockaded and attacked by military police in the city of Eldorado dos Carajás, Pará state. 19 people were killed on the spot and 2 others died days afterwards. The day of the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre has officially become the National Day of Struggle for Land Reform.

By Luiz Zarref

After the vote on the rural manifesto, the text, written by Congressman Aldo Rebelo in the House of Representatives in June 2010 that details the deconstruction of the Forestry Code, was forwarded to the Senate.