Breaking New Ground Brazil’s Mst

Where is religion in political ecology?

“…Liberation theology was a popular mid-20th-century attempt, largely concentrated within Latin America, to bridge Christian theology with historical materialist analysis of class oppression and systemic poverty. A few political ecologists have empirically engaged liberation theology when analyzing Latin American social movements (Olson, 2006; Lyons, 2006), while several others have fleetingly referenced its importance for one or another case study, especially the widely studied Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil (Rocheleau and Ross, 1995; Radcliffe, 1999; Navarro, 2000; Bebbington, 2004; Karriem, 2009). Though as it grew MST moved away from churches, the logistical and ethical support provided by Catholic and Lutheran organizations inspired by liberation theology was indispensable in the early movement (Navarro, 2000; Karriem, 2009).…”

Civil Society Fragmentation and Agrarian Reform: Focus on CARPER in the Philippines

“…One particular case that figures prominently in the studies on the region is the Rural Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil (e.g. Fernandes 1999;Navarro 2000;Robles 2001;Wolford 2003;. The MST's achievements in forcing the hand of the state to redistribute land and implement agrarian reform on their terms are noteworthy, and have not been seen in other contexts (Heredia et al 2006, 280).…”

The MST and the EZLN Struggle for Land: New Forms of Peasant Rebellions

“…However, this claim on land does not form part of a broader system of customs and traditions that one could associate with a moral economy of the Brazilian peasantry 20 . This strong association between land and work is more a consequence of the political influence of progressive clergymen who adopted the ‘preferential option for the poor’ within the Catholic Church and who were key leaders in the rebirth of the landless movement in the early 1980s (Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000, 14; Cadji 2000, 32; Navarro 2000, 37). Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s, Catholic priests, reframing Marx's distinction between use‐value and exchange‐value, promoted the distinction between ‘land for production’ or ‘land to work’ ( terra para producir or terra para trabalhar ) and ‘land for business’ ( terra para negôcio ).…”

“…Scholars who have sought to characterize and explain peasant rebellions have mainly focused on four interrelated issues: (i) the conditions giving rise to peasant rebellions; (ii) the social and political goals of the rebellions; (iii) the class composition of the rebellions; and (iv) the reasons explaining the success of the revolutionary movement. There is a large body of literature that has focused on identifying and analyzing the political and organizational processes that led to the emergence, development and success of the MST (Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000; Navarro 2000; Branford and Rocha 2002; Welch 2006) and the EZLN (Collier with Quaratiello 1994; Harvey 1998; Nash 2001; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001). Hence, in this article, I will focus mainly on the first three issues.…”