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Seminar April 26th, 2010, 14:00, CES Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Coimbra Caetano de Carli - Paper Abstract The MST, the Agrarian Issue and sustainable Development This paper will discuss the path of sustainable development in the MST, since its foundation process, analyzing, especially the co-relation between the new economic situation of the Brazilian rural area, the reality of local settlements and agro-ecological production. In this sense, I will refer to three main aspects: A) The changes of financial capitalism in Brazilian agriculture, mainly, due to the advance of transnational corporations in the field. B) Sustainable Development as a practice of counter-hegemonic social movements in Latin America as opposed to an agricultural coloniality, and C) Agroecology as a pedagogical, productive practice, and of political action in the MST. April 17th: Resistance and Criminalization of the MST. On April 17th, 1996, at least 19 landless rural workers were murdered and others injured by action of the military police in Eldorado dos Carajás, southeast of Pará, Brazil. The workers participated in the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and promoted a political act intending to press the government to expropriate a large plantation in the region. This episode, which became known as the Massacre of Eldorado dos Carajas, caused numerous consequences on the dynamics of struggle for land. Today, April 17th is the symbol of resistance and, every year in this period various political actions are performed by the MST and Via Campesina. Meanwhile, these actions are criminalized by different organs of state with the arrest of militants, the opening of criminal proceedings, repossessions etc... At the same time, these actions have achieved the gestation of new interpretations in the courts on the legitimacy and legality of land occupations and on the concept of right to land ownership. We intend to present this framework and its consequences, raising questions about the land problem in Brazil. The Images of the Criminalisation of Social Movements by the Media Latin America has been stage of many demonstrations and demands, since the colonial era, all in pursuit of defending the land, be it for access, be it for permanence, through better working and life conditions. From the second half of the 1980s, Latin American countries started, after long dictatorial period, experiencing a redemocratization process. However, alongside the political opening, there was an increased criminalization of social movements, urban and rural. In Brazil, the struggle for land was prosecuted during the Collor de Mello government, period in which more legal proceedings were brought against the MST, forming a new fence in the agrarian structure and new forms of repression. However, it is necessary to go beyond the legal concept of criminality, since other social instances label the movements as criminals, thugs, terrorists and violators of social peace. The Media, of importance here, appropriates this discourse and the roles of pointing out and dictating who are the criminals, reproducing the interests of major hegemonic groups, making all of society thinking as such, and specifically in our object of analysis, discrediting the reasons for the movement itself. The goal here is to demonstrate, through theoretical and imagery interweaving, how the hegemonic media treats social movements and how a simple image is able to convey the idea that hegemonically is intended to pass. Under the Bed of Procrustes: The Judicial System and Criminalisation of Struggle for Land Thus, the dimension that the MST has become a movement manufacturer of violence, crime agent, defying the democratic rule of law and runs through the lines of the owners, through the media arriving at the judiciary and the Public Prosecution, which take to themselves the task of imposing control over the movement, on behalf of national security and democratic order. Our intention, in the limits of this work, is to study parting from the Action in which members of the MST respond to the National Security Law, thus set as a state enemy, the historical continuities of that punitive power in the legal discourse, centred on the notion of social control ( that in the field of criminal procedure will be marked by the inquisitorial system), and the new settings outlined in the neoliberal punitive mark, in which the universe of law seems to be gradually mitigated by a penitentiary order. |