Letter to the People of Brazil
We received the following letter from our partner the Landless Workers Movement (MST) as they reflect on their 35-year history and their commitment to continuing the struggle for justice in Brazil.
Letter to the People of Brazil
The Landless Workers Movement (MST) celebrates its 35 years of struggle for agrarian reform and social justice. We were born at the end of the civil-military dictatorship, along with thousands of fighters who defended democracy and challenged authoritarianism. Once again, we reaffirm our commitment to fight for the democratization of the land, for the production of healthy food, for popular sovereignty and for an emancipated society.
Faced with the structural crisis of capital, with serious and destructive consequences for nature and humanity, our political tasks have become even more urgent and necessary. The solutions presented by financial capital have nothing to do with human needs, as they result in an increase in the over-exploitation of workers through the precariousness of labor, dismantling of public policies, aggressive withdrawal of rights and diverse expropriations, brutally raising the levels of social inequality. To carry this out, capital requires an increasingly authoritarian state, aimed at repression, violating and persecuting the poorest, promoting a cruel genocide of black youth.
This is how the media, the judiciary, the banks, the military and agribusiness have led to a neo-fascist and ultraliberal power, a retired captain who acts in the lowest and most vulgar forms of politics, to maintain the privileges of those who historically plundered the country and directly attacked the rights of the working class, through fiscal adjustments, privatizations, and subordination of our economy to international capital, especially the United States.
The subordination of Indigenous land and environmental issues to the interests of the ruralist and agrochemical groups in the Ministry of Agriculture: the dismantling of social security and the threat of the selling [privatization] of national companies and banks, such as Petrobras, Banco do Brasil and Caixa Econômica Federal: of the possession of weapons are some of the deadly policies adopted by this government, which endanger our biodiversity and intensify the conflicts in the countryside impacting the Indigenous, Quilombolas, riverine, peasants, people in settlements and encampments of Agrarian Reform and show the anti-national and antipopular character of the current government.
It is necessary to occupy the streets and squares denouncing the voracity of these policies that deepen the capitalist expropriation and exploitation.
Thus, we commit ourselves to struggle and defend all the workers whose existence is threatened. We will continue to defend the sovereignty of peoples and fight against any kind of political interference and/or military interventionism in any country. We declare total solidarity with the people of Venezuela!
We are in solidarity with the families affected by the Brumadinho dam, victims of another criminal and recidivist action by Vale, a murderer protected by the judiciary.
We will join the mobilization of working women on March 8, we will be custodians of the legacy and the memory of Marielle Franco and of so many other comrades who have fallen, demanding the punishment of their murderers and masterminds. We will defend the freedom of comrade Lula, whose political imprisonment was used to make this project victorious in the elections.
We pledge to strengthen the Popular Brazil Front and all initiatives of the working-class struggle that confront exploitation, subordination and oppression, joining the daily struggle of women, the urban and peasant population, blacks, Indigenous Peoples and LGBT people.
We will fight for democracy, justice, equality, for the defense of the goods of nature, for the democratization of the land and for the production of healthy food to feed the Brazilian people.
STRUGGLE, BUILD POPULAR AGRARIAN REFORM!
NATIONAL COORDINATION OF THE MST