MST: 30 years of struggle, sweat and blood for the right to land.

Officially founded in January 1984, during its 1st Congress, the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) celebrates its 30th anniversary with accumulated knowledge from the history of peasant formation that has made the MST a reference movement in Brazil, Latin America, and the world in the struggle for agrarian reform, enabling it to occupy political space and guarantee its autonomy.

The story begins in the 70s and 80s, when, even in its death throes, the military regime posed a threat to the people and their organizations. Landless workers, indigenous people expelled from their lands, and urban workers living in subhuman conditions on the outskirts of cities united in a single organization, giving birth to the MST (Landless Workers' Movement), with the motto "Occupy, resist, and produce." This organization began to break down, both subjectively and concretely, the fences of large landholdings in Brazil. During this period, land conflicts tripled. To contain and silence the workers, the land issue was militarized, incurring various forms of violence: private violence, maintained by the landowner with the support of public forces; and police violence supported by the courts, which decreed repressive actions using resources from land grabbers and large landowners.

With the awareness that the land is the place where people plant roots, their own and those originating from the seeds sown in it, the MST (Landless Workers' Movement) began occupying large estates, showing society the unjust distribution of land in the country. The land, which signifies the right to work, the place from which one draws sustenance for the family, the right to have children with dignity, remains to this day in the hands of the few heirs of the hereditary captaincies. The land is also the place to make history, to plant bread, where the dead rest forever. And they were not absent from the arduous and violent struggle waged over these 30 years. The first heroes to fight against the expropriation and enslavement by the landowners and their henchmen, supported by a State complicit in massacres, were the indigenous people, the slaves, the emigrants, the fighters of Canudos, of the Contestado War, of the Cangaço, who, since the arrival of the Portuguese, have soaked the soil with their blood.

In Brazil, historically, land has symbolized suffering, struggle, and resistance; from the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided Latin America, through the arrival of the Portuguese and the hereditary captaincies, our land has been a symbol of segregation and predetermined possession, inherited from father to son. We lived through 400 years of slavery of the African people, torn from their lands. Millions of European immigrants were thrown into different Brazilian states in search of pieces of land. And the story continues with the expulsion, by large landholdings and industrialization, of millions of Brazilians who leave their land and their families and seek sustenance and dignity elsewhere.

The Brazilian land also bears the marks and sentiments of the Peasant Leagues, a political organization created in the 50s, with a clear opposition to private land ownership, the wage labor of rural workers, and slave labor.

The policy of "conservative modernization" promoted the economic growth of agriculture, further concentrated land ownership, increased income concentration and inequalities, intensified land control, degraded the environment, destroyed springs, dammed waters through the construction of dams, swallowed the land, and expelled more than 30 million people who migrated to the peripheries of cities and/or to other regions of the country. The advance of capitalism transformed the rural environment with the mechanization and industrialization of agricultural sectors. It caused land degradation and pollution of rivers and forests with the heavy use of pesticides. This model brought about major transformations in the countryside. It increased the areas cultivated with monocultures of soy, oranges, and sugarcane; intensified mechanization and, consequently, the number of wage earners; aggravated the situation of family farming; and gave rise to the "boia-fria" (day laborer).

The seeds of these movements grew, and the workers began to raise their flag and set up their black tarp tents between the fence and the road. There were more than thirty encampments. In the struggle for land, encampment signifies a temporary place to challenge the political model, denounce exclusion, and transform reality.

In the early 80s, experiences with land occupations in the southern states, São Paulo, and Mato Grosso do Sul brought workers together and initiated the process of building the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), which was formed through articulation with other social movements. Violence intensified; in 1985, the last year of the military government, gunmen and the police murdered a rural worker every two days. Let us remember the massacres of Santa Elmira, Eldorado Carajás, Corumbiara, Felisburgo; the struggle of Roseli Nunes, Dorcelina Folador, Dom Pedro Casaldáliga; the deaths of Chico Mendes, Father Josimo, missionary Dorothy Stang, the couple José Cláudio and Maria do Espírito, among many others.

Despite the increase in organizations fighting for access to land and justice in rural areas, the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) has become, throughout its existence, an increasingly determined organization, remaining firm, resisting attacks and violence, and following its proposed path of conducting a peaceful struggle alongside society. In 2014, at its 6th Congress taking place in Brasília, it reaffirmed its struggle and commitment to solidarity with the Brazilian people and other peoples of the world, confronting capitalism and its exclusionary, life-destroying, segregating consequences that strengthen inequalities and injustices.

The reflections of this moment lead Brazil's largest mass movement to reaffirm its struggles and dedicate its strength to popular agrarian reform that returns to the people the planet's resources that do not belong exclusively to a select few exploiters. Land, water, and forests in the hands of those who truly care for them signify a return to their origins and the seeds of a just, egalitarian society, without exploiters, with dignity for all. To this end, it is necessary to democratize access to land and transform the current economic model that is destructive to nature and people. It is with this perspective that the MST, at this Congress, renews and expands its commitments to the defense of food sovereignty, the production of healthy food, agroecology, and the preservation of nature. Without forgetting education as a fundamental human right. It reaffirms its solidarity in the struggle for the rights of indigenous and quilombola peoples, for equality between men and women, for social justice, and for the construction of socialism.

Milton Nascimento and Chico Buarque sing in the song "O Cio da Terra": "To thresh the wheat; To gather each grain of wheat; To forge in the wheat the miracle of bread. And to feast on bread."