Miguel Carter’s edited volume, Challenging Social Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Agrarian Reform in Brazil, provides a thorough description of the origin and consolidation of contemporary rural social movements in Brazil. The interdisciplinary nature of the collection—featuring geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists, as well as political scientists—offers readers many well-researched, diverse theoretical perspectives on the largest social movement active in Latin America. The various chapters from Brazilian scholars will acquaint readers with first-rate social science scholarship that Carter himself translated from the original Portuguese. This volume is the most complete book on what can be considered Latin America’s most innovative social movement.
The collection balances studies on the main actor within the movement—the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (The Landless Workers Movement, or MST)—with the many other organizations that have meaningfully participated in collective action over the past three decades. Prominent among these other protagonists include religious groups such as the Commissão Pastoral da Terra (the Pastoral Land Commission, or CPT), the Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (the National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture, or CONTAG), which is a rural labor union, and other movements including the Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (Movement of People Affected by Dams, or MAB) and the Movimento de Mulheres Camponesas (Movement of Peasant Women, or MMC).
The book documents the Landless Movement’s emergence, internal organization, and differences throughout Brazil. Its central argument is that the Landless Movement confronts inequities in land ownership and political power. Carter’s opening chapter presents the distinct problems posed for democracies by inequality, broadly conceived. Ensuing chapters situate the movement in its appropriate context. Chapters by Leonilde Sérvolo de Medeiros and Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, which respectively contextualize historically the movement and trace its growth over time, are required reading for anyone unfamiliar with the struggle for agrarian reform. Carter’s solo chapter, where he draws on insights concerning the role of political opportunities and resources from theorists such as Doug McAdam and Sydney Tarrow, gives a solid account of the movement’s origins in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Two overall qualities of the volume deserve special attention: the analysis of the movement’s actions throughout Brazil and the internal workings of the MST. Instead of focusing on one region, Carter carefully selected scholarship on actions in different states. The Landless Movement is rare in this regard—in addition to its unusual longevity (first emerging in the late 1970s and continuing through the present day), it has mobilized over one million and a half people in 23 of Brazil’s 26 states. The movement has organized share-croppers, wage-laborers, peasant farmers, as well as inhabitants from the urban periphery and recovering drug users, on a national scale. The movement’s development in the Amazon, most precisely in the state of Pará, is nicely documented by Gabriel Ondetti, Emmanuel Wambergue, and José Batista Gonçalves Afonso. Ondetti and his co-authors find that the MST’s style of resistance that was developed in southern Brazil has limited success in the Amazon. As Marcelos Carvalho Rosa also discusses, the three past decades of mobilization have led to tensions between movements, and also the creation of splinter groups, particularly in the Brazilian northeast. Two other chapters—by Wendy Wolford and Lygia Signaud—analyze the movement’s origins, as well as distinct challenges faced in this region. Wolford finds that the movement has encountered setbacks from the entrenched nature of the sugar industry in the region, and from unemployed wage workers who lack an ethos of small proprietorship. Her contribution, like the chapter by Ondetti and his co-authors, highlights the need to acknowledge the role of cultural beliefs and regional differences when understanding the dynamics of recruitment and movement growth.
The other quality of the volume worth showcasing is the focus on internal movement organization. Besides Wolford’s contribution on internal challenges facing movements in the northeast, the chapter by Carter and Horacio Martins do Carvalho describes the MST’s organization and specific attributes of its education, economic production, and communications sectors. Their study includes some of the most controversial, and provocative features of the movement, mainly due to what could be construed as parallel or alternative organizations that oppose the Brazilian state. The movement’s collective cooperatives were in part modelled from Cuban experiences, while its educational project incorporates elements from Soviet pedagogues and Paulo Freire. Throughout the movement, an explicit rejection of private property and capitalism is voiced by members. Susan Branford’s chapter on relations with the Brazilian government, mainly through the Cardoso administrations (1994–1998, 1998–2002) and then the first Lula government (2002–2006), helps us understand that characterizing the movement’s organizational development as fully autonomous or parallel is incorrect. In fact, the growth in resources dedicated by the left-leaning PT governments to agrarian reform policies is embraced by the MST and others.
One element missing in the collection deals with the effects of particular current policies on the movement. This critique can be made with respect to any book that has survived an extended, lengthy process of peer-review, in addition to the time required for translation, gaining rights for images, etc. Most of the research took place before effects could be analyzed. Still, analysis of the impact of some of the Lula administration’s flagship policies—mainly Bolsa Familia (the Family Fund)—is given only a few lines in the conclusion. Other policies that the movement has promoted, mainly PNAE (the Programa Nacional Alimentar Escolar, the National School Food Program) and PAA (the Programa de Acquisão dos Alimentos, the Program for Food Acquisition), each dealing with agricultural production, are absent from discussion. Various Landless Movement organizations have over the last fifteen years made serious efforts to develop their production capacity. If accessing such programs have helped or hindered movement actions is a question that is left unanswered. Given that these policies began over ten years ago, it could be expected to find a chapter-length treatment on their impact.
The more central question is: has the movement been successful, especially with respect to agrarian reform? Carter and the others in the collection document how the movement confronts inequality in various senses. But, as Carter acknowledges, land inequality is at the same level as when the movement emerged. Also, most land that has been redistributed is found in the Amazon, showing a continuation with colonization programs initiated during the Brazilian military government (1964–1985) that were designed not to address social justice concerns, but internally exile potentially troublesome organizers. Surveys of beneficiary families show that the majority believe that their quality of life has improved after gaining land. While potentially construed as evidence for success, this finding’s importance is diminished when compared to the extremely dismal initial conditions of movement members who often are previously employed in highly-exploitative, dangerous rural industries, or unemployed in the urban periphery. That the Landless Movement challenges inequality is without question. Yet, after taking into account these persistent themes that are mentioned in the book, a reader could be left wondering if the movement has been successful in creating changes in political and economic life that reduce inequality.
