PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOJOURNALISM VIDEO by PAUL SMITH

PROJECTS/ARCHIVE: Brazil's Landless - The landless rural workers movement (MST).

Brazil's rural landless workers movement (MST - Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra) which has fought for decades via land occupations/invasions of subutilised agricultural land to pressure the government to expropriate.

The photographs here were taken at the Giocometti land occupation in Parana State, at the time the largest in Brazil; the Santa Rita MST camp, later to be a land occupation of part of the 13,000 hectare Santa Rita hacienda; and the occupation of the Itapetininga hacienda.

Itapetininga - After a fairly short period at the Santa Rita encampment I was Invited to accompany what was to be the first land occupation of its kind - where the poor of the city were mobilised to participate in an urban to rural migration and return to the countryside and agriculture.

The MST members of this occupation were once peasants themselves or were the children of peasants who had migrated to the city to escape rural poverty, and were living in the favelas of Sao Paulo or homeless on the streets of the city.

Article: