The struggle for land in Brazil: a sign of the passage of God

Abstract

The theme of land possession and usufruct in Brazil became a problem upon the arrival of the Portuguese conquerors at the beginning of the 16th century. Taken violently from the hands of the native inhabitants of Brazilian soil, land ownership became the subject of the Portuguese Crown, which transformed its new colony into a reservoir of inexhaustible natural resources. The struggles to overcome the exploitation of the colonizers began early, in an attempt to give the land its social destination, beyond the European mercantilist vision. The Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST) is part of a long epic struggle for land, in a tireless war against the private land ownership, maintaining always in its horizon the utopia of access to land, especially for those who depend on it to work, produce and survive, going explicitly against agro-business and its destruction of soil and natural resources. A theological reading of MST, with Human Rights and the Rights of Nature as the background, detects, in the midst of the movement, signs of the passage of God, as was experienced in the history of the People of Israel who were liberated from the land of slavery and led to the land of brotherhood.