January 28, 2009 -- In the dying days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, in late January 1984, a group of nearly a hundred "landless" farmers from across Brazil met in Cascavel, Paran to debate the founding of a movement for agrarian reform which would unite landless campesinos and farm workers from around the country. It was an unlikely challenge in the world’s fifth-largest nation, where even today less than 2 per cent of landowners control nearly half of the total territory.

Two and a half decades later, the tiny Landless Worker’s Movement (MST -- Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) has grown in to a formidable force. According to MST co-founder Joao Pedro Stedile, the movement has forced the expropriation of 35 million acres of land -- larger than the country of Uruguay. MST numbers show that in the last 25 years, 370,000 families have acquired their own land, and 100,000 families are currently in encampments waiting for land. The movement has built hundreds of public schools and taught tens of thousands of its members to read and write. MST members have formed 400 associations and cooperatives to collectively produce their food.

"But those are just statistics", said Stedile in his closing comments of the movement’s 25th birthday celebration on January 24. "The most important thing that we have built over these last 25 years is that when someone joins the MST, he or she stops walking with their head down, and acquires dignity, and thinks with their brains, organising their companions in struggle."

The birthday celebration marked the close of the 13th national meeting of the MST, in which 1500 MST members from across the country descended on the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul to debate the direction of the movement.

"It’s been great", says Joao Paulo Cardoso, one of a delegation of 47 MST members that made the four-day bus trip from the northern Brazilian state of Ceará. "It’s really good to make new friends, and see old ones. Also the debates and discussions are impor