Cutting the Wire: The Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil

by Sheila M. Spiers, Jan Rocha, Sue Branford

Book Overview

Access to land is one of the key issues for developing countries - and Brazil has one of the most inequitable land distributions in the world, with vast tracts of land held by often absentee landowners. Meanwhile thousands of peasants live in marginal lands in cities and rural areas. The Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST) has proved a huge success with the disenfranchised rural and urban poor in Brazil - becoming one of the largest social...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1899365516
• ISBN13: 9781899365517
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Latin America Bureau (Lab)
• Length: 316 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Thorough Look at the Roots of a Movement

"Cutting the Wire" is a thorough look at the history of MST - the Landless Movement in Brazil. Brazil's rural poor began organizing in the late 1970s, during the military regime, occupying unused farmlands and agitating for ownership of family-size plots. MST was founded in 1984 and has grown larger and stronger in the years since. Branford and Rocha have no pretense of academic objectivity: they are perfectly up-front about their leftist ideology and sympathy for their subject. This is occasionally annoying, because all of the assessments are skewed in one direction, but it is manageable for the critical reader. This perspective becomes particularly unsuitable in the final chapters, which give an overview and a look forward. But the accounts of MST are interesting. Interviews with peasants and leaders, discussions of well-known land invasions and demonstrations in Para and Sao Paulo states. These make the book worthwhile. At least they have done their research, talked to the principals, and got their dates and facts mostly in order.This is far stronger than Branford's previous work, "Carnival of the Oppressed", a stilted under-researched account of Brazil's Workers' Party, and it is certainly more comprehensive than Rocha's "In Focus Brazil", a strange little cultural travel-guide. "Cutting the Wire" is far from perfect, not at all even-handed, but is nevertheless a useful contribution to understanding modern Brazilian history.