Last week, Brazil’s leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva scored an upset victory over right-wing challenger Flavio Bolsonaro—son of jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro—in a presidential runoff. “Lula,” as he is known, is among Latin America’s most far-left presidents, with close ties to China and Iran. Among the groups celebrating the win were members of the Landless Workers Movement—the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST—a left-wing social and agrarian-reform movement that had extensively mobilized on Lula’s behalf.
For American leftists, MST’s organizing prowess is more than an object of distant admiration. This past July, MST hosted delegations of some of America’s most energetic and influential activists in hopes of giving them an inside look at the methods that have helped make MST Latin America’s largest progressive mass movement.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Those methods, however, are militant, including invasions and mass destruction of private farmland, illegal occupations of government buildings, and violent clashes with political opponents. The American participants hope to adapt these methods—many of which may qualify as civil terrorism—for use in the United States.
The July delegation in Brazil included members of 13 youth organizations from the U.S. and Puerto Rico, along with activists from across Europe. All attended a three-week intensive program with MST combining organizational immersion with rigorous political indoctrination. Activists learned about revolutionary solidarity, collective discipline, and how to build a multigenerational Marxist-Leninist movement made up of “active learners and militants.”
During a “report back” with the Friends of the MST last month, the Americans described their eagerness to apply MST’s methods domestically. MST representatives welcomed this response, explaining that winning recruits from across the United States was part of a deliberate plan to cultivate a coordinated stateside movement with national reach.
Established in 1984, MST’s activities have long courted controversy. Central to the organization’s philosophy is the idea that agriculturally productive land should be redistributed to the poor because present-day ownership patterns are a holdover from colonial Brazil. MST portrays its land-reform efforts, Marxist-Leninist rural public schools, and various co-ops as necessary for achieving racial and environmental justice. It is the largest Latin American grassroots movement, with nearly 2 million members.
MST backed the Lula campaign, but the group sees elections as just one of its active fronts. Prior to the presidential runoff, Rodrigo Suñe, MST’s international coordinator, said that class struggle would persist no matter who won the election, though he did acknowledge that Bolsonaro would have halted agrarian reform efforts and given the MST “many difficulties,” likely alluding to renewal of his father’s efforts to classify MST occupations of farmland as “domestic terrorism.”
If that sounds harsh, consider some of the movement’s more extreme direct actions. Members once cut down several thousand orange trees during a protest against Cutrale, one of the world’s largest orange juice producers. MST and allies have repeatedly occupied research nurseries, destroying greenhouses and seedlings to oppose the potential expansion of industrial eucalyptus production. In the early 2000s, the movement occupied farmland that belonged to the family of former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso—an action that Lula himself criticized. MST has also been associated with violent clashes involving political opponents and has occupied government buildings as part of its campaigns.
MST has hosted many other international delegations over the years. A 2023 delegation included several figures who would later join Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral administration in New York—including Ana Maria Archila and Gianpaolo Baiocchi, commissioner and deputy commissioner, respectively, in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, and Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.
Most of the groups participating in July’s delegation have remained quiet about the trip, but some spoke openly. The Los Angeles Tenants Union is known for militant organizing, occupations, and rent strikes. Desis Rising Up & Moving (DRUM) was an early supporter of Mamdani, and a former DRUM political director now serves in the mayor’s administration as a senior aide, while the organization itself maintains a hardline police-abolitionist stance.
The first half of the July trip focused on education, while the latter half immersed participants in MST settlements across various Brazilian territories. The Americans reported being impressed by MST’s daily rituals, which embody the spirit of the struggle (mística), the collective discipline of organicity (organicidade), and the avoidance of top-down power structures through a decentralized team model known as the base nuclei (núcleos de base). The mística rituals, which began each day by honoring past revolutionaries and sharing poems about the struggle, left brigade participants in tears.
Organicidade showed activists how education and action kept members accountable to their comrades within the base nuclei. As one activist explained, the challenge was getting “the people to move the ways that we need them to, to sustain but also to move [the movement] forward” in a settlement where basic needs were met but work still had to be done to maintain the site. American activists initially found the base nuclei confusing but eventually appreciated them for preventing a “patriarchal structure” from emerging, ensuring issues were taken seriously, and offering a model that activists felt could be scaled to their organizing back home.
For MST, Organicidade begins in the crib, with the indoctrination of the very young. MST militants said that instilling socialist and humanist values was the key to steering children the right way.
One older militant had more to say on educating the next generation:
The youth need the fastest possible support. They are interested in knowing their history. I believe that capitalist society holds back the youth. It hides their history from them. If they don’t know their history, they become lost. They don’t know where to go. So, I think one of our tasks is to make youth learn their history, the history of their country and their family and to teach them to never stop seeking social transformations. Always collective, always aiming at the community, never seeking improvements only for oneself, always seeking transformation to improve the surrounding community. This is the message.
The trio of mística, organicidade, and núcleos de base seemed to many activists like the Communist ideal. One brigade participant recalled, “I would send my family videos and they’d be like, ‘you know, you don’t have to do this, we can send you money. Like they don’t have to scrub the floor. Like we’ve never seen you work this hard.’” The delegates might have been surprised to learn that the Florestan Fernandes National School, the very institution they were visiting, was funded in part by tech-billionaire-turned-far-left-financier Neville Roy Singham.
The MST delegation follows the playbook of many of the foreign-influence delegations operated by Singham’s network: activists visit leftist organizations abroad and then return home to implement the lessons learned. And busy implementing they are: the youth brigade’s marching orders are to help “build up the power of the MST,” whether through fundraising, “election security,” or other initiatives passed to them through the Friends of the MST organization.
A brigade member from DRUM saw his role as counteracting a globally coordinated far Right: “I think a lot of us left this brigade and left Brazil with this feeling that we see the place of our work in the U.S., right in the heart of empire and the way it connects to work that people are doing in other parts of the world, . . . and it inspires us to keep going, to keep fighting, to keep pushing.” Milena Polini, an MST organizer, echoed these sentiments, encouraging attendees to strengthen both the Friends of the MST and their own organizations while building a broader struggle in the United States linked to international solidarity efforts in Cuba, Venezuela, Palestine, Haiti, and elsewhere.
As Brazil gears up for a fourth Lula term, Friends of the MST and allied U.S. groups are positioned to defend the movement and promote its methods abroad. MST’s ties, training programs, personnel exchanges, and ongoing coordination with American left-wing groups warrant closer examination, particularly as the State Department increases scrutiny of other Latin American activist networks. The central question is whether MST’s model of occupations, cadre formation, and political education will remain confined to study trips or will begin to show up as coordinated action in the United States.