'Hands off the MST Brazil!' say South African social movements

[Mark]

"Hands off the MST Brazil!" say South African social movements

Joint Statement on Workers Party (PT), Brazil, Campaign to Criminalise the
Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST), Brazil

Landless Peoples' Movement (LPM), Shack-Dwellers' Movement (Abahlali
baseMjondolo) & Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF), South Africa -
Joint Statement on Workers Party (PT), Brazil, Campaign to Criminalise the
Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST), Brazil [Italiano]

7 August 2008

To the poor of the world, to all people of good will who work for
progressive change

We, the landless and homeless people and associated activists of South
Africa, decry the secret campaign by the so-called Workers' Party (PT)
government of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul to
criminalise, outlaw and otherwise illegitimately harass our landless
comrades of the MST.

Under PT governance, Rio Grande do Sul has made substantial sums of money
off hosting four World Social Forums – and yet that same government is now
cynically using its militarised police forces to wage a clandestine war
against Brazil's most important, poor-driven social movement.

Even the worn-out old statist Left has tiptoed quietly away from its
earlier support of the government of Lula ("Squid") da Silva as his
supposedly liberating regime has extended its tentacles into all areas of
Brazilian life, from throttling the growth of free trade unions, to
extending university exclusions, now to moving against the poorest of the
poor.

Tarring-and-feathering the MST as "terrorist" is a despicable tactic more
worthy of George W Bush and his henchmen – as Da Silva is now revealed to
be. We demand the unilateral cessation of hostilities, plots and illegal
actions by the PT, and if not, call on the peoples of the world to resist
with all their might their actions, to picket their embassies and boycott
their products.

Signed:

1) Maureen Mnisi, Gauteng leader, Landless People's Movement

2) S'bu Zikode, delegate, Kennedy Road Development Committee, Abahlali
baseMjondolo

http://www.abahlali.org/

3) Michael Schmidt, International Secretary, Zabalaza Anarchist Communist
Front, delegate to First Encounter of Latin American Autonomous Popular
Organisations (ELAOPA), Rio Grande do Sul, 2003

Related Link: http://www.zabalaza.net