We invite you to join us for Field Notes, a new video series featuring award-winning photojournalist and documentary photographer Orin Langelle, co-founder of Global Justice Ecology Project and author of Portraits of Struggle.
Join Orin as he shares the stories behind the captivating images that document interconnected global struggles for ecological, social, and economic justice across six continents and five decades.
Brazil’s Vote and the Fight For Land
On Sunday, October 25, 2026, Brazilians choose between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who finished narrowly ahead in the first round. For Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), whose communities are featured in this episode of Field Notes, the stakes are concrete. They remember what happened the last time a Bolsonaro was in power.
Within days of Jair Bolsonaro taking office in 2019, Brazil’s land reform agency was ordered to halt all land acquisitions for agrarian reform. His campaign had proposed treating land occupations as terrorism. Occupying unused land, often held by timber corporations or large landowners, is the MST’s central tactic. His government also expanded landowners’ right to keep guns across their entire property, a move critics warned would put landless families in the line of fire.
Education was targeted too. In February 2020, a decree issued during Carnival shut down the National Program for Education in Agrarian Reform (PRONERA). The program had brought literacy classes, high school, technical training and university degrees to tens of thousands of people in settlement communities.
Despite all this, for four decades, the MST has settled hundreds of thousands of families and become the largest producer of organic rice in Latin America. As farmer Romildo Biancardi says in the film: “We might lose, but we’re still MST.” Whoever wins on Sunday, the question Orin first asked in 2005 remains: Who controls the land, and what is the land used for?
Field Notes — Dispatches from the frontlines of land, justice, and resistance is a series of visual dispatches drawn from Langelle’s six decades documenting environmental justice movements, Indigenous land struggles, and social resistance around the world. Learn more about Orin Langelle’s work: https://langellephoto.org To sign on to in support of the Mapuche struggle, go to: https://globaljusticeecology.org/mapu…
My first trip to Brazil was in 2005. We visited and heard testimonies from communities about the damaging social and ecological impacts of industrial eucalyptus timber plantations spread across Brazil’s landscape.
Then 18 years later, I returned with an international delegation to examine this growing problem. The landscape had changed, the people had changed, but one question remained. Who controls the land? And what is the land used for?
When I arrived in 2005 at an encampment of Brazil’s landless workers movement called Galdino dos Santos, I didn’t find empty land. I found a community beginning. Once an industrial eucalyptus plantation, the community occupied it, cut the trees down, and was using the wood to build their homes. Families were creating homes from plastic, eucalyptus wood, and determination. Life had already begun. Children played as children do everywhere. Homes were built. People gathered beneath the trees. They made decisions together out in the open. The struggle over land wasn’t abstract. It had names, faces, families. Walking through the camp, it was obvious these were in temporary shelters.
People were creating neighborhoods, friendships, community, a future of their own. Land was at the center of the struggle, but it was also about families taking action to ensure their future. And every day, the camp looked a little bit more permanent. What was once a eucalyptus plantation devoid of life was now a thriving community. The question was not just who controlled the land. It was also who was allowed to live on it. Then 18 years passed.
When I traveled back to Brazil, I was deeply curious. What had become of the people I met? The answers weren’t simple. Some struggles continued. Others had transformed as I couldn’t have ever imagined.
Brazil’s landless workers movement, the MST, had helped settle hundreds of thousands of families. And those communities that once lived beneath plastic now harvested food. The MST had become the largest producer of organic rice in Latin America.
At the Egidio Brunetto School of Agroecology and Agroforestry, community members learned how to use organic practices to grow food. Occupying the land was only the beginning. Keeping it, working it, feeding people from it year after year. That’s the real struggle.
For the MST, resistance is everyday life. It’s harvest and celebration season after season, generation after generation. The work doesn’t stop, but it’s good work. At another MST encampment, farmer Romildo Biancardi grows food on land once occupied by eucalyptus plantations. He says, “See what the struggle of landless peasants is. We’re the real MST movement. Whether we win or lose, that’s who we are. We might lose, we were still MST.”
But the timber industry continues to expand. Fueled by global demand for pulp and paper, the timber industry’s encroachment brings new infrastructure and pulp mills across Brazil. Millions of hectares of former native forest have been destroyed for industrial eucalyptus monocultures. This was once a cerrado forest. The eucalyptus trees are planted in vast uniform stands, then cut for pulp and planted again, cut and planted over and over.
The scale of production is enormous, and the industry continued to advance. In Mato Grosso do Sul, Suzano was building what was planned to be the world’s largest single line pulp mill. And the question still remains, who controls the land and what is the land used for?
Field Notes is an ongoing series documenting struggles from the front lines of resistance spanning five decades on six continents. I’m Orin Langelle.