“Plantations of Eucalyptus are Not Forests”
For this camp, the MST took over portion of a eucalyptus plantation owned by timber company Aracruz Cellulose, removed the non-native trees and erected their tents, installed a well and built a community space using an elaborate system on non-hierarchical decision making. The camp was named Galdino dos Santos, for an indigenous chief who was murdered two years earlier in a racist attack.
Link to Social Documentary Network gallery: https://www.socialdocumentary.net/exhibit/Orin_Langelle/6449
Abstract:
This 2005 photo essay documents the Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – MST) encampment named Galdino dos Santos in Espirito Santo, Brazil.
The essay is meant to explore the concept of who controls the land and what is used for? Who are the exploited and who are the exploiters?
The MST base their actions on Brazil’s Constitution, which states that land should fulfill a social function. The landless built the Galdino dos Santos’s encampment by taking the land from an industrial tree plantation timber company, Aracruz Cellulose.
This photo essay shows the people of the encampment in its early beginning.
The encampment was named for an indigenous leader, Galdino dos Santos, who was violently murdered in a racist attack in 1997.
Educator and theorist Paulo Freire’s last unfinished writing was about the murder of Galdino dos Santos. Freire said, “Disrespecting the weak, deceiving the unwary, offending life, exploiting others, discriminating against the Indian, the Black, the woman, will not be helping my children to be serious, just, and loving about life and others …”