Letter From the Landless Mothers

We talk to the children of the land from all nations. To those who weren’t invited to the banquet. To those who waited in the lines of history for centuries. We will not be spectators of a film, waiting for the light to go off. It is time to believe in the possibility to win over pain.

We rise as mothers who lost their children in wars, urban crimes, under the barrel of a gun, in concentration camps, in actions against women, from domestic violence, in political persecutions, behind barb wire fences. We rise as mothers who lost their children for not having milk, bread, land, and access to humanity`s systematized knowledge. We rise as mothers who roam with their children seeking the dream of a new world. We rise to claim for social justice and dignity!

We raise our hands, our tools and our conscience to proclaim the world’s working women unite against those who exployt land, life, and our labour.

We address the masters of the world. We don’t want and we don’t need your permission to cut the fences and to plant flowers and dreams. We will not use dubious words. We are struggling for land, water, in defense of seeds and biodiversity, for the right to decide our lives, our food, for the right to work, for our future and for the solidarity among the peoples of the world.

“Development and modern life” advance over the world and open wounds. From its mouth laws are created that put life and humanity at risk. Against green desert and the lack of hope, we break away from silence and denounce power that runs over dreams and the imprisonment of flowers. Its modern life for the very few means darkness and hunger and it is not good for us. Don’t dare to step ahead.

The crimimal manipulation of biogenetics, green desert, monoculture, agri-fuels and agribusiness atempts against food sovereingty and the possibility of a world ecologically correct and socially just.

Today we mothers reafirm our determination to transform the countryside into a space of hope, happiness and above all struggle. In our project everyone have the right to a dignified life, better living conditions and the scent and perfume of flowers. We want to transform the world into a more just and egalitarian place. Respecting all its living beings.

We will go on sowing the revolutionary unrestlessness for the agrarian reform, social justice, popular and food sovereignty. This is our mission, and that is how it will be for peasant mothers victims of persecution from the backwardness of agribusiness and hidrobusiness.

The mothers of the whole world have left as the only option to organise and struggle. We have to struggle tirelessely against the neoliberal system that conceives food, water, land, people’s knowledge and women’s bodies as a commodity.

It is time to demand justice and the punishmen for the perpetrators of exploytation, violence, genocide, massacres. It is time to draw new landscapes, new people and new women.

It is time to aim at new horizons. We are standing vigilant and carving night and day the fertility and rebelion that is born from the guts of the earth.

Salute the earth. For the mothers of the land to live.

May 2007

MST Agrarian Reform: For Social Justice and Popular Sovereignty!