Every April 17, farmers, landless workers, fisherfolk, and rural communities around the world mark the International Day of Peasant Struggles. The date commemorates the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre of April 17, 1996. That day, in the Brazilian state of Pará, military police opened fire on members of the Landless Workers' Movement, the MST, who were marching and blocking a highway to demand land reform, and nineteen landless workers were killed.

That same year La Vía Campesina, the international peasant movement that now unites organizations from dozens of countries, declared the date a day of global struggle. Vía Campesina also put forward the principle of food sovereignty: the right of peoples to control their own land, seeds, water, and food systems, instead of leaving them to agribusiness corporations and the dictates of global markets. The day carries forward a long history in which the peasantry has been a central force in revolutionary change, from Emiliano Zapata's call for land and liberty in Mexico to the peasant armies of the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, the land reforms of revolutionary Cuba, and the African liberation movements that organized in the countryside. 

Peasant resistance continues today, against land grabs, enclosure, debt, pesticides, and the displacement of rural people to make way for plantations, mines, and dams. Its recent victories include the farmers' movement in India, which in 2021 forced the government to repeal laws that would have handed agriculture to corporate control, and the United Nations' adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants in 2018. The International Day of Peasant Struggles honors those who feed the world and are so often killed for demanding the land, and it affirms that there is no liberation without the land and no future without those who work it.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*