Adbusters magazine published a really good article about Brazil's Landless Workers Movement, which gathers farmers who, after having been repeatedly denied access to agricultural lands decide to occupy farms that have not been purchased for agrarian reform to build community co-ops:
Today, the favelas of Brazil are known as some of the most impoverished and dangerous ghettos in the world, ruled by drug traffickers and crime syndicates so heavily armed that even the police are too scared to enter. Within this desperation, the Movimento has been very successful in gathering disillusioned people from the cities and bringing them back to re-connect them with their roots in the countryside. They even have a certain group of workers (militantes) dedicated to informing and recruiting favela-dwellers. In fact, rather than boasting about the amount of land that they have helped redistribute, the statistic most proudly repeated by the Movimento is the number of families that it has assisted in relocating to the countryside in the past two decades, which is by some counts as many as 350,000.
