“My child, do you know what agrarian reform is? It is land, giving land to rural workers to work on.” This is the opening scene of the documentary short film “Elizabeth” (2023), produced by the Brazilian observatory De Olho Nos Ruralistas [Agribusiness Watch]. The film features the story of the historical peasant militant Elizabeth Teixeira, who turned 100 in February 2025.
The documentary has been featured in film festivals and militant screenings and won Best Film at Brazil’s 7th National Environmental Film Festival. As part of the celebrations for her 100th birthday, it is now available on YouTube. The film is in Portuguese, but you can activate automatic subtitles in other languages to watch it.
Elizabeth Teixeira, a peasant fighter from the state of Paraíba, had already been recorded on film decades ago, for the documentary film “Twenty Years Later” (1984), by Eduardo Coutinho, which denounces the murder of Elizabeth’s partner, the peasant leader Pedro Teixeira, in 1962, and tells the story of the struggles waged underground by Elizabeth in the following years under the violent regime of the military dictatorship that started in the country in 1964.
According to the Agribusiness Watch, “the number of times agrarian reform is mentioned in her speech is inversely proportional to the number of times the topic is addressed in present-day Brazil.” And it was because of their struggle for agrarian reform that, in 1996, 21 peasants were killed in the state of Pará, northern Brazil, in the episode that became known as the Eldorado do Carajás Massacre. To pay tribute to these fighters, La Via Campesina has defined April 17th as International Day of Peasant Struggles. It is a date for remembering and honoring peasant resistance from the past and present, and to call for global action for the right to land and food sovereignty.
