Análise política da saúde no MST: problemas, práticas e projeto.

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the health problems and actions/practices produced by the Landless Rural Workers Movement, as well as to identify the concept of Health and the sociopolitical project that guides the Movement's actions. Data production was carried out through document analysis, using as sources of information the MST's Popular Agrarian Reform Program, the notebooks produced by the Health Sector of the MST and 326 copies of the Bulletin and Journal of Landless Workers' Movement, produced in the period 1981 to 2014, and published in Hemeroteca Luta pela Terra, on the website <www.mst.org.br>. Data on health problems reveal the permanence of diseases due to poverty and food insecurity (diarrhea, malnutrition and parasitic infections), but late incorporated in the third period the diseases caused by the expansion of agribusiness in the Brazilian countryside, cases of pesticide poisoning and lung diseases caused by charcoal works. As for the problems of access to the official health system, the absence/insufficiency of health services appears as the first and main barrier to access in all periods, however, the healthcare gap is more present in the first period and in the territories of the camps, while the insufficiency and precariousness of health services are more frequently reported in the spaces of the land settlements. The results reveal that the MST has historically been carrying out a set of care, prevention and health promotion actions in its territories, in partnership with several organizations, such as Universities, Ministry of Health and Fiocruz. Attention is drawn to the technical and higher education strategy of its militants in the health area, who play a fundamental role in caring for populations linked to the MST, but are also inserted in the SUS, assuming a political commitment to care for the working class in urban and peripheral regions of the parents. These actions are guided by a radical and expanded conception of health and in the defense of the integral, public and universal SUS. For the MST, health problems directly observable in the bodies of settled and encamped populations express the dynamics and ways of living and working in the Brazilian countryside, as well as their relationships and structural determinants, that is, Real Health can only be understood by starting from the relations of class, race and gender domination that determine the unequal distribution of wealth, the goods that promote it, as well as the aggression and destructive processes that deteriorate it. The movement breaks with the medicalizing and functionalist logic and articulates a set of actions and institutions aimed at emancipation, which operate in the singular order of individuals and their families, in the particular of classes and the general society oriented towards the reproduction of capital. The research reveals that the MST project in the field of health is part of the Popular Agrarian Reform Project and very much convergent with critical epidemiology thinking. For the Movement, it is not possible to build a society for life without an economy aimed at reproducing life, therefore sustainable. A sovereign economy, identity and culture, not subordinate and colonized by the interests of international organizations and countries of central capitalism. A solidary and integral life policy and safe ways of metabolism society nature. Thus, the struggle for Health is organically linked to the struggle for the Land and for the Popular Agrarian Reform Project, against the latifundium and its corporations, against disease and barbarism, in defense of the life and popular sovereignty.