variety of cultures and origins, with roots in Catholic ritualism, as well as Afro-Brazilian religious practices that had first been introduced after the migration of slavery into Brazil in the 16th century. Not only this, but some contemporary historians have also identified aspects of the MST mística as having originated from Indigenous practices and belief systems. One example of recent demonstrations of mística within the MST is found in the practices of the ceremony at the ten year anniversary of the Eldorado do Carajás massacre. Members engaging in mística carried effigies of the bodies, while singing and chanting, as they converged on a location that symbolised the site of the event. The MST highly value education and the organisation is committed to the teachings of Freirian pedagogy, which espouses the process of conscientisation. This commitment to community education forms another aspect of the groups mixture of influences. Popular education and liberation theology are closely linked with the practice of mística within the MST, as CEB's, and the sense of community generated by popular education often form the site of mística - with many members having overlapping interests and participation in each aspect. Such settlements and communities produced by the encampments of the MST actively encourage and sponsor the practice of mística within CEB's present, as a method of reaffirming commitment and dedication to the goals of the group, these goals often being exclusively linked to the political ambitions and campaigns at the time of practice. Ideological foundations of MST's later activism This supposed opposition to capitalist modernity on the part of the movement has led authors to ascertain that the MST activities express, in a way, the decline of a traditional peasantry, and its desire of restoring traditional communal rights. - which would the difference between the MST and a movement for the preservation of such communal rights as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Others, however, say that, instead of expressing the "decline" of the peasantry, the MST, developing as it was in Brazil, a country where agriculture since colonial times was tied to commodity production, expresses the absence of a proper peasantry and has as its social basis a rural working class striving at granting a toehold in the field of capitalist production. As remarked by non-specialist foreign onlookers, the MST's tagging of the landless as "rural workers" - i.e. proletarians in the Marxist sense - appears sometimes