The emergence of the MST fits into this framework. Between late 1980 and early 1981, over 6,000 landless families established an encampment on land located between three unproductive estates in Brazil's southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul. These families included 600 households expropriated and dislocated in 1974 from nearby to make way for construction of a hydroelectric dam. This first group was later joined by an additional 300 (or, according to other sources, over 1,000) households evicted by FUNAI from the Kaingang Indian reservation in Nonoai, where they had been renting plots since 1968. Local mobilization of the Passo Real and Nonoai people had already achieved some land distribution on non-Indian land, followed by demobilization. Those who had not received land under these claims, joined by others, and led by leaders from the existing regional movement, MASTER (Rio Grande do Sul landless farmers' movement), made up the 1980/1981 encampment. The location became known as the Encruzilhada Natalino. With the support of civil society, including the progressive branch of the Catholic Church, the families resisted a blockade imposed by military force. Enforcement of the blockade was entrusted by the government to Army colonel , already notorious for his past counter-insurgency efforts against the Araguaia guerrillas. Curió enforced the blockade ruthlessly, most of the landless refused his offer of resettlement on the Amazonian frontier, and eventually pressured the military government into expropriating nearby lands for agrarian reform. The Encruzilhada Natalino episode set a pattern. Most of subsequent early development of the MST concerned exactly the areas of southern Brazil where, in the absence of an open frontier, an ideological appeal at an alternate foundation for access to the land - other than formal private property - was developed in response to the growing difficulties agribusiness posed for family farming. The MST also developed what became its chief modus operandi: local organizing around the concrete struggles of a specific demographic group. The MST was officially founded in January 1984, during a National Encounter of landless workers in Cascavel, Paraná, as Brazil's military dictatorship drew to a close. Its founding was strongly connected to Catholic-based organizations such as the Pastoral Land Commission, which provided support and infrastructure. During much of the 1980s, the MST faced political competition from the National Confederacy of Agrarian Workers' (CONTAG), heir to the peasant leagues of the 1960s, who sought land reform strictly through legal means, by favoring