legal counsel, including their own lawyers, sons and daughters of MST families, and organizations such as Terra de Direitos, a human rights organization co-founded by Darci Frigo, the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award Laureate. The courts might eventually issue a warrant for eviction, requiring the occupier families to leave, or it might deny the landowner's petition and allow the families to stay provisionally and engage in subsistence farming until the federal agency responsible for agrarian reform, Brazil's National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), determines whether occupied property had indeed been unproductive. The MST's legal activity bases itself on the idea that property rights are in a continuous process of social construction, so litigation and seeking to strike sympathy among the judiciary is essential to MST's legitimacy. Traditionally, Brazilian courts side with landowners and file charges against MST members some call "frivolous and bizarre". For instance, in a 2004 land occupation in Pernambuco, a judge issued arrest warrants for MST members and described them as highly dangerous criminals. Nevertheless, many individual judges have shown themselves sympathetic. Brazilian higher courts have usually regarded the MST with reserve: in February 2009, for instance, the then-president of the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF), Gilmar Mendes, declared the MST engaged in "illicit" activities and opposed granting it public monies, and supported an "adequate" judicial response towards land occupation. The MST leadership has in turn on various occasions charged that the STF as a whole is consistently hostile to the movement. In late 2013, it described the court as "lackeying to the ruling class" and "working for years against the working class and social movements". This fraught relationship came to a head on February 12, 2014, when a court session was suspended after an attempted invasion of the court building in Brasilia by MST activists, who were met by police firing rubber bullets and tear gas. History Foundation The smashing of the peasant leagues following the 1964 coup opened the way for commercialized agriculture and concentration of land ownership throughout the period of the military dictatorship, and an absolute decline in the rural population during the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, out of 370 million hectares of farm land total, 285 million hectares (77%) were held by latifundia. The re-democratization process in the 1980s, however, allowed grassroots movements to pursue their own interests rather than those of the state and the ruling classes.