preserving a grassroots, decentralized organizational model. This is regarded as an important strategy by the MST, in that it allows the movement to maintain an ongoing and direct flow of communication between member-families and their representatives. Coordinators are aware of the realities faced by member-families and are encouraged to discuss important issues with said families. This organizational blueprint seeks, in a way to empower people politically by having them acting "in the way they see fit, true to local context". To assist with communication between Coordinators and member-families, and as an attempt to democratize the media, the MST produces the Jornal Sem Terra and the MST Informa. The structure and goals of the MST has led some authors to consider it a large libertarian socialist, or anarchist organisation. Ideology The MST is an ideologically eclectic rural movement of hundreds of thousands of landless peasants (and some who live in small cities) striving for land reform in Brazil. The MST has been inspired since its inception by liberation theology, Marxism, the Cuban Revolution, and other leftist ideologies. The flexible mix of discourse that includes "marxist concepts, popular religion, communal practices, citizenship principles and radical democracy", has increased the movement's popular appeal. The landless say they have found institutional support in the Catholic Church's teachings of social justice and equality, as embodied in the activities of Catholic Base Committees (Comissões Eclesiais de Base, or CEBs) which generally advocate liberation theology and anti-hierarchical social relations. This theology, a radicalized re-reading of the existing social doctrine of the Church, became the basis of the MST's ideology and organizational structure. The loss of influence of progressives in the later Catholic Church, however, has reduced the closeness of the relationship between the MST and the Church as such. MST's anti-hierarchical stance stems from the influence of Paulo Freire. After working with poor communities in the rural Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire observed that aspects of traditional classrooms, such as teachers with more power than students, hindered the potential for success of adults in adult literacy programs. He determined that the students' individual abilities to learn and absorb information were severely impeded by their passive role in the classroom. His teachings encouraged activists to break their passive dependence on oppressive social conditions and become engaged in active modes of behaving and living. In the mid-1980s the MST created a new infrastructure for the movement, directly guided by