Full text
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| Author(s): |
Cristiane Dias de Melo
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas |
| Defense date: | 2012-02-27 |
| Examining board members: |
Claudio Henrique de Moraes Batalha;
Fernando Teixeira da Silva;
Clifford Andrew Welch
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| Advisor: | Claudio Henrique de Moraes Batalha |
| Abstract | |
In 1972, the Brazilian Dictatorship created the Land Project to deal with irregular land tenure questions in the western border region of Santa Catarina state that abuts Argentina. The government's National Colonization and Agrarian Reform Institute (INCRA) established regional offices to carry out the project. Intended to resolve local conflicts over property rights, the agency sought to normalize and regulate property lines, farm sizes and agricultural activity in the region. The project initiated several land expropriations that mostly affected small farmers. Analysis of the expropriation process in the 1970s revealed the importance of squatting - effective land possession verses legal property holding - as a common cultural practice among the poor that eventually gained legitimacy through the project as an alternative strategy to gain access to land. By regulating the squatted areas as normal farm properties, the project influenced juridical interpretations of the Land Statute (ET), Brazil's prevailing land tenure legislation since the military took power in 1964. In the early 1980s, the normalization process stimulated landless agricultural labors and displaced farmers to occupy the abandoned, 2,800 hectare Burro Branco farm, located in the region's Campo Erê municipality. Denigrated in the press as a land invasion, the act generated a debate over the concept of land rights. For the region's landlords, the state had the duty to protect the property rights of title-holders. For the occupiers, however, landlords forfeited their rights to land when they failed to develop it. They proclaimed a human right to use the land to sustain life; they insisted that land should be in the hands of those willing to work it. Their defenders argued that the ET itself recognized occupation as legal by making the establishment of "effective culture and eventual place of living" defining characteristics of landholding. In the context of the fight for the redemocratization of Brazil and inevitable end of the Dictatorship, this occupation and others unfolded in different parts of Brazil as isolated actions that the media began to define as a social movement of the landless. In fact, the Santa Catarina occupiers joined with others to found the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in 1984 (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 09/04595-3 - Land and Work: a land´s conflict in the west of the state of Santa Catarina (1977-1985) |
| Grantee: | Cristiane Dias de Melo |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Master |