Violência institucional agrária: o Estado e os massacres no Arco do Desmatamento (1985-2019)

Abstract

This thesis investigates agrarian institutional violence manifested in massacres occurring in land conflicts in Brazil between 1985 and 2019, with a spatial focus on the Arc of Deforestation region. The study is based on the premise that the Brazilian countryside is marked by a structural conflict between two antagonistic logics of land appropriation: the peasant expansion front, which defends land as a space for life and work, and the capitalist pioneer front, which conceives it as a commodity and financial asset. The research justification lies in the need to demonstrate that violence in the countryside is also promoted by the state apparatus itself, which acts not as a mediator, but as a central agent in the dynamics of expropriation. The research problem is: in what way did the State act in the massacres occurring in agrarian conflicts between 1985 and 2019, with an emphasis on the Arc of Deforestation region? The general objective is to analyze the State's performance regarding the massacres in agrarian conflicts during this period. The specific objectives are: 1) to understand the historical-social structures of agrarian conflicts and their main subjects; 2) to examine the State's performance in its direct and indirect dimensions; 3) to analyze the geographic concentration of massacres in the Arc of Deforestation; and 4) to evaluate the effects of agrarian institutional violence. The methodology adopts the inductive method, based on the empirical analysis of 50 massacres cataloged by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT). The theoretical framework articulates the theory of frontiers (Martins), accumulation by dispossession (Harvey), and the concept of expulsions (Sassen) with Gramsci’s category of the Extended State, demonstrating how coercion (political society) and consensus (civil society) operate together. The thesis concludes that massacres are the most brutal expression of agrarian institutional violence, a mechanism mediated by the Extended State to ensure the hegemony of agribusiness. This violence has a double face: direct action, materialized by the state coercive apparatus (executing 18% of massacres), and strategic omission, which allowed gunmen to execute 66% of the cases. The overlap of 43 out of 50 massacres with the Arc of Deforestation provides empirical proof that extreme violence is an instrument of economic frontier expansion. The primary structural effects are the consolidation of the latifúndio, the demobilization of land reform struggles, the criminalization of social movements, and systemic impunity. Brazil's convictions in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights externally validate this thesis, which argues that overcoming this cycle requires structural reforms to dismantle the institutional violence that perpetuates massacres in the Brazilian countryside.