Assentamentos rurais em terras sul baianas: sujeitos em luta, territórios em disputa

Abstract

This thesis aims at the settlement projects in agrarian reform areas that were implemented in the Southern Coast Territory of Bahia, in the period within 1986 to 2017. A synthesis of the historical process of social struggle for land, located in time and space, which reaffirms the permanence of the Brazilian agrarian issue. Thus, we sought to understand how has been developed the affirmation of the "cacao region" as a political space of the banner of agrarian reform by the rural workers, and how, in this context, new territorial dynamics were defined in the daily life of settled families. A process that, in the midst of the multiple determinations and contradictions of the real, is defined in the relation and tension between the State, the social movements and the settled families. More than three decades after the struggle for conquest of permanence in the land, challenges and threats to rural settlements and settled families have been imposed. Challenges and threats that are associated to the (dis) paths of agrarian reform in Brazil, but that are particularized in the context of the productive restructuring of the capital in the South Coast of Bahia. A process that not only affects the dynamics of production, but also the valorization of the space produced and the territorial conflicts that are established. As well as the daily forms of resistance and confrontations that emerge from this process. Regardless of the gaps defined between the projected dreams and the conquered realities in the rural settlements, the sense of the struggle for land is reaffirmed in the speech place of the settled workers. A reaffirmation that is defined by the improvement of the conditions of reproduction of life, in its objectivities and subjectivities, in relation to the previous conditions as salaried employees of cacao. A sense that vivifies the subjects in struggle over the disputed territories in the face of the challenges and threats that have been imposed. A research that has not intended to be conclusive on all its questions, but bears the intention of contributing with the construction of the critical thinking on the Brazilian rural area, specially in times of conservatism and austerity that have been instituted after the impeachment of the president Dilma Rousseff, in the year of 2016, which have been unveiling in an even more perverse way for the rural peoples and communities. The research has been developed from the survey, analysis and systematization of documentary, bibliographical and cartographic sources, and the accomplishment of the fieldwork through the participant research, having the interlocution with the subjects and spaces surveyed, as principle of the theory and the method. Primary and secondary data that have also subsidized the thematic mapping carried out, as well as the iconographic approach constituted.