A política de reforma agrária em Minas Gerais: debates e contradições acerca da realidade dos assentamentos no Vale do Mucuri-MG

Abstract

The objective of this study is to understand how public policies for agrarian reform areas are configured in the encampments and settlements of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in the Mucuri Valley, Minas Gerais. It starts from a critical perspective, grounded in the Marxist tradition, which understands the agrarian question as the core of the contradictions inherent to the uneven and combined development of capital in Brazil. The theoretical-methodological path constructs the necessary mediations between the historical-structural processes of dependent capitalism and the singularity of this struggle in Mucuri. For this purpose, an investigation in the region is required, which reveals a central contradiction: the implemented policies primarily operate as Social Policies (focused, discontinuous, and geared toward poverty management), and not as an effective Agrarian Policy capable of promoting structural transformation. The agrarian question is understood as the core of the contradictions of the uneven and combined development of capital. Thus, we build a path using field research as the main methodological tool, conducted through interviews with the leaders of each settlement. This theoretical and methodological journey, by explicating the particularities of the dynamics of capitalist development in Brazil, which manifests itself through the condition of dependency, seeks to clarify the contradictions of this dynamic and construct the necessary mediations to understand how agrarian policy is configured in the encampments and settlements of the Mucuri Valley. The methodology is based on field research, consisting of interviews with ten leaders from five emblematic territories of the struggle in the region (the Mãe Esperança encampment and the Aruega, Nova Vida, Esperança do Vale, and Santa Rosa settlements). The theoretical-methodological path constructs the necessary mediations between the historical-structural processes of dependent capitalism and the singularity of this struggle in Mucuri, in search of explicating the historical-structural processes, inherent to the particularity of capitalism in Brazil, that define the singularity of the agrarian question in the Mucuri Valley. The thesis finally demonstrates that the daily challenges and precariousness faced by the families are the product of an exclusive society. They are, in fact, the functional expression of the limits of the dependent capitalist State, which manages the "agrarian question" without, however, altering the structure of land concentration that reproduces it. Finally, surveying the existing social policies in the agrarian reform settlements in the Mucuri Valley was necessary to understand the non-existence of agrarian policies in the region. We can apprehend that the constitution of the studied rural settlements harbors many contradictions that drive challenges to the daily lives of the settlers today.