A política agrária de Leonel Brizola no Rio Grande do Sul: governo, legislação e mobilização

Abstract

There is a wide variety of studies related to the debates on land reform in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. However, most of them regard the federal government and the disputes concerning the different interpretations on the Brazilian agrarian issue in the National Congress. Furthermore, when the analyses focus these disputes from the states’ specific cases, they are generally oriented by the social actors’ activities, such as social movements, the Church, labor unions, among others. In this sense, the states governments’ acts are interpreted as a mere response to the mobilizations in favor of land reform. This study, conducted in Rio Grande do Sul, aims to go beyond some of those impressions. Based on a documentary research and interviews, it was possible to verify that the emergence of local land reform mobilizations have had a meaningful relation with the Leonel Brizola’s government representatives (1959-1963). This government has given incentives to landless rural workers associations’ formation, which were responsible by most of the land demands in the state. From these groups’ actions, the government mobilized some articles from the state Constitution in order to meet this demand. Therefore, this study analyzes the Leonel Brizola’s agrarian public policies. However, facing the questions posed by this subject, it’s necessary to amplify the analysis field beyond the limits of the government itself, exploring the construction of these constitutional articles, as well as the formation process of groups responsible by the mobilizations, which produced the necessary interdependence to the colonization projects’ promotion.