2. Denied recognition: threats against the
rights of quilombola communities

José M. Arruti and Thaisa Held

I went to a quilombo at Eldorado Paulista . . . Look, the thinner African descendant there weighed seven arrobas. They do nothing. I don’t think they’re even good for procreation anymore. Over a billion reais every year [is] wasted on them. They get a staple products quota [cesta básica] and some agricultural benefits . . . They don’t give a damn about anything
– Jair Bolsonaro, 3 April 2017, Rio de Janeiro

In this chapter, we propose a synthesis of the complex construction process of – and the attempt to deconstruct – a new political and legal actor in Brazilian society, namely the quilombolas.1 This timeframe largely coincides with the historical processes of re-democratisation and de-democratisation. We face this challenge by accepting two main limitations. First, this synthesis includes but does not expand on the initiatives of negotiation, resistance and invention of the quilombola social movement, its communities, actors or thinkers; we restrict our discussion to the limits of the state. Second, such a synthesis paints an inevitably incomplete picture, insofar as it speaks of an ongoing government that has been surprising Brazilian society on a nearly daily basis with attempts to dismantle victories won over the past three decades.

Taking this into account, we note that the construction of rights for quilombolas since 1988 has been marked by ambiguities. The creation of public policies based on those rights has been marked by the tendency to restrict to the administrative and fiscal levels what is guaranteed by law and official programmes. The quilombola struggle for the affirmation of rights, therefore, never experienced a particularly favourable moment – except, perhaps, at the very beginning of the first Lula administration. Seen in this light, all the advances made, as well as the growth of the national quilombola movement, have occurred under intense dispute. The political perspective of class conciliation resulted in the internalisation of contradictions by the governments formed between 2003 and 2016, which transformed them into arenas where different social projects competed for space, priority, budget and so forth. The 2016 institutional rupture and Bolsonaro’s election in 2018 may thus be described as an attempt to put an end to such contradictions. Unfortunately, the easiest way to do this was the elimination – or drastic limitation – of the democratic practice itself.

The epigraph to this chapter is from a speech by the then federal deputy and potential presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, in one of the most traditional associations in Rio de Janeiro, addressing a constituent of the Jewish community. He was referring to an alleged visit he paid to one of the 32 officially recognised quilombo communities in Vale do rio Ribeira, São Paulo. The region was historically stigmatised because of its low economic development, but later gained prominence for its high degree of socio-environmental preservation and diversity, becoming known, in the 1970s, as the ‘Paulista Amazon’ (Amazônia Paulista). There are at least 56 Black rural quilombo communities in the Ribeira Valley: besides the 32 communities recognised by the state, six have initiated the process of land regularisation and 20 are waiting to start or restart it. The Bolsonaro family has an economic interest in the region and Jair Bolsonaro’s brother-in-law has a grievance for invading the territory of one of those quilombo communities. In the same address quoted above, the then deputy stated:

If I get there [the presidency] there will be no money for NGOs. These scoundrels will have to work. You can rest assured that if I get there, as far as I am concerned, everybody will have a firearm at home and there won’t be a centimetre demarcated for indigenous or quilombo territory.

A few months later, Bolsonaro was prosecuted and sentenced in the state of Rio de Janeiro for his statements, which were characterised as hate speech (crime de racismo). In the following year, as a result of action by the National Coordination for the Articulation of Black Rural Quilombo Communities (CONAQ), among other entities and members of the parliament, the attorney general’s office launched another action before the federal Supreme Court to increase the sentence imposed on Bolsonaro on the basis of the gravity of the remarks, including in the action the offences uttered in the same address against other groups, such as indigenous people, migrants and women.

In September 2018, however, when Bolsonaro was already regarded as a possible winner of the presidential elections the following month, the first conviction was reversed by the state justice and the federal prosecutor’s request was archived, based on the guarantee of freedom of expression for parliamentarians in exercising their mandates. In the same month, the traditional agricultural system of the Ribeira Valley received the title of Brazilian Cultural Heritage ‘for representing an essential aspect of identity for the native population of this region and for its relevance in promoting the Brazilian ethnic and cultural diversity’.2 This recognition marks an important achievement in the quilombola struggle for recognition, 30 years after the Brazilian Constitution and 15 years following specific legislation about the quilombolas. The overlapping of these two events in that month, however, heralded an aggressive and explicit reaction to such achievements, presented in a language of disrespect that had not been registered in the speech of political actors since, at least, the period of re-democratisation. In this way, Bolsonaro’s address also heralded what recent political literature has called ‘post-democracy’ or ‘de-democratisation’. Alongside labour precarisation, the revocation of social rights and the reduction of public services, de-democratisation also operates through the naturalisation of racism and the dismissal of (liberal) values associated with socio-cultural diversity, which marked the Brazilian democratisation process. It consists of a project that aims to annul the degree of unpredictability that democracy, even limited as it may be, imposes on the full sovereignty of the markets and on the reproduction of domination.

To describe how the de-democratisation process impacts quilombola communities, this chapter is divided into two parts. First, we present an overview of the process, full of obstacles, for the state recognition of collective rights for quilombolas in the context of the 1988 Constitution. We then attempt to outline the most visible and immediate effects the current process of de-democratisation has on recent quilombola conquests.

The development of a New Right

The writing of a new constitution, which began in 1986, was a fundamental moment in the Brazilian re-democratisation process. Together with its outcome, the Constitution of 1988, it was characterised by the recognition of fundamental social and ethnic rights. This was a watershed moment for Latin American constitutional revisions that underpinned the cycle of progressive governments on the continent. Alongside a series of advancements in the political and social fields, an important innovation of the 1988 Constitution was the creation of a specific chapter for indigenous rights. In addition, the terms of the new chapter on indigenous rights opened up hermeneutical possibilities for the recognition of other social groups, based on ethnic or cultural difference.

Nomination

In the chapter dedicated to culture, the Constitution imposes on the state the duty to guarantee ‘to everyone the full exercise of cultural rights’, thus supporting and incentivising ‘the valorisation and diffusion of cultural expressions’, protecting ‘the popular, indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions, and those of other groups that contributed to the national process of civilization’ (Art. 215, caput and §1). According to a prominent interpreter of the Constitution, this would have made the ‘analogous application of the treatment given to the indigenous issue and to the other ethnic groups indispensable’ (Duprat, n.d.), thus extending and strengthening the two sole mentions made, for the first time in a Brazilian Constitution, to quilombos. These are the article on Brazilian cultural heritage, which lists ‘[a]ll documents and sites that contain historical residues of the ancient quilombos’ as heritage (Art. 216, §5 II) and Article 68 of the Temporary Constitutional Provisions Act (ADCT),3 which states that ‘Final ownership shall be recognised for the quilombo remnant communities which are occupying their lands and the state shall grant them relevant land titles.’

It is worth mentioning that the recognition of the cultural value of Black people is part of the main constitutional text, while the recognition of the quilombola right of access to land is part of the Transitional Provisions of the Constitution. The distance between these two recognitions reveals, on the one hand, the elective affinity that Brazilian society establishes between Blacks and the cultural issue and, on the other, the reluctance of that same society to re-examine the right to land, and, more than that, to bring together in a single legal mechanism two central issues for the formation of national society, race and land (Arruti, 2006).

The constitutional text, however, only gained significant strength and extent when the Black peasant movement in the states of Maranhão and Pará appropriated it to translate the demand for the recognition and regularisation of the ‘common use of lands’ – a non-existing concept in the national agrarian regulation (Arruti, 2008). From then on, the constitutional expression ‘remnants of quilombo communities’ has been defined as ‘groups that developed practices of resistance in maintaining and reproducing their traditional livelihoods in a given place’, and takes on the form of ‘ethnic groups’ characterised by ‘different forms of using and occupying space, based on kinship and neighbourly ties of solidarity and reciprocity’ (ABA, 1994). This definition, based on anthropological rather than historical grounds, was fundamental in the legislative debates held between 1995 and 2000 for the formulation of a bill which would regulate Article 68 of the ADCT.4 While the regulatory proposal was debated, however, some local initiatives started to put into practice this interpretation of the constitutional article. This was the case for the state land institutes of Maranhão, Pará and São Paulo, and of some National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) and Palmares Cultural Foundation (FCP) regional offices.5 Few communities accessed land titles as a result of those initiatives, but this was enough for similar collectives across the country to see in this legislation (and in the claim of ‘quilombola community’) a way to resolve the legal insecurity regarding their collective land possessions.

Controversy

When, in 2001, legislators were considering a bill to regulate Article 68 of the ADCT, then President Fernando Henrique Cardoso anticipated its approval by issuing a presidential decree (3912/2001) opposing the afore-mentioned bill on almost all points. The main items of that decree serve to highlight what the country’s traditional elites perceived as the most dangerous changes in the new constitutional framework:

(a) It revoked INCRA’s power to recognise and issue titles, transferring such role to the FCP, thereby restricting constitutional recognition to the field of culture, without proposing any new version of agrarian reform;

(b) It established the thesis, which would later become known as a ‘temporal framework’ (marco temporal), according to which the constitutional right would be restricted to communities that could prove effective possession of land since at least the abolition of slavery (1888) and until the proclamation of the new Constitution (5 October 1988).

(c) It insisted on individual land titling, in the conventional form of private property, in order to prevent the recognition of the ‘common-use land tenure’ (terras de uso comum) which constituted collective territories.

The 2001 decree declared any quilombola titling not in line with its interpretation ungrounded, resulting in the paralysis of all ongoing processes at federal or state level. Quilombola rights only resumed effective conditions in 2003. With the inauguration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government and the ratification of ILO’s Covention 169 on indigenous and tribal rights, a new presidential decree (4887/2003) revoked the previous one and incorporated the controversial items outlined above.

Before that, however, it was necessary to overcome, at least partially, the reproduction of the same restrictive interpretation of 2001 at other normative levels. From 2003 onwards, the interpretative dispute migrated to the interior of the federal government, so that legal disputes gave way to disputes over technical procedures for the titling of collective territories within INCRA. After a new period of paralysis, marked by the internal publication of successive normative instructions on the same topic, INCRA arrived at the current definition of procedures only in 2009. The result of this long negotiation is a complex, time-consuming administrative process, which lasts, on average, ten years. It begins with the community’s self-declaration with the FCP and its request to open an administrative process at INCRA. It then proceeds with the elaboration of a Technical Identification and Delimitation Report (RTID), which includes an anthropological study, and continues through several administrative steps open to contestation by any potentially interested party (public or private) in the same area, until it finally ends with the collective titling of those lands, in the name of the quilombola association (INCRA, Normative Instruction 57/2009). It is important to note that the title is valid subject to the maintenance of the common use of land: that is to say, the association cannot divide or sell the land, under penalty of returning it to the state.

On the other hand, the 2003 decree had secondary effects, by establishing quilombo communities as a public with special and specific policies. Quilombo communities started to figure as a population to be included in participatory initiatives that multiplied at that time, as in the form of state and municipal councils for education and health. There was a growing need to create a public record of the presence and demographics of these populations – which resulted in their inclusion in the educational census of the federal agency National Institute for Educational Studies and Research ‘Anísio Teixeira’ (INEP) and in the Single Registry (Cadastro Único) used for the basic income policy. The debate on how to include such populations in the national census was also initiated. The ensemble of such policies, of such instances of participation and of progressively qualified knowledge initiatives, contributed in the following years to the growth and spread of the quilombola movement across the national territory. As an increasing number of communities were becoming aware of the legislation and of the redefined official notion of the quilombo, the negative connotation the term still held in its colloquial rural use was gradually reversed. This enabled communities to move beyond the initial estimates of the early 1990s – pointing to the existence of some hundreds of communities concentrated in some states – to the current estimates by CONAQ of the existence of six thousand quilombos across the country.

Special public policies and their limits

While the federal Constitution recognised the cultural and land rights of quilombo communities, the latter were kept isolated in the Temporary Provisions, risking further precariousness. Similarly, while the federal government published a presidential decree regulating the constitutional article according to the demands of the quilombola movement, it established internal rules for the government body responsible for the implementation of the decree that hindered the fulfilment of its stated objectives. As we will see below, such ambiguities also marked the construction of the field of public policy, transforming the latter into a new arena of disputes (Cefaï, 2002). In this arena, the interests of agribusiness and the chief government strategy, based on a new version of the old developmentalism, were confined to the margins, and had to justify themselves in the national and international public sphere in the face of the emergence of a new subject of collective rights.

As a way to organise and render its relevant actions visible, the federal government launched, in March 2004, the Brazil Quilombola Programme (PBQ), which would act on four axes: access to land; infrastructure and living standards; productive inclusion and local development; and rights and citizenship.6 The first of these axes was arguably the most important, since expected action in other axes depended on the regularisation of the territories in which they would be developed. The second and third axes, in practice, had little impact on specific policies, as they resulted from the local repercussion of general infrastructural policies already foreseen in the Growth Acceleration Plans.7 Finally, the fourth axis gained importance inasmuch as it involved the debate around the creation of a special quilombola education, which ended up being the second most important item in the movement’s agenda. Below we will briefly present these two dimensions of specific public policies for quilombos, namely territorial and educational dimensions (Arruti, 2009).

Land

CONAQ estimates that there are around six thousand quilombo communities across Brazil. Although CONAQ’s estimate is vague, it is based on a comprehensive network of sources not connected with the state. The Palmares Cultural Foundation (FCP) currently registers 3,386 certified communities, 192 certificates in progress, and 38 requests awaiting Palmares’s technical visit to petitioning communities.8 The figures available from the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) are significantly smaller, as they reflect solely communities that have started or completed the long process of land regularisation. By the end of 2019, there were 1,747 quilombo communities awaiting the outcome of their application for land titling at INCRA. From those, only 278 Technical Identification and Delimitation Reports (RTID) had been considered. These reports are fundamental for the definition of the titling process. Just 124 quilombos in the entire country had received their collective land titles.

A simplified but fundamental indicator of the Workers’ Party (PT) governments’ performance on the quilombola issue is the number of titled territories. In the first Lula term (2003–6), the federal government titled five territories; in the second (2007–10) 11; and throughout the Dilma period (2011–14; 2015–16), 16 territories were certified. In other words, in 13 years of PT administrations, the federal government was responsible for 32 of the 120 titles of quilombo territories (all others were issued by state land institutes), corresponding to less than 2 per cent of the number (in itself insufficient) of INCRA’s pending processes. Even so, it would be possible to see in the progression of the number of titles issued by the successive governments an expectation of gradual improvement of these indicators. However, a deeper look at the budget for quilombola policies raises important reservations in the interpretation of this first indicator.

While in 2010, the last year of Lula’s administration, the authorised budget for indemnification of properties in areas delimited for quilombo territories was R$54.2 million, in 2011, the first year of Dilma’s administration, this item was reduced to less than half. In the following years, during the Dilma administration and following the coup that removed her from power, this budget continue to be reduced until it reached, in 2018, the figure of less than R$1 million; that is to say, it was practically extinct (Schramm, 2018).

Although the political base of both Lula’s and Dilma’s governments was the less economically privileged segments of the population, their government programme, based on the proposition of ‘class reconciliation’, led to a close alliance with the conservative sectors. Regarding quilombolas (as well as peasants and indigenous peoples), this involved giving in to agribusiness – now the government’s biggest financial backer – resulting in numerous obstacles to the land regularisation policy, which accentuated land concentration and denied access to rights.

We began to see the effects of this as early as 2005, during Lula’s first term, when Dilma Rousseff was appointed chief of staff and commodity exports were consolidated. While federal funds continued to be allocated to the Brazil Quilombola Programme (PBQ), and funding even increased, honouring the government’s commitment with its political base, funding began to be informally contingent through different administrative and legal mechanisms. From 2012 on, although the PBQ was not formally dissolved, it disappeared in practice. Spending on quilombos was no longer planned, and became the responsibility of the Programme Against Racism for the Promotion of Racial Equity (PERPIR). Despite having broader responsibilities, the programme allocated smaller budgets than those previously allocated to the PBQ.9

Therefore, it is only possible to comprehend the titling of 16 territories during the Dilma administration if we take into consideration that it was during this period that INCRA adopted the practice of titling territories only partially, leaving out areas which involved the payment of indemnities to third parties. Of the 16 territories recognised in that period, only one was fully titled. In the name of producing indicators, INCRA adopted the controversial practice of obtaining the communities’ consent to recognise only part of their territories by promising that the disputed areas would be recognised in future, inasmuch as the institute found the resources to pay the necessary indemnities. Based on a promise that is difficult to keep, the practice of partial titling not only produced a false indicator, but it also consolidated, in the face of local power struggles, a reduction of the territories of those communities.

Education

One of the most notable novelties in the final document of the 2010 National Conference for Education was the elaboration of a specific chapter dedicated to ‘quilombola education’ (CONAE, 2010).10 It specifically mentioned the rights to preserve cultural heritage, to the sustainability of traditional territories, to a diet and school structure that respect people’s culture and relationship with the environment, as well as the differentiated training of school teachers. The latter was conceived as part of a potential quilombola undergraduate programme, which included specific pedagogical materials and administrative mechanisms that would allow the participation of quilombola representatives in staffing the relevant education boards. This document immediately reverberated around the National Education Council (CNE), which also organised the First National Quilombola Education Seminar in the same year, to discuss the elaboration of the National Curriculum Guidelines for Quilombola School Education, published two years later.11 Although these texts had been preceded by similar policies developed by state and municipal governments, the approval of the new guidelines at the national level contributed to standardising the vocabulary, legal and institutional mechanisms and available resources, and to influencing the social and intergovernmental social debate on ‘diversity policies’.

The transition from concepts to numbers, however, needs to be done carefully. There is a fundamental difference between the normative definition of ‘quilombola education’ and the purely classificatory definition of ‘quilombola school’, as it appears in the INEP school census. In the second case, the figures simply refer to schools in quilombola territories or those outside such territories catering to this population. This means that the category includes existing schools, which, due to the recognition of the population they serve as quilombola, were also reclassified, regardless of any effective adaptation to the quilombola education concept. Thus, the exponential growth of quilombola schools since 2004 (see Figure 2.1) does not result from the creation of new schools, or even from the adaptation of old schools to the National Quilombola Education Guidelines, but from the progressive reclassification of schools located in quilombola territories.

Figure 2.1 Brazil and its major regions, 2004–14: evolution of the number of quilombola schools (basic education establishments). Source: Arruti, 2017.

Still, observing such numbers is interesting in that the reclassification is not automatic, but depends upon a decision by the school administration, or even by the municipal or state secretariat to which it is linked. As school management or teaching positions are rarely in the hands of quilombolas, the distribution and pace of school reclassification as quilombola reflect conflicts surrounding the recognition of the communities themselves, as well as the resistance of public administrations to conform to the principle of diversity as proposed by the Guidelines.

On the other hand, these numbers also reveal progress in the consolidation of quilombo recognition by local authorities, regardless of the stage of their recognition at the federal level. This is important to the extent that such powers are frequently occupied by big landowners, agricultural developers and other economic interests opposed to the recognition of quilombola territories. Furthermore, the goal expressed in the Guidelines, that both the positions of teachers and the management of schools should be linked to quilombola consultation, makes such public apparatus a focus of great interest to the social movement – not least because it depends largely on the training and qualification of new activists.12

Quilombos in the context of de-democratisation

By assuming a kind of double commitment to both social policies and to the acceleration of neo-developmentalist policies, the PT governments, while they created the conditions for the advancement of quilombola rights, also generated mechanisms (mainly infra-legal, such as procedural rules and budgetary executions) intended to curb or, at least, regulate such advances. Throughout this period, the quilombola movement frequently complained about seeing the consolidation of rights being used as a bargaining chip in government negotiations in the Congress. This expression reveals the perception many quilombolas (and indigenous populations) had of the political negotiations between the government and the Congress regarding their rights. But it has the disadvantage of attributing to the ‘government’ a unified global rationality. It would be more correct to recognise that the state itself sets up an arena of disputes and negotiations, in which different internal fractions of the same government may be in complete contradiction.

These contradictory movements result from the creation of a field of debate in which academic arguments (mainly by anthropologists, lawyers, educators and historians), connections with similar movements in other countries (drawing especially on the experiences of the new Colombian and Ecuadorian constitutionalism) and a new conception of education and knowledge production were mobilised. In addition, there was also the formation of a body of technicians within public organisations that, by accumulating experience in quilombos, added administrative knowledge to the processes of elaborating and implementing public policy.

There is, therefore, a complex relationship between public policy for quilombos before and after the 2016 democratic rupture, triggered by the judicial-parliamentary-media coup against President Dilma. The actors involved, including those who were part of governmental alliances, appear to be the same, but thereafter the focus seems to shift from disputes within the political arena to a project of dissolving the arena itself, through the winding up of its institutional foundations and even the physical elimination of its opponents. The following reflections will further elaborate on these two issues.

Deinstitutionalisation

Answering to a question about indigenous peoples’ claims for land demarcation, the then Minister of Justice, Osmar Serraglio, said that ‘the land does not fill anyone’s belly’.13 In the same vein, Antônio T. Costa, the evangelical pastor appointed FUNAI’s new president, defended the presence of religious missions inside indigenous villages and affirmed that indigenous peoples should be included into the ‘national production system’ through the promotion of agricultural enterprises in their lands.

While the most conservative sectors in the National Congress14 – including the new occupiers of positions in the government – used the parliamentary rostrum to announce part of the political project associated with the coup, interim President Michel Temer started to restructure the government bodies responsible for agrarian policy. Provisional Measure 726 (May 2016) abolished the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA)15 and transferred the quilombo land regularisation authority to the new Ministry of Education and Culture. Eight days later, the government retracted this, maintaining INCRA’s role, but linking the latter to the presidency through the chief of staff and the special secretary for family agriculture and agrarian development. These changes had an immediate impact on the implementation and continuity of public policies for related federal bodies (Mattei, 2018, p. 298).

In addition, the chief of staff also decided to suspend all ongoing quilombo land titling processes. This decision was taken on the grounds of the Supreme Federal Court’s (STF) uncertainty regarding the merits of the Direct Action of Unconstitutionality (ADI 3239) against Decree 4887/2003. The government’s strategy was to transfer the responsibility for the interruption of more than 1,500 open cases to the justice system, betting on the perpetuation of the slowness in determining ADI 3239, which had already been postponed for 14 years. Nevertheless, the STF would make its final decision in February of the following year, declaring the action against the 2003 presidential decree groundless.

This decision was important as a formal guarantee of quilombola rights to land. In the discussions leading to the judgement, however, several restrictive arguments were presented, including the so-called marco temporal (temporal framework). First brought up in 2009, in the judgement of an action against the demarcation of the Raposa Serra do Sol indigenous reserve, the marco temporal thesis affirms that the constitutional right applies only to areas already occupied in 1988. In doing so, it fails to acknowledge forced displacements and expropriations, and restricts quilombola land struggles to a moment in time when the vast majority of current quilombo communities were unaware of the possibility of guaranteeing their rights.

In the ADI 3239 case, the evocation of the temporal framework thesis did not significantly impact the decision but highlighted that the highest level of the judiciary is open to its reconsideration. This is an important indicator for the legislature, which has been discussing several ways to implement this thesis, including the PEC 215/2000. Seizing this opportunity, only a few months after the STF’s decision, the Attorney General’s Office (AGU) published a normative opinion, approved by Michel Temer, binding all federal public administration actions to the temporal framework thesis. This document, conflicting with STF’s own understanding that its decision on the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve did not extend to other cases, was questioned by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and by indigenous peoples’ organisations, but it was not revoked.

In the aftermath of the 2018 presidential elections, the most conservative group of deputies in Brazil’s recent history would arrive in Congress, alongside Jair Bolsonaro. In this way, the measures taken by the previous government would not only continue but would be expanded. The aspiration to abolish the policies created or maintained by previous governments would go so far as to make the state’s own operation unviable. Immediately upon taking office, Jair Bolsonaro issued a Provisional Measure (MP 870) that re- or de-structured the state, reducing the federal organisation from 29 to 16 ministries. He also dismissed all the technical positions created in previous administrations16 and made changes that crippled control bodies,17 including technical ones, such as the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), responsible for monitoring Amazon fires.18 Finally, the president also tried to extinguish all mechanisms for popular participation in government decision-making and management, by dissolving more than 2,500 councils, commissions and other collegiate bodies composed of representatives of public administration and civil society.19

MP 780 transferred the authority to demarcate indigenous (FUNAI) and quilombola territories (INCRA), as well as the Brazilian Forest Service, to the Ministry of Agriculture, which is considered to be the political headquarters of the agribusiness sector. It also significantly weakened the institutional standing of INCRA. The abolition of the General Coordination of Rural Education and Citizenship (Decree 10252/2019) is an example of INCRA’s debilitation. This agency was behind the National Programme for Education in areas of Agrarian Reform (PRONERA), created in 1998 in response to demands for access to all levels of education for the thousands of young land workers. It also created the Terra Sol project, which fostered agricultural training for newly settled local workers who benefited from the agrarian reform. Its extinction had an impact both on the autonomisation of these rural populations and on food sovereignty policy.

Strangulation

Another change imposed by the government of Michel Temer and continued by Jair Bolsonaro, with a direct impact on the poorest and, therefore, on the quilombola population, was the creation of a new tax regime, which prevents the growth of total and real government expenditures above inflation over the following 20 years. Constitutional Amendment 95/2016, better known as the ‘public spending ceiling’, maintains the spending cap rules even in the face of demographic growth or strong economic performance. The ‘ceiling’ hinders investments in the preservation and expansion of public services, in the incorporation of technological innovations, in the increase of salaries, in the hiring of personnel and in career planning. All forecasts made by the new regime foresee the scrapping of social policies (especially in the areas of health and education), which points to a degradation in quality of life for the Brazilian population and implies disrespecting the spirit of the 1988 Constitution, which is oriented by welfare state principles. The ‘ceiling’s’ main goal is to save public money to guarantee the fulfilment of the obligations assumed by the federal government towards the creditors of public debt, one of the few items excluded from the prohibitions imposed by the measure.

The effects were already felt in the year following the Constitutional Amendment to health and education policies, where there was a budget reduction of 17 per cent and 19 per cent respectively. In other cases, the impact may lead to the closure of important social programmes, such as the Food Acquisition Program (PAA), a symbol of fighting hunger and extreme poverty in the country, responsible for the income generation of small rural producers, such as the quilombolas, and for access to food products by low-income sections of the population. According to a recent study, the PAA’s budget in 2017 was just 31 per cent of what it had been in 2014 (INESC, Oxfam Brazil and CESR, 2017, p. 4).

This strangulation of national finances led to successive cuts in the budget dedicated to the regularisation of quilombo territories between 2016 and 2019 – drastic even in comparison with the last year of the Dilma administration, which, as we have seen, was already imposing cuts in this area (see Figure 2.2). With the 2019 Budget Law, little more than R$3 million remained for land regularisation in the regional superintendencies across the country, an amount that was supposed to cover more than 1,700 ongoing processes at INCRA.

Figure 2.2 INCRA’s budget for quilombola land regularisation. Source: INCRA, 2019.

To illustrate this dire situation, in 2017, the regional superintendence of INCRA in the state of Mato Grosso had a cash flow of less than R$10,000 for handling more than 70 ongoing processes, while the state of Alagoas had less than R$4,000 for 17. The unviability of INCRA’s task is highlighted by the fact that the regional superintendence of São Paulo state has an average cost of R$60,000 per RTID (CPISP, 2017).

Devaluation

Even though the ‘rigging’ of state organs was one of Bolsonaro’s main criticisms of previous governments, the logic of corporate and partisan interests prevailed in the appointments made by his administration. All technical criteria (such as educational attainment or familiarity with the topic) were abandoned, in order to distribute positions to people lacking technical qualification or recognition in their respective fields. In some cases, even unknown characters were appointed, with careers and views contrary to the directives of the office to which they were assigned. With regard to quilombos, managerial positions related to land, environmental and Black culture issues were especially affected.

‘This is your government!’ was the phrase Bolsonaro spoke to the deputies and senators who make up the Agricultural Parliamentary Front (FPA) in a breakfast held for them at the Planalto Palace. Members of this group occupy the positions that impact directly the future of quilombo communities. The Ministry of Agriculture is headed by Tereza Cristina Dias, leader of the ruralist caucus (as the FPA is commonly known), dubbed ‘poison muse’ (musa do veneno) for defending a bill that lifts restrictions on the use of pesticides, despite the reluctance or disagreement of regulatory bodies. The Special Secretariat for Land Affairs is chaired by Luiz Antônio Nabhan Garcia, President of the Democratic Association of Ruralists (UDR),20 who is under investigation by the joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into Land for acting in the formation of armed militias in the countryside, with the aim of ‘repressing’ social movements in the 1990s.

The connection between Dias and Garcia led to the dismissal of INCRA’s president, General João Carlos Jesus Corrêa, as he did not comply with the ruralists’ recommendation to title 600 areas in the name of beneficiaries of the national programme of agrarian reform through Operation Light at the End of the Tunnel. This operation aimed to greatly expand the amount of land available to the market. The ruralists’ influence can also be seen in changes in INCRA’s behaviour in relation to apparently minor, internal and technical actions, such as the decision not to recognise the technical reports of land identification at the moment of regulating quilombo territories.21

This stance fleshed out that what Bolsonaro has been promising from the beginning of his campaign: to legalise mining and other economic activities in indigenous lands and environmental reserves; to end the ‘charade’ of fines for environmental crimes; to abolish the Ministry of the Environment (MMA); and, like Donald Trump in the United States, to take Brazil out of the Paris Agreement against climate change. Indeed, as soon as he took office, he withdrew Brazil’s candidacy for hosting the UN 2020 Climate Change Conference, COP25, but backed down about the Paris Agreement and the MMA. Given the negative repercussions within and outside the country, especially in the agribusiness sector, and aware of the environmental clauses that regulate international trade agreements, Bolsonaro decided to keep MMA but chose someone with a solid record of opposition to environmental policies. As the new minister, Ricardo Salles, declared in a press interview, he was the first head of this ministry who had not been an ‘activist’ in the field: ‘The Ministry of the Environment was, historically, managed by environmentalists who had no commitment to economic development,’22 he declared.

Unable to modify indigenous and environmental legislation, which, from his point of view, hampers national development, Salles has been working to dismantle federal environmental policy from within, intimidating even his subordinates.23 He thus abolished the Secretariat of Climate Change and Forests, considering global warming as ‘secondary’. He reduced the participation of organised civil society and state and municipal governments in the composition and functioning of the National Environment Council. He began to discuss the reduction of environmental conservation units and loosened the inspection of these areas, with budget cuts and the reduction of regional posts. He distanced himself from environmental organisations – about which he began to raise generic suspicions without evidence – in addition to ending agreements and partnerships with them regarding the management of the Amazon Fund resources, originally designed to promote the preservation of the forest. The inversion of values in the MMA practices resulted, almost immediately, in a wave of invasions by miners, loggers and land grabbers in protected areas, as well as in an unprecedented increase in deforestation of several biomes, including the Amazon, which has the greatest worldwide repercussion.

Finally, after values were reversed in the conduct of land and environmental policies, it is worth making a brief note about changes in cultural policies. First, it is necessary to understand that the creation of the Ministry of Culture in 1985 was one of the innovations by post-dictatorial governments, in order to provide autonomy to cultural initiatives, which previously fell under the Ministry of Education and Culture (1953–85). Arts, historical, archaeological and intangible heritage, and folk cultural expressions were clearly encouraged and diversified. Special attention was given to ‘Afro-Brazilian culture’, for which the Palmares Cultural Foundation (FCP) was created, with the stated aim to fight against racism and promote and preserve Black socio-economic and cultural values.

With the abolition of this ministry in 2019, its tasks were allocated to the Special Secretariat for Culture and incorporated into the Ministry of Tourism, suggesting the standpoint that would guide relevant initiatives. As if this were not enough, the first secretary appointed to this office was dismissed after public outcry over a speech in which he echoed statements made by Joseph Goebbels.24

Something similar happened with the nomination of the journalist Sérgio Camargo to the presidency of FCP. From November 2019 to March 2020, his appointment was discussed in the judiciary due to some public statements in which he denied the existence of racism in Brazil, defended the end of Black Consciousness Day (which, according to him, ‘causes incalculable losses to the national economy’), attacked the Black movement, and called the historic quilombola leader Zumbi dos Palmares a ‘false hero’ (Falcão and Vivas, 2020).

From 2003 onwards, the FCP began to have a special role in the process of quilombo recognition, by acquiring the power to issue the certificate which initiates the process of land regularisation at INCRA. Upon taking office, Camargo abolished seven public bodies at once, concentrating power in the presidency. They included entities indispensable to public policy, such as the management committee of the Quilombo dos Palmares Memorial Park, the Open Data Committee and the Information Security Committee (Decree 45/2020).

Violence

Ultimately, such actions of dismantling the state and reversing its values come hand in hand with a rhetoric of war, anti-intellectualism and intolerance, cultivated daily by the president himself, through his public pronouncements and social media activity. This stance has an effect of its own on the growth of violence, which cannot be attributed exclusively to any of the above-mentioned factors. Since the electoral period, the press has registered aggressions against social activists (indigenous people, quilombolas and people associated with the Landless Workers’ Movement, as well as gay, transgender and Black people), both by individuals inspired by Bolsonaro’s hate speech and by political groups with special economic interests. Situations defined as ‘political violence’ grew as Bolsonaro rose in the electoral polls.25 With his victory, authorisation for the use of violence has become more than symbolic: it has been guaranteed by the manipulation of inspection bodies, by the Minister of Justice’s silence on crimes of international repercussion, and by the active encouragement by the government of the use of firearms, especially by the landowning rural elite, while legitimising and legally guaranteeing unrestrained police violence.

As a result, violence against the poorest, against Black people and against the rural population increased, as the report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) from November 2018 indicates. Motivated by a set of denouncements of human rights violations, the IACHR report is concerned with impunity for rural violence, with social and environmental setbacks, and with the weakening of democratic institutions for human rights (CIDH, 2018, p. 6). The NGO Human Rights Watch released the ‘Rainforest mafias’ report (Human Rights Watch, 2019), which links the fires in the Brazilian Amazon with the impunity of landowners and criminal groups who finance machinery, chainsaws and a workforce for land grabbing. The report highlights that civil servants fear that environmental fines will be annulled and the inspectors who issued them will suffer penalties. It also calls attention to the increase of rural violence, especially against environmental activists, indigenous people, quilombolas and other traditional communities. In November 2019, the Arns Commission and the Human Rights Advocacy Collective denounced Bolsonaro to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and for inciting the genocide of indigenous peoples. In sum, in little more than a year of Bolsonaro’s government, the country was constantly mentioned in the UN for human rights violations, the numbers of which are approaching the darkest period in our recent history: the military dictatorship. In 2019, more than 35 complaints against Brazil were filed at the Human Rights Council, involving violence against indigenous peoples, human rights activists and religious intolerance.

The report Rural Conflicts: Brazil 2018, by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT, 2018), deserves special mention. This report, a product of the extensive and diffused network of social agents, pointed to an increase in conflicts over water and labour involving mining, in addition to the increase in the number of families expelled from their land holdings in 2018. Conversely, it also registered a progressive decrease in ‘gun crimes’ (crimes de pistolagem), between 2015 and 2018. This type of crime is committed by illegal security agents in the service of landowners and land grabbers (frequently police officers working outside office hours), and is symptomatic of the low standard of public security and of the abandonment of the most vulnerable populations by the justice system. Thus, such a reduction probably points to a progressive change of the institutional framework. Bolsonaro responded to this ‘good news’ at the end of 2019 with what different commentators have called the ‘nationalisation of hired gunmen’.26 The president sent a bill to the Congress to exempt from punishment security agents who committed crimes and abuses of power during operations called Guarantees of Law and Order (GLO). According to the Federal Constitution, the GLOs would be reserved for cases of exhaustion of the instruments provided for in public security bodies (Article 142, regulated by Complementary Law 97/1999 and Decree 3897/2001). In this case, however, it specifically aimed at repossession actions.27 If the proposal had been approved, police and military officers could be exempt from punishment.

Finally, focusing on the specific situation of quilombo communities in the period between 2008 and 2017, a report titled ‘Racism and violence against quilombos in Brazil’ was published (Terra de Direitos and CONAQ, 2018). The report identifies 2017 as the most violent year, registering threats, injuries and deaths. In 2017 alone, 14 people were murdered in different types of conflict: an increase of 350 per cent compared to the previous year.

The sampling used to collect this data does not reflect the exact number of violations suffered by quilombolas, but it offers a glimpse of the vulnerability such communities experience. In 2017, 29 threats and persecutions were registered; five arbitrary arrests; six cases of contamination by pesticides and/or water pollution, in which quilombolas were deprived of the use of natural resources; 15 civil, criminal or administrative proceedings were opened against quilombo communities or quilombolas in order to criminalise them in legal disputes, in addition to the opening of administrative proceedings for alleged environmental crimes; there were five incidents of destruction of houses or crops; and 22 records of expropriation of communities in their territories, involving evictions and illegal subdivisions.

There were also reports of killings in the Iúna quilombo, in Lençóis, Bahia state, and in Lagoa do Algodão Quilombo, in Carneiros, Alagoas state. However, investigations do not link these deaths with land disputes, which calls for reflecting upon the ways institutional racism and the invisibility of quilombo communities interfere with the production of available data. As the CONAQ report highlights, in 29 of the 38 cases – that is, in about 76 per cent of cases – the killer is unknown, leading police investigations to conclude that the motivations for those deaths are of a personal nature. Police strategies to dissolve land conflicts into other kinds of conflicts are enhanced by on-the-ground factors, namely the fear of denouncing the responsible actors, due to the low or ineffective protection for witnesses and human rights activists. In 2017 alone, several cases related to real estate speculation (11.8 per cent), large estates (24.8 per cent), megaprojects (20.8 per cent), rural militia (2.4 per cent) and institutional racism (32.8 per cent) were registered (Terra de Direitos and CONAQ, 2018, pp. 63, 83).

The report also draws attention to gender-based violence in the context of violence against quilombos. Although women are on the front line in the struggle for land rights, political invisibility places them in official statistics as victims of domestic or common violence. The survey carried out by CONAQ demonstrated that six women were murdered between 2008 and 2017. The study also identified that all murdered women had held positions of leadership and/or were actively participating in the quest for collective rights (Terra de Direitos and CONAQ, 2018, pp. 54, 108–9).

Concluding remarks

‘Left-wing governments found other ways to hinder Brazil, with quilombo communities. With all due respect to those who came to Brazil and were enslaved – we abhor slavery, thank God it no longer exists in Brazil – these demarcations cannot happen. We are one people, one race’ (Noticia Preta, 2020).

Jair Bolsonaro’s statement in March 2020, quoted above, was given at the exact moment in which we were writing this conclusion. It perfectly conveys his rejection of the Constitution and his willingness to violate it with respect to quilombola rights. In the course of this chapter we have also gathered evidence of three additional post-democratic characteristics of this government: its concerted work to disqualify and even criminalise alternative political, social and environmental conceptions, always alleging the protection of national development; its public security initiatives and its dismantling of state bodies of fiscalisation, effectively contributing towards tolerating if not stimulating violence; its reaction to any form of control or monitoring by the civil society – whether through the abolition of bodies that, in various instances, guaranteed the participation of civil society in public decisions, or through ending transparency in the production of official data and threats to punish its critics. Jair Bolsonaro’s statements and actions are not, however, just traces of an authoritarian personality (alluding to the image of the demagogue analysed by Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). They characterise a conservative political project, based on an accounting mindset for which socio-cultural and socio-environmental diversity only represent an increase in costs and unpredictability of the movement of capital.

Quilombola rights were constituted in Brazil under the sign of ambiguity. Rights holders have had to wrestle with a reductive interpretation of the categories of recognition used in the text of the law; the manipulation of the rules that must regulate those same laws; and budget cuts that prevent their consolidation. This ambiguity was aggravated from 2010, when, as a result of the 2008 financial crisis and the international appreciation of commodities, the government’s commitment to the popular classes, especially the rural populations (peasants, landless workers, indigenous people and quilombolas) has lost more and more ground to commitments to agribusiness and extractive capital.

The 2013 protests in Brazil expressed, in part, this breach of commitment, but they also expressed its opposite. Representatives of a middle class who were not satisfied with the social advances of the immediately preceding period also took to the streets. The reduction of poverty, the entry of the less economically privileged segment of the population into public universities, the regulation of domestic work, which in Brazil maintains a direct link with colonial forms of work (a mixture of overwork, family, affection, racial hierarchy and asymmetric exchanges), represented a threat to the hierarchical structure of Brazilian society. The crisis around the impeachment of President Dilma took the necessary time for the ambiguity of the streets to be captured by one of these parties. This paved the way for the process that would result in the 2018 elections.

Since then, quilombola rights have ceased to be subjected to the ambiguities of the policy of class conciliation and are under direct attack, without the ideological cover of racial democracy. The presidential speeches are relevant not only because of the prominence that our presidential arrangement ends up attributing to them. They are important also because they exemplify a regression in the public discourse of our elites in dealing with the racial issue. It is no longer a question of denying racism, but of affirming the need to eliminate unwanted populations. In this context, the (ambiguous) advances achieved by quilombola communities since re-democratisation, in terms of rights and public policies, ended up placing them in a prominent position, alongside the indigenous populations, in the face of the current federal project for the destruction of the legacy of the 1988 Constitution.

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