Mediação e conflitos em espiral: encontros e desencontros do estado e dos movimentos sociais no Pontal do Paranapanema

Abstract

Rural collective conflicts and agreements conceived to its pacification within a process of state mediation is the subject of the present work. It is introduced by the history of 150 years of frauds and illegal land appropriation in Pontal do Paranapanema, follows the landholders struggle of resistance transformation into huge land occupation process led by Movimento Sem-Terra (MST), within a collective conflict of great proportions, registered in national and international headlines in the 1995 news. Then, it traces a historical profile of the central social actors in field – landless workers, farmers and State agents – and rescues the circumstances that led to the construction of a Plan for Government Action, based on negotiated proposals among these three actors, which included the reclaiming of those land due to the State that were under the farmers possession, and the gradual settlement of the camped families. That Plan, intended to be peacemaker, started a spiral of conflicts and agreements that seemed to stretch till infinite. In the effort to understand this process, the new way of state action, initiated with the execution of that plan, and the resulting social dynamics, were reconstructed in its minor details, by the actors speeches and images that pictured the main episodes. The narrative goes on until the year of 1996, when the first thousand families that took place in those conflicts are definitively settled in rural settlement and the situation turns to normality. The Plan of Action fulfilled its objectives of pacification, at last. In the final part, the work analyses the several plans in which these conflicts were developed, with simultaneous factors related to personal and collective issues; to honor, prestige and charisma aspects; to economic and politic power aspects; to beliefs and moral codes shared by the social groups; and to the showing off and scenes directed to external public, when press acted key rule. It also analyses the action developed by state in mediation, the mediators’ practices and the dilemmas related to the duality of the state agent in the dual rule of mediator-executor of the agreements originated by the plan. In conclusion, the work presents some reflections about the conditions of possibility for a state practice in mediation on conflicts in Brazil.