AGRARIAN REFORM ADVOCACIES IN THE CONTEXT OF NEOLIBERAL REFORMS AND THE POLITICAL-INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS IN BRAZIL

Abstract

This article presents the main political and institutional milestones of the changes that have taken place in agrarian legislation in recent years, which mainly reflect Agrarian Reform and the social function of land. We live in troubled times with social apprehension due to the dismount of the main organs and public policies directed to family agriculture. In the countryside, violence against workers and leaders increases, resulting in massacres, murders, evictions and prisons. Agrarian Reform, on the other hand, partly represented by the policy of creatins settlements, has been paralyzed since 2015. The current forces (powers) that undertake such changes and political retrogression in our evaluation result and personify contradictions of the grave political and institutional crisis of the pact that sustains the current government. At the heart of this study’s discussions is the extension of MP 759/2016 and Law 13.465 of 2017, which together changed more than a dozen different laws. The changes in legislation aim to ensure the titling of both urban and rural lands and conditions for land transactions in the market, furthermore causing land reconcentration and to hinder the realization of Agrarian (and Urban) Reform.