Abstract

The research aims to show how criminal actions against the social movements of struggle for land in the State of Sao Paulo have been used as a political tool to criminalize and to set back land reform.  The research worked on a total of 13 actions, in civil and criminal context, totalling about three thousand pages, and 15 habeas corpus and interlocutory appeals, filed in the Superior Court of Justice in favour of the defendants, and 11 injunctions of repossession. The analytical instrument used was discourse analysis and the analysis was divided into three parts: 1) quantitative analysis, in which we sought to take stock of criminal actions, their sentences in the first degree and the type of data legal framework; 2) count of words and expressions, in order to analyse how often certain key words and expressions appeared over the processes and the direction in which they were built ; 3) formal analysis and the language used in the processes, in order to show how the power of speech is built in these processes. The criminalizing effect of this type of discourse and its political intentions, authoritarian control over the rural social movements in Brazil, become, therefore, quite clear.

Research funded by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo [State of Sao Paulo Foundation for Research Support]

Bio note

Adalmir Leonidio - Associate Professor, Department of Economics and Sociology, Higher School for Agriculture Luiz de Queiroz, University of Sao Paulo. 

Activity within the Permanent Observatory for Portuguese Justice (OPJ)