As lutas pelas terras do senhor: A comissão pastoral da terra (CDT) no Estado de São Paulo (1990-2000)

Abstract

This dissertation is the result of a research of theoretical and empirical nature, referring to the actuation of the Comissão Pastoral da Terra [CPT] Pastoral Commission of Land - in the state of São Paulo, in the decade of 1990. CPT was born in June 1975, after several meetings of bishops, protestant pastors, and religious people from the Roman Catholic Church. It had as its goal to give support to rural workers in the most diverse ambits: social, political, juridical, religious etc., denounce violation of human rights, fight for the conquest of the land, and demand in the most different ways the implementation of an land reform by the Brazilian State. Being a pastoral of the Catholic Church, amongst many others, CPT has particularities and specificities. Officially linked to the Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil [CNBB] National Conference of Bishops of Brazil -, it has a greater flexibility for actuating, the support from its public [followers] and from part of the Official Church. CPT members see it as a frontier pastoral. They understand that to be a pastoral is to go where no one else goes, it is work and actuate with the poor, marginalized and excluded from the countryside, and also from the city. This entity deals therefore, with a very heterogeneous universe of workers, marginalized and excluded. Its demands and projects go through changes in its conjunctural and structural, in what refers to the conquest of land and land reform. Conflict is thus intrinsic to this entity, in diverse spheres, private and public, extending to internal conflicts amongst its members, locally, regionally, in the sate and nationally. CPT, since being an ecumenical entity, within the Jewish Christian tradition, has as a characteristic the use of symbols and the mystic in its celebrations, assemblies, events, etc. The mystic has as a goal, amongst others, to encourage its pastoral agents to keep fighting for the conquest of the promised land e for the land reform. The limits and potentialities of the mystic in the conquest of the proposed goals are also object of analysis. In a synthetic manner, the analyses of the Pastoral Commission of Land in this research will refer to its social dynamism and the conflicts, to the limits and potentialities of the entity to conquer its goals, in the relevance of the use of symbols and the mystic for the conquest of the land e the internal conflicts that result from settling in the land and the kind of relation that this pastoral develops with social movements, more particularly with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra [MST] Movement of the Landless Rural Workers