{"id":158,"date":"2017-11-15T12:58:52","date_gmt":"2017-11-15T12:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/?p=158"},"modified":"2017-11-21T15:57:32","modified_gmt":"2017-11-21T15:57:32","slug":"jake-blanc-rural-democracy-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/2017\/11\/15\/jake-blanc-rural-democracy-brazil\/","title":{"rendered":"Jake Blanc on rural democracy in 1980s Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Centre welcomed one of its own this week, hosting Jake Blanc, Edinburgh\u2019s newly-appointed Lecturer in Latin American History. This talk represented both a geographical and conceptual shift from those that have preceded it this semester, leaving behind histories of Western, urban spaces to concentrate on rural areas in the global south. Fraser Raeburn sent this report – or you can listen again to the whole talk by following the link below.<\/em><\/p>\n[audiomack src=”https:\/\/audiomack.com\/song\/csmch-edinburgh\/jake-blanc-talks-about-rural-democracy-in-1980s-brazil-14112017″]\n

The focus of the talk was the Itaipu Dam megaproject on the border of Brazil and Paraguay. The dam displaced 40,000 people in the Paran\u00e1 region of Brazil and led to unprecedented political mobilisation in the early 1980s. Blanc has done extensive research on this mobilisation and he used this talk to advance\u00a0several theoretical and empirical hypotheses based on this case study of political and environmental activism.<\/p>\n

Challenging urban-centric histories of Brazilian democratization, he pointed to the emerging protest movements not just as an effective instance of activism that succeeded in many of its goals, but as the politicisation of the countryside itself.<\/p>\n

This movement was not just a challenge to the military regime on the question of Itaipu\u2019s effects, but was able to articulate a positive message about agrarian reform that resonated throughout much of the country. Taking place as it did during a key period in Brazil\u2019s democratic transition, known as abertura,<\/em> the issue became a test of the government\u2019s new-found commitment to democratic processes.<\/p>\n

Despite the unity of purpose, Blanc also observed that there were tensions within the movement between different categories of displaced people. Landed farmers \u2013 generally of European heritage \u2013 saw the question as one of property rights, and sought fairer compensation for the land they were losing. Landless agrarian workers, on the other hand, saw the issue in terms of land reform, seeking \u2018land for land\u2019 as a replacement. Lastly, the local indigenous peoples, the Av\u00e1-Guarani, saw the lost land as a threat to their specific way of life.<\/p>\n

Perhaps predictably, each group of stakeholders saw substantially different outcomes and post-Itaipu trajectories. Landed farmers were generally successful in gaining higher levels of compensation for their land, and were often able to purchase new land elsewhere in the region or Brazil, and this success meant an end to their participation in the political movement.<\/p>\n

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Jake Blanc captures the audience’s attention during the Q&A session.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Agrarian workers, by contrast, were less successful in pressing their claims, and their continued activism spawned a wider movement still active in Brazil (known as MASTRO). This put them into conflict with the Brazilian Government, and they faced violence and repression at the hands of the police and military. Nevertheless, the mobilisation sparked a surge in rural political consciousness, as well as connecting rural struggles with urban political movements.<\/p>\n

Finally, indigenous peoples remained marginal to post-Itaipu political movements, and were seen as apolitical actors, making their struggle as much one of recognition as legitimate participants in the political process as of land rights.<\/p>\n

Blanc used the case study of the Itaipu Dam protests to make two theoretical observations. First, that Brazilian abertura <\/em>needs to be understood as having dual realities \u2013 that of official rhetoric and promises, as understood by an urban elite, and the experiential reality faced by Brazil\u2019s rural population. In Blanc’s view,\u00a0a<\/em>bertura\u00a0<\/em>was an attempt to democratise Brazil without upsetting existing social orders, meaning that these rural campaigners for agrarian reform experienced similar problems under both dictatorship and democracy.<\/p>\n

Blanc\u2019s second point was that we should challenge our periodisation of Brazil’s democratic transition. Historians have tended to accept a national periodisation of the military dictatorship, with less regard to the actual experiences of the different strata of Brazilian society. He stressed, in particular, the continuities in the struggles of rural Brazilians that both predated and continued past the end of Brazil\u2019s military dictatorship, with entrenched structural inequalities defying the neat dichotomy of dictatorship and democracy. Competing realities, in other words, produce competing chronologies, meaning that historians need to be more critical in their use and acceptance of established periodisations.<\/p>\n

After the talk, Cassia Roth (Edinburgh) offered a thoughtful comment, in which she challenged the relevance of the rural-urban dichotomy in a Brazilian context. This was followed by an engaged question and answer session from an inquisitive – and interdisciplinary – audience.<\/p>\n

Fraser Raeburn is a PhD student in History. He works on interwar Europe and Britain, ideological confrontation and the history of foreign fighters. His thesis examines the involvement of Scots in the Spanish Civil War. He is a member of the CSMCH steering committee.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Centre welcomed one of its own this week, hosting Jake Blanc, Edinburgh\u2019s newly-appointed Lecturer in Latin American History. This talk represented both a geographical and conceptual shift from those that have preceded it this semester, leaving behind histories of Western, urban spaces to concentrate on rural areas in the global south. Fraser Raeburn sent … Continue reading Jake Blanc on rural democracy in 1980s Brazil<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-podcasts-and-videos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206,"href":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions\/206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/csmch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}