GESTIÓN OPERATIVA

INTRODUCTION

Almost immediately following the taking of the timber barges on the Arapiuns River, described in the introduction, officials from several state agencies rushed upriver to where the barges were being held to try to mitigate the situation. The state

environmental agency representative offered to take the wood elsewhere to determine its legality. The wood, however, was the movement’s bargaining chip; they did not even consider that proposal. The state forestry agency offered to pass demands regarding indigenous territory on to the federal government. Indigenous issues, the agency

explained, were outside of their jurisdiction. The aldeia (indigenous community) leaders could not count the number of times they had heard that before; the federal government was well aware of their demands. They declined the offer. The Civil Police threatened to arrest the demonstrators, although they had no arrest warrant. The protesters sent the police back to Santarém empty-handed.

Realizing that they were settling in for the long haul, the protesters assembled on the beach to discuss organization and strategy. First they dealt with logistics, setting up commissions for cooking, cleaning, camp infrastructure, resource assessment and

procurement, and entertainment/consciousness-building – establishing the material means for the encampment’s existence. Then, they moved on to questions of leadership,

movement. This group, it was decided, would always consist of both men and women and of both indigenous people and “extractivists.”76 _{Next, they articulated their}

objectives/demands, and outlined a strategy for moving forward. As discussed in the introduction, the movement’s early demands were quite specific – determination of the detained wood’s legality, expansion of the Agro-extractive Agrarian Reform settlements’ (PAEx’s) boundaries (which, as discussed in Chapter Three, had been reduced to one- fifth of their agreed upon size), and demarcation of the Borarí indigenous land in Gleba Nova Olinda.77 _{Finally, they selected a name for themselves. The Movement in Defense}

of Gleba Nova Olinda was the obvious choice, but it was not the name they chose.78 _It

was true that the demands themselves aimed at “defending” rights to land and resources in Gleba Nova Olinda. However, the desires and goals of the movement, it was argued, exceeded the immediate implications of these demands. In fact, the majority of the people protesting on the beach did not even live in Gleba Nova Olinda. They lived in the

RESEX Tapajós-Arapins and the PAEex Lago Grande. Why then, were so many communities from across these different areas, who already had collective property rights, who had basically “succeeded” in their “struggle for land” gathered on the beach, in a standoff with both loggers and the state, to make demands about land rights in a place that they did not even live?

76

This was the designation that they began using for non-indigenous people from the extractive reserve (extractive reserves are dedicated to subsistence extractivism, as opposed to industrial extractivism). They ultimately deemed the word unsatisfactory because, as one indigenous leader pointed out, “We are all extractivists.”

77

Gleba is the word used to describe a large area of government-held, undesignated land (e.g. no property rights or use rights are assigned in this area).

78

Naming movements the “movement in defense of [name issue here]” is common in Amazonia, perhaps a legacy of the environmental movement and the fact that the wave of region-wide movements in the 70s and

For years, and intensely in the previous several months, the people and

communities of the Arapiuns, Aruã, and Maró Rivers witnessed logging barges headed downriver to Santarém from Gleba Nova Olinda daily. To them, the extraction of millions of dollars worth of timber represented the first step in their ultimate

dispossession and displacement. The effects of activities in Gleba Nova Olinda could not be restricted to that area. As one interviewee explained, the only thing that differentiated the communities of Gleba Nova Olinda from the rest of the people of the Arapiuns were the “boundaries created by the state.” These boundaries, she explained, did not represent difference among them as people. They all “plant farinha, hunt, and fish” and had family networks that extended across the entire region. Many of them, she explained, were “one movement, we have struggled together, against the loggers, for the Resex…for our rights...Without Gleba Nova Olinda, there is no Arapiuns. These rivers, this territory they are our life, our culture, all of ours.” These were the initial moments of the formation of the Movement in Defense of Life and Culture of the Arapiuns River, a movement not for land, but, in their words, for territory.

In this chapter I demonstrate and theorize this shift, by movements in the Lower Amazon (Baixo Amazonas) over the course of two decades from a “Struggle for Land” to one for territory. I argue that this move from the pursuit of land and property to a struggle for life, culture and territory is not a simple “re-framing” (Benford and Snow 2000) of ongoing struggle. Rather this substantive and strategic shift expresses deeper political changes in the capacity of these movements to confront, and intervene in the given order of domination. Embedded in this shift is a move away from the political supremacy of the concepts of “peasant” and “rural worker” introduced by political parties and the syndical

movement in rural Amazonia (and Brazil) (Castro 2006; Almeida 2011), and toward new subject categories that split these previous categories and re-organized them according to self-determined collective, ethnic, and ecological (e.g. relations to nature/natural

resources) elements.

At the foundation of this shift, I will argue, is a move away from economically based claims about production. The framing of the struggle for land within the labor theory of property (land to the tiller) ultimately trapped the claims that Amazonian movements were making within an economic argument that was inadequate to their actual struggle, and could even be used against it. The claim for territory, in response, is less a claim of economic productivity – although economic production may be one component of it – and more a claim about the production of a collective subject and a

particular way of life.79 _{This claim expresses a conception of territory that understands}

particular territories and subjects as a co-produced and thus inextricable and that

understands territorialization as a practice of resistance forged through a combination of everyday practices and struggle through which these subjects are formed (Porto

Gonçalves 2001; Porto Gonçalves 2009; Fernandes 2005; de Almeida 2006; Reyes and Kaufman 2011; Zibechi 2008).80 _{I will more explicitly theorize this conception of}

territory by charting the emergence of new collective political subjects (e.g. movements) and their corresponding, specific processes of territorialization and territories - what geographer Bernardo Mançano Fernandes (2005) calls socio-territorial movements – in multiple iterations, in the Araipiuns region.

To make this argument, I begin with an overview of what we might call the sociological characteristics of life in the lower Amazon, which lays the foundation for the analysis that follows of how a rather objective category (agricultura familiar) was

invested with meaning and linked to particular notions of both struggle (for land) and political change. In other words, I explore theoretically and historically how practices-in- common were used to generate a broad political category (peasant, and then rural

worker). I address the limitations of these broad categories of analysis through a closer                                                                                                                

79 _{It is important to note here that I am not suggesting that the struggle for land is not a struggle for a}

particular way of life, or, for that matter, for territory, as I would argue that it most certainly is (and in fact, this analysis draws heavily on other analyses of the Landless Workers’ Movement as a movement for much more than simply “land” (Wolford 2004b; Wolford 2004a; Wolford 2005; Wolford 2004c), and that argue that the MST is a socio-territorial movement (Fernandes 2005). Rather, many of these broad categories were externally introduced to Amazonian people and although they are meant to be categories of resistance, they have some of the same destructive effects of erasing difference as other colonizing practices. The strategic innovation in explicitly territorial claims that express diverse forms of collective life are a re- claiming of this difference.

80 _{This is a conception explained quite clearly in the above quote from a protester, whose self description}

examination of territorial struggles in Gleba Nova Olinda, demonstrating that common livelihood practices do not map on to political categories. Rather, following EP

Thompson (1978) and others, these are forged through struggle. I examine the co- constitution of political subjects and land claims in Gleba Nova Olinda through the struggle for the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve, the “Resurgent” Indigenous movement, and finally the movement in Defense of Life and Culture on the Arapiuns River (MDVCA). I pay special attention to the way that the concept of territory as articulated by the indigenous movement informs MDVCA’s formation, especially in its capacity to join different forms of collective subjects into a common struggle.