Sertão and the default of the world

Expropriation, madness, forced migration and land concentration during conservative modernization in Brazil

Abstract

Within the scope of conservative Brazilian modernization, in the north of Minas Gerais there was an intense concentration of land ownership from the usurpation of the lands of families of black communities, mainly, but also of white communities of family farmers who were forced to migrate with a greater number of cases among the years 1965 and 1980, after the annexation of the northern region of Minas Gerais to the area of ​​operation of the Northeast Development Superintendence. The northeastern development agency financed the transformation of farms into modern rural companies and in the northern region of Minas Gerais, professionals from the main cities, seeking to get involved in order to take advantage of the fiscal and financial resources available to modernize the regional economy, and traditional farmers, in search of the best lands in the region, expropriated with excessive violence the black families that occupied, since the 17th century, the fertile lands of the valley of the Verde Grande river and the white families of farmers in other regional spaces. A significant number of people went crazy with the destruction of the social mundus in which each lived. Using an ethnographic account, my experience, chronicles and newspaper reports from the period that inform the eviction of people maddened by the mayors of the municipalities of northern Minas Gerais in the streets of Montes Claros and from there, sent by the local government, to the Hospital Colônia de Barbacena and, also, to the Hospital Galba Veloso in Belo Horizonte. The constructed interpretation , in an anthropological reading of the economic theory of migration factors - expulsion and attraction, is based on the concept of anomie by Durkheim (1982) and used in their studies by Merton (1970) and Oliven (2000) that allow me to understand, in my reading, the madness of people with the destruction of the social mundus in that lived.