QUILOMBO LANDS: DILEMMAS OF LAND GOVERNANCE
Quilombos. Land titling. Collective property. Land governance.
After the abolition of black slavery in Brazil, in a predominantly rural country, there was no official interference from the State in land ownership, in order to guarantee the freed population access to land. The proposals formulated in this sense – notably by the abolitionist André Rebouças – were rejected.
One hundred years after this historic milestone, it was article 68 of the ADCT, of the Federal Constitution of 1988, that granted special protection to the remaining quilombo communities, by recognizing the property of these communities. Thus, the only specific land policy for the black population in the Brazilian legal system was instituted.
Thirty-six years after the promulgation of the Federal Constitution, twenty-nine years after the complaint regarding the lack of definitive title deeds for quilombola communities, delivered to the Executive Branch in 1995, during the Zumbi dos Palmares March, and six years after the ruling in the Supreme Federal Court on the constitutionality of Decree 4.887/2003, which regulates the procedure for granting title to lands occupied by remnants of quilombola communities, only 391 quilombolas communities have any title issued, out of an estimated universe of 3,716 communities certified by the Palmares Cultural Foundation (FCP). The data reveal the deficiency in the implementation of this constitutional land policy.
Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to investigate the difficulty of the State in recognizing the definitive ownership of quilombos at the level of land and territorial management. The hypothesis is that despite being a constitutionally provided right, its enjoyment faces a long and bureaucratic procedure, which directly depends on the identification of the domain of the land on which these communities are located, which impacts the exercise of rights of 1,330,186 registered quilombola people and intensifies land conflicts and legal insecurity in rural areas.