Titula Brasil: o avanço da mercantilização das terras de assentamentos de reforma agrária no município de Petrolina-PE

Abstract

Historically, Brazil has kept its land structure highly concentrated since the colonial era through the Sesmarias system. At the time, land was already treated as private property, even though formal control rested in the Portuguese Crown, and land ownership was not yet fully codified. The Sesmarias Concession to the sesmeiros (granted recipients) gave them the liberty to control the lands granted to them as private properties. The Agrarian Question arose in the country with the advance of capital in the countryside, where land has become gradually more concentrated, and those without the resources to purchase land are often forced to work on private estates. Land concentration is the dissimulated face of the ongoing labor question (2025). With high land concentration and a growing number of expropriated peasants, the fight for Land Reform ascended, which is the only form to achieve a fair redistribution of land and combat the large estates and the advancement of monopolies in capitalistic agriculture. In the ambit of the modern State, however, these struggles are converted into land reform public policies functional to capital. These policies are not fully executed, nor do they modify the country's land structure. This is because the State serves the needs of capital's expansion and accumulation. With the advance of capital in the country's countryside and its constant necessity to subsume land and labor, the Land Reform policies, intended to establish settlements and give them to expropriated, landless, and rural workers, have become gradually more scarce. In their place, land settlement privatization policies have emerged, which, while resembling Land Reform policies, undermine the struggle for land and lead to the privatization of existing land settlements. Law 13.465/2017 and the Titula Brasil Program (2021) were established to privatize land held by the Brazilian Union and enable the commercialization of Land Reform settlements obtained through landless peasants' struggles in this country. In this context, the present Dissertation aimed to analyze the alterations in land structure with the institutionalization of the Titula Brasil Program and its effects on land and privatization in the municipality of Petrolina-Pe. For this purpose, the present research had historical-dialectical materialism as its method, allowing us to scrutinize Petrolina in its particularities and the capitalistic mode of production totality. The methodological procedures included bibliographical research, documental research, fieldwork, and structured and semi-structured interviews with subjects and actors of the researched object. Research analyses infer that policies of land reform settlement privatization have been implemented in this country, especially in Petrolina. The conclusion is that, under the fetish of private property, the concession of private Deed Titles to land reform settlers is progressing, inserting them as rural entrepreneurs in the market and, consequently, contributing to the erasure of the fight for land, the financialization, the indebtedness, and the commercialization of lands.