De sesmaria a latifúndio: a reconstituição da cadeia dominial de um assentamento rural em Goiás

Abstract

The article re-constructs the dominial chain of a ancient sesmaria, located in the state of Goiás, Brazil, until its transformation into a Rural Settlement, demonstrating how, in Brazil, agrarian legislation and justice operators was used to benefit large rural properties.We re-constituted the ownership chain of the former sesmaria using, at the same time, an analysis of the legal documentation relating to Brazilian agrarian legislation and the traces of ancient sesmaria, both in the colonial documentation and those mentioned in the administrative process of expropriation of the rural property. The argument develops in two dimensions: 1. examining the extensive land legislation produced by the State, emphasizing the way in which a regulation was produced in order to legitimize an order, in fact, already required, and to create the necessary conditions to implementation for the implementation of the land market and facilitate the selective transition from public property to private agents; 2. Following the successive transformations and transformations of the aforementioned property, from the granting of sesmaria to the expropriation process for the purposes of agrarian reform, we argue that the action of public agents involved in this process, at different levels, express a voluntarism that, in the end, defined the implementation of the Acaba Vida Settlement Project as a paradigmatic case of how agrarian reform in Brazil benefits private interests to the detriment of its social function.