A GRILAGEM COMO MÉTODO DE APROPRIAÇÃO DE TERRAS NO OESTE DA BAHIA

Abstract

In this paper, we show how ilegal land grabbing has become the main method of appropriating land in the western region of Bahia. As the initial focus of the agricultural frontier now known as MATOPIBA, the region was targeted, especially from the 1970s onwards, by the conservative modernisation project in the countryside imposed by the Military-Business Dictatorship (1985-1964). With a territorial focus on the Corrente River Basin, in 1980 alone, this research identified a total of 1,486,592ha of land formally appropriated through fraudulent titles and registry records. In order to appropriate this superlative size, only 11 land registry records were used in the municipality of Correntina (BA), through fraudulent area rectification actions. The plateaus of the São Francisco River and its associated valleys, traditionally occupied in common by groups of riverside peasants and geraizeiros, indigenous people, blacks and mestizos, were the most coveted lands in this process. In this context, their formal status as public lands facilitated strategies for their illegal appropriation. With the second commodities super-cycle in the 2000s, the physical appropriation of the chapadões intensified with the deforestation of the Cerrado on a scale and at a speed unprecedented in history, amplifying the socio-environmental impacts for the riverside communities and pasture bottoms and closes that still resist this process today.