Davi Félix Schreiner

This study concerns contemporary experiences lived by rural workers in organized resistance movements in southwestern and western Paraná State, along the Brazilian border with Paraguay and Argentina, between 1985 and 2001. Its main objective is to analyze the organization of settlers day-to-day living in rural settlements. The investigation focused the evidenced contradictions in the processes of organizing different cooperative and/or associative efforts, and how these efforts influenced day-to-day living among the settlers. The sites picked for survey were Vitória Settlement, in the town of Lindoeste, and Terra Livre Settlement, in the town of Nova Laranjeiras, both linked to the MST and with 30 families settled in all; and the new settlements formed by settlers that were moved from Salto Caxias Waterpower Station to various towns in the west region, comprising 612 families linked to the Crabi/MAB. Considering that settlements are not socially isolated areas, their internal organization and forms of solidarity and cooperation were analyzed in two ways: on the one hand, from the review of links between changes in the agrarian structure in the region, the organization of the resistance carried out by the landless, and the formation of rural settlements and their ways of organizing land and work in the region; on the other hand, the investigation of the mediation in the social relations and of the dynamics of social movements, and the multiple ways the settlers elaborate to represent the memory of their fights for land and their path through life. In these contexts, the settlements are seen as social and production environments where diversity and difference generate relationships guided by power, intertwined with contradictions and conflicts of habits, values and tradition. Visible in the settlements are the class contradictions, like the one pertaining to the very formation of the social rank of settler. One of the main contradictions materialize in the settlers possibility of returning to the colony way of life and the praxis around a new project of social, productive and communitarian organization by their mediators. The proposals of cooperation, especially the collective ways of using the land and dividing the work, are seen by most of the settlers as restraining their freedom and autonomy. The study shows that the dualistic conception of MST (collectivism against individualism) in the effort to implement cooperation in the settlements led to the discrimination of individual settlers and proved to cause reduction of cooperation experiences among them. Collectiveness is something strange to their culture and constitutes a restraint to their lifestyle and utopias. Such incompatibilities evidence the need to value the settlers cultures and to consider their traditions and values when formulating a cooperation policy in the fight. It also reveals the need to forget old authoritative and subordinative practices in the political relationship between mediators and settlers, as one prerequisite to a new individual and coletive life qualitx, based in the different kinos of horizontal reciprolity, in the democracy and in co-operation.

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