Cliff Welch
After working as a stevedore, cowboy, carpenter and journalist, Clifford Andrew Welch earned his Ph.D. in Latin American history at Duke University in 1990. He taught Latin American history at Grand Valley State University in Michigan for 20 years before taking a position as historian of contemporary Brazil at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) in 2009. He has been visiting professor of graduate studies at the Pontíficia Universidade Católica, the Universidade de São Paulo and the Universidade Estadual Paulista. His books and films include Lutas camponesas no interior paulista: a memória de Irineu Luís de Moraes (1992), The Seed Was Planted: The São Paulo Roots of Brazil’s Rural Labor Movement (1999), Grass War! Peasant Struggle in Brazil (2001), Camponeses brasileiros (2009) and Jôfre Corrêa Netto, Capitão camponês (1921-2002). Email: cliff.a.welch@gmail.com |
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Research on Land-grabbing:
Land grabs and land reform: contemporary conflicts in the Brazilian land struggle
While land reform and land grabbing are two quite different phenomena, there has long been a dynamic relationship between them. As symbols of neocolonial control, foreign-owned lands have often been the first targets of land reform projects. One recalls, for example, Guatemala’s attempt to redistribute to peasants lands controlled by the United Fruit Company in the early 1950s. During these same Cold War years, Brazilian communists accused latifundiários of being allies of United States imperialism and targeted their properties for expropriation. Thus, the terms easily came to be seen as representing opposite political poles: resisting foreign land grabs with land reform. To explore this relationship, this project mines the historical struggle over land grabbing and land reform in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, from the first projects in 1961 to the present. Utilizing historical materialism as method, the paper places at its analytical the discourse and actions of landlord, capitalist and peasant groups, as well as policymakers. It examines the changing face of land reform policies to understand their relationship to land grabbing, especially their contradictory role as forms of resistance and collaboration with the process.
