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This article addresses the question of how the recent political context of Brazil shapes violations of various kinds against Quilombola communities in Brazil. Using data from online news sources, we track violations from 2016 to 2020 related to land disputes, physical attacks and threats, and environmental issues. We show that, despite the legal rights accorded to these communities since the 1988 constitutional reform and subsequent processes of democratisation, vested interests in the agricultural lobby and a later authoritarian turn, especially after 2016, led to a dismantling of social and economic policies for Quilombos. The violations suffered by these communities result from the denial of their collective identities as constitutional subjects and the non-recognition of their dignity, which are the product of historical processes of inferiorisation that have treated some people as non-subjects or not eligible to bear rights, based on colonial classifications but still present in the dominant society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil has endured multiple political, economic, and environmental crises—and now the COVID-19 pandemic—which have drawn social inequalities into razor sharp relief. This contribution analyzes the resilience of rural families facing these crises in southern Bahia. These families have benefited from various redistributive policies over the years, including redistributive land reforms (RLRs), conditional cash transfers (CCTs), and recent emergency aid (EA) payments related to the pandemic. Each (re)distributive approach involves different notions of distributive justice informed by competing background theories of "the good," which hold implications for concepts of resilience. Drawing on long-term research with RLR communities in Bahia, this article considers the gains achieved by different redistributive programs. Families who acquired land through RLR projects appear more resilient, especially in the face of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the impact of COVID-19 on the rights of indigenous peoples, particularly in Brazil. It deals with the current situation of the Brazilian indigenous peoples, the impacts of the pandemic, the rights created on the adoption of protective sanitary measures for indigenous people and land rights in Brazil. Does the Brazilian government comply with international law, with constitutional rights of indigenous peoples in the current COVID-19 crisis, particularly with the Brazilian Supreme Court decision on the adoption of protective sanitary measures for indigenous people? With a focus on the 2020 Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, this paper will identify and examine the gaps in protection of the indigenous peoples rights by reason of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. This paper argues that the crisis is misused as an occasion for land invasions, deforestation, forest fires and the denial of basic indigenous rights. Especially in Brazil, a transformative change, an emergency support for indigenous peoples, and a still stand agreement on logging and extractive industries operating next to indigenous communities are needed. Brazilian NGO statements give guidelines as to how to manage the threats of the present pandemic on indigenous peoples of Brazil. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation all offer further relevant suggestions as to how to address the serious impacts in the response to and the aftermath of this crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concepts of sharing and commons are normatively and historically ambivalent. Some forms of sharing, such as sharecropping or alms-giving, proceed from and sustain asymmetrical relations to the means of life. Access to commons in other social contexts merely serves to make unequal forms of life more bearable. In other words, some expressions of sharing and commons are "functional" within hierarchical societies. Departing from these observations, this contribution traces contests over the logic of sharing, and apportioned shares of common land, from Brazil's slave period through contemporary land rights movements in the northeastern state of Bahia. For former slaves and their descendants, "freedom" often meant sharecropping on the same plantations from which they had been released. However, rural Brazilians have also succeeded in transforming shared land into more equal and equitable distributions, from "peasant breaches" that emerged in slave gardens from the early colonial period through the abolition of slavery, to land occupations that occurred in the late twentieth century. By sharing land and other material resources—especially tree seeds, seedlings, and cuttings—rural laborers have established unexpected reconfigurations in distributions of property and social recognition that exceed institutionalized norms of sharing common land. With such outcomes in view, this contribution distinguishes socially replicative and transformative sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the quality of institutions influences the strategic choice of agents in the pulp and paper production system based on the forest plantation sector. In order to proceed with the study, we employ the Economic Analysis of Property Rights (Barzel, 1982, 1989, 2002) as foundation, and test the proposition: in federative states where the institutional environment is fragile and therefore the State has a high cost to enforce property rights, private mechanisms stand out in the protection of property rights. According to Dixit (2009, p. 8), "if the government does not pro tect property rights, at least not as well as owners require, many private arrangements arise to satisfy the owners' needs". The analysis of three business cases of companies with plantations in more than one federative unit revealed the broad range of private mechanisms in place to cope with insecure land rights. In addition to countrywide strategies, in the federative units where government fails to be a good property rights steward, we found geographically specific initiatives being used. Another finding was the identification of variables that are able to evaluate the quality of institutions and employed in the companies' decision-making process for the selection of land rights protection strategies. Findings altogether are empirical evidence of how the quality of institutions influences the strategic choice of land rights protection in the forest plantation sector in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to democratize access to land have a long history in Brazil. Although initially focused mainly on the rural sector, in recent decades they have also gained some momentum in the cities. The central notion that has oriented these efforts is the so-called social function of property, which asserts that the right of private ownership includes an obligation to use land in ways that benefit society as a whole. This paper examines the development of this principle in Brazil in terms of both legislation and policy implementation and evaluates the criticisms that have been leveled against attempts to put it into practice. It argues that the social function principle has been extensively integrated into Brazilian legislation, but actual implementation has thus far been modest, especially in the urban sector. These efforts have been criticized on economic, environmental and cost-effectiveness grounds, but none of these criticisms is entirely convincing. Given the marked inequality in landholding in Brazil, the social function continues to be an important tool for enhancing popular welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of indigenous land rights is a particularly pressing political and socio-economical issue in contemporaneous Brazil. Violent land disputes between non-indigenous land ownership and indigenous people with overlapping claims to land rights is a complex problem. It has been caused by the bureaucratic and slow process of land adjudication that generates insecure property rights leading to the violent land disputes. Another problematic issue on indigenous land is the deforestation process. Motivated by such pressing issues, and using the experience and results obtained in a previous paper on indigenous forest rights in India, where a recent Act of law defined the situation, the initial team of authors has been extended to include Brazilian land administration experts. This paper aims to define the indigenous land rights in Brazil, as described under various laws, in the framework of ISO 19152 Land Administration Domain Model, with an emphasis on the spatial dimensions of the definitions. The existing international convention on indigenous rights, by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) of the United Nations, is referred as a basis for the national legislation enacted in Brazil. This background review of existing international and national legislation framework supported the following step of establishing the legal sources and definitions for a number of core LADM classes, concerning the Parties, Legal & Administrative and Spatial Units packages. The descriptive text is then complemented with UML diagrams. This is a fundamental step in defining an LADM specialized model for the situation of indigenous land rights in Brazil. From this first description, a contextualized Use Case Diagram is displayed (not currently part of the LADM standard). Finally, it is expected that the publication of the situation of indigenous land rights by using the LADM framework, as presented here for Brazil, and previously for India, can contribute to broadened discussions by land administration experts worldwide. This is one of the first initiatives (for Brazil) in the use of a specialized model, and in the future can be expanded in order to achieve the modeling of other types of spatial units and related rights, until a complete, multipurpose, country profile LADM_BR is reached that can underpin an integrated cadastre. It can be equally used to test implementation prototypes, using current or experimental geographic information technologies and spatial databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 18th century, the presence of "pueblos de españoles" and "villas" was multiplied in the Hispano-American Southern border. The importance of squatters in the formation of "pueblos de españoles" was more frequent in Buenos Aires countryside than in other jurisdictions, although little is known on its behavior. The objective of the article is to analyze the leeway for action of squatters to ask for legal land recognition for founding a town in Buenos Aires, to identify the mechanisms used and the difficulties found during the 18th and 19th centuries. The analysis of the case of the town of San Pedro allowed to pose several questions on the characteristics of the regulation of land rights particularly in towns and villages in a period that is often linked to changes in the rights and power relationships exercised in their implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]