Environmental justice as a (potentially) hegemonic concept: a historical look at competing interests between the MST and indigenous people in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article explores the need to recognise and compensate the plurality of environmental justice claims, while paying close attention to the outcomes of the most marginalised groups – cultural and ecological – in political decision-making to avoid vestiges of hegemony. The early history of the Movimiento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST) serves as a case study in which environmental justice claims clash with indigenous rights claims. In recent decades, the MST has refused settling Amazonian indigenous territories, consistent with the organisation’s Via Campesina platform, which focuses on redistributing the 50% of national territory controlled privately by Brazil’s richest 4%. Yet, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Brazil’s military government pitted landless peasants and indigenous people’s struggles against each other, circumventing land reform potentially disruptive to the country’s de facto colonial fazenda land system. This tactic pressured competing groups – landless peasants and indigenous people – to fight against each other, concluding predictably: the most powerful factions ended up getting their way, conceding less in negotiations than their less-advantageously positioned, marginalised counterparts. When marginalised groups gain concessions in environmental justice struggles, often the goods comprising those concessions come at a cost to marginalised groups with even less political visibility. Hegemonic structures of power remain non-negotiable in the process of alleviating other injustices in perceived zero-sum politics. Such systemic displacement and dispersion of violence in systems built on violence suggests hegemony affects not just to other marginalised groups, but to nonhumans too.

KEYWORDS:

• MST
• Brazil
• land rights
• hegemony
• indigenous commons

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Yogi Hale Hendlin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1714-6132

Notes

1. Also see Cox (1993). Laclau and Mouffe (1985) rightly note that in regarding and utilising the concept, hegemony is “not the majestic unfolding of an identity by the response to a crisis”, but instead is inherent to the existing structure of power relations (7). In the case described here, one could imagine that the response described arose from the crisis of reconfiguring power after the end of historical colonialism (see Deutsch 1999).

2. The propensity for alternative structures to reproduce internally the violence hegemonic social structures impose externally is the very crux, ironically, of critiques of multiculturalism, cultures that exist separately but not outside dominant, hegemonic culture (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000; Okin 1998; Parekh 2002).

3. The fazenda (or hacienda in Spanish-speaking Latin America) system is a remnant of the colonial latifundio land apportionment in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. However, every country in Latin America, with the exception of Brazil, has since independence subsequently undergone land reform. See Stédile and Fernandes (1999), for evidence that the MST emerged to disintegrate the fazenda system.

4. In “Chile, Argentina, [the] western United States and Canada, and non-coastal Brazil – new national stories served largely to justify and settle outline maps. They filled in the blank ‘unoccupied’ spaces with ‘nationals’ or at least demonstrated possession in some visible way” (Stephanson et al. 2009, 6). Grappling to legitimate politically one’s own identity group as the truly national(ist) one is not a new event, but is continuous with the long history of colonialism.

5. See Dennett’s very strange treatment of this topic in Dennett (2002, 2). He writes: “It was still possible in the 1960s for a human being to live in a nation, and be subject to its laws, without the slightest knowledge of that fact”.

6. Even as Brazil has experienced social democratic governments like that of Lula, the recent hostile take-over of the Rousseff presidency by what appear to be parties favouring the same constellations of power as Brazil’s historical military dictatorship, demonstrates that the plutocratic colonial Brazilian fazendeiro power structure has evolved, while still rejecting restorative justice measures such as agricultural reform.