Delegacy of Political and Social Order (DOPS/MA): a look at the forms of violence and resistance in Maranhão.
Maranhão, countryside, violence, resistance, state.
This paper offers an analysis of the land conflicts in Maranhão in the 1970s, the period that
goes through the coup d'état (1964-1985), involving various forms of violence against rural
workers. In order to broaden the idea of repression, violence, and affected social subjects, we
adopted the following guiding question: What meanings were attributed to violence by the
workers? What was the motive of the disputes? What were their forms of action and
organization? In the context of the agrarian conflicts in Maranhão it is possible to observe that
violence can manifest itself in several ways: the destruction of crops, "enclosures", forced
displacement, invasion of houses, fires, etc. The situations that threatened or involved the loss
of control over goods and/or resources that were fundamental for production and social
reproduction, besides those that involved moral, cultural, and symbolic aspects, are also
considered here to be of the order of violence. The research carried out based on the analysis
of State documents, from the Maranhão Delegacy of Political and Social Order (DOPS/MA),
revealed the production of different discourses (from workers, business, and the State) about
the disputes, as well as the forms of violence. In this sense, this thesis offers a contribution to
the literature that deals with the impacts of the civilian-business-military regime on the rural
environment, pointing out its influence on the dynamics of land conflicts, and making visible
a range of actions, also violent, executed against various social subjects in the countryside,
who did not identify ideologically with the left.