Between Development Theology and Christian Reformism: the Basic Education Movement as an agent for the modernization of the Brazilian countryside (1961-1966)
MEB; Church; Popular Education; Rural Workers; Agrarian QuestionThis thesis proposes to approach the MEB from a new analytical perspective. Unlike the historiography on the movement – which
does not discuss the place of this political force in national agrarian debates –, we seek to analyze MEB's political action in the
Brazilian field, between 1961 and 1966. We discuss how the concept of “peasant” and the nature of the “agrarian reform” were
characterized in the teaching materials Viver é lutar, Mutirão and Educar para construir, during the three phases of the movement,
the modernizing phase (1961), when the movement was much closer to the national episcopal arguments, seeing rural problems
through agricultural bias, indicating as solutions the expansion of access to rural credit, the formation of cooperatives, the technical
training of rural workers, the creation of social centers, the dissemination of medical-sanitary knowledge and public-private
partnerships (State, employer and rural workers); the progressive phase (1962 to 1964), when the movement significantly
approached the assumptions of the encyclical Mater et Magistra, criticizing imperialism, socioeconomic inequality and land
concentration, and defending the political participation of workers, the realization of a reform agrarian, which democratized
access to small private property (reinforcing its emancipatory role), and the State's role as guarantor of access to credit,
professional training and the formation of cooperatives; the conservative progressive phase (1965-1966), a time when the
MEB was aligned with the modernizing proposals of the military government, resuming the guidelines of 1961, but maintained
some proposals of Christian reformism. Our analysis has as its axis the signs of “peasant” and the nature of “agrarian reform”,
because, around them, rich debates were produced by the forces that worked in the rural environment, and privileges the
didactic groups, because the aforementioned didactic sets materialized the political objectives of the movement's leading
nucleus – since through them this sector was able to speak directly with rural workers, acting in the constitution of their ways
of life and their worldviews. Adopting as theoretical-methodological references the ideas developed by Thompson, Romano,
Marx and Engels, Chauí, Bakhtin Circle, Williams, Fairclough and Scott, we attempt to make a two-dimensional analysis of
these materials, discussing their textual structure as a politicaleconomic conjuncture in which they are inserted – considering
it as, at the same time, social practices that reflect class conflicts and elements by which they try to interfere and change
ways of life. Thus, we use a variety of sources: bulletins and guidelines from the MEB's National Directing Council (CDN),
legal documents signed or produced by the movement, correspondence exchanged between monitors, students and
coordinators, agendas and materials from their monitors' training meetings, reports sent by the monitors to the State
Coordination and to the CDN of MEB, annals of the coordinators' meetings, pastoral letters, works of the main pecebistas
theorists and leaders of the Peasant Leagues, official documents of the main political and economic organizations that acted
in the field, bills that circulated at the federal congress and periodicals linked to rural movements with a Marxist orientation,
the Catholic Church and the mainstream press