Acumulação por despossessão, grandes projetos de desenvolvimento e as lutas Kaiowá e Guarani por território: geo-grafias dos povos em movimento contra o capital

Abstract

This research investigates how state, private, and para-state actors operate articulated dynamics of expropriation and violence in Guarani and Kaiowá territories while also examining the territorial struggles and collective actions built “from below” by peoples in movement. Through a multiscalar analysis, the study addresses the expansion of global commodity chains and Large-Scale Development Projects, with particular emphasis on the Ferrogrão (MT–PA) and Nova Ferroeste (MS–PR) railways, understood as vectors of new enclosures, the financialization of land, and the deepening of accumulation by dispossession. Grounded in historical-dialectical materialism and Latin American critical social thought, the research combines land-use mapping, analyses of private land overlaps in Indigenous territories, fieldwork, and documentary research. From this perspective, the findings highlight four central processes: (i) the articulation between megaprojects, state–para-state violence, and new enclosures, showing how legal frameworks, such as Law 14.701/2023, reinforce the militarization of territories and the criminalization of struggles; (ii) the expansion of new mechanisms of private and corporate territorial control through emerging markets and processes of land and nature financialization; (iii) a multiscalar understanding of territorial and environmental impacts; and (iv) the emergence of epistemic and political horizons arising from land recoveries, revealing that the retomadas (land reclaiming practices) constitute territories of resistance in defense of the commons and the social reappropriation of nature. The retomadas, as well as other territorial defense processes, are configured as political actions rooted in the alliances among women, youth, peoples in movement, and the spirits of the forest, affirming alternative forms of production and reproduction of life in the face of the destructive logic of capital.