Disputas intra-elites e agendas distributivas no Brasil rural de 1920 a 1945: mineração de texto no Arquivo Juarez Távora

Abstract

This doctoral thesis aims to analyze political elite clashes over public provision in rural Brazil from the 1920s through 1940s, during a period of modernization and state building in the country. Given that there was no specific regulation of rural work after the so-called Brazilian Revolution of 1930, nor extension of social rights to the countryside or agrarian reform, I compare negotiations regarding access to land through colonization policies, education policies that specifically targeted rural populations, the organization of agrarian classes through the creation of cooperatives, and policy priorities for managing droughts in the country's northeast. The purpose is to clarify differences in elite attitudes and to compare the power resources that they have employed to pursue their projects. The study is based on text mining and qualitative analysis of Juarez Távora's Personal Archive, a military and revolutionary hero who served as Minister of Agriculture during the Getulio Vargas Administration. Elite disputes and collective action indicate two competing political projects within the State: a tutelary interventionist project that was more excluding for rural populations, and a reformist interventionist project linked to a cooperativism-based social justice ideal. The Conservative Modernization paradigm can be used to frame the two programs.