Palmares and Belo Monte

an Essay on the Permanent War against Quilombolas and Peasants in Brazil

Abstract

This article analyzes the historical continuity of a permanent war against insurgent communities, exemplified by Palmares and Belo Monte, and shifts the focus to the operational role of mestiçagem as a new category of racialization that renders state violence more sophisticated and less visible. It argues that the genocide and epistemicide of these communities are not isolated reactions to uprisings, but rather manifestations of a racial contract legitimizing dualism, superiority, and inferiority. Mestiçagem operates in a twofold manner: as a mechanism of symbolic domestication that dilutes political demands into narratives of cultural integration, and as a marker that identifies autonomous practices as dangerous, thereby legitimizing dispossession, militarization, and criminalization. In this sense, the articulation between state repression and the racialization of the enemy materializes the persistence of colonial structures of power which, reconfigured over time, remain a constitutive element of Brazilian genealogy