Land reform has been one of the most contentious issues in Brazilian political history. Government administrations since the 1960s have adopted the banner of reform, and the country has implemented vast colonization and redistribution programs, but the objectives and the effects of those programs have varied widely. Throughout this long history, considerable scholarship has focused on the programs themselves as well as on the increasingly radical social movements that have fought for more enduring reform. Most of this work, however, has invoked the state as the site of policy making and political direction and paid little attention to the state workers responsible for actually implementing reform. In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of the agency in charge of land distribution and settlement since 1970, the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). I argue that understanding the politics of reform requires attention to the political culture within INCRA, which can only be explained through examination of the agency’s long history as first a tool of frontier colonization and then a response to social mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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