Agribusiness at a gallop

allegories of conquest and agri-bolsonarism

Abstract

This article aims to clarify the allegorical language associated with the forms of political enunciation of employers’ associations of soybean farmers in their bases in Mato Grosso and in the federal capital. The ethnographic perspective allows us to identify stereotypes mobilized in the dispute over “agriculture” between the political concertation of agribusiness and peasant movements and traditional peoples and communities. The allegory of the “gaucho”, especially the image of the hero on horseback, corresponds to this discursive weapon of power that, operating as a stereotype, tends to mark the absence of something desirable in its object, which is precisely “manual labor” or labor practices linked to peasant rusticity. The incorporation of the horse in these public performances, as well as the use of “frontier” to designate the areas of interest of the contemporary plantation, are revealing messages of the persistence of the war of colonial conquest.