Entre vermelhos e azuis, os "Comunistas de Cristo" formam partido: política e religião na região Sisaleira da Bahia (Conceição do Coité, 1970-2000)

Abstract

This work discusses the relationship between politics and religion, drawn in the county of Conceição do Coité, located in the Sisal Region in the state of Bahia. The object of study is centered on the actions of Catholic lay people that, imbued by the thought of the directives of the Second Vatican Council and the Theology of Liberation, founded the Municipal Directory of the Workers Party, in 1986. Under this legend, the affiliates disputed local power with the hegemonic political groups, called Blue and Red, colored groups led, respectively, by the sisal businessmen Misael Ferreira de Oliveira and Hamilton Rios de Araújo, that consolidated their leadership from the 1970s onwards. Thus, they linked their bases of legitimation during the period of validity of the civil-military dictatorship, the reason why the temporal cut of this research was initially marked out. In this regard, a special attention was paid to the trajectory of these religious agents before the inception of the Workers Party (PT) Directory, especially the religious activity that made possible the experience of the so-called Popular Church, the sociopolitical base of the progressive locus developed by the action of these lay people that, in the midst of the clashes with the colored associations, were categorized as “communists”. The different typologies of analyzed sources, such as official documents, journalistic, memorialistic, ecclesiastical documents, audiovisual records and oral sources, were crucial to reach the central objective of this investigation, which corresponded to the disputes between lay people and businessmen for the political power of Conceição do Coité. This research found support in the theoretical and methodological procedures of the history of the present time and the assumptions adopted by the new approach to political historiography and regional and local history. This investigation was guided by the hypothesis that the tactics developed by Catholics, called “Communists of Christ”, in the confrontation of the hegemonic parties, mobilized socialization processes to strengthen the popular participation. Lay people worked closely with the rural workers of the sisal environment, modifying the political field of Coité with new rules in the political game, to the detriment of a political behavior in which the vote was seen as an object of bargaining and the use of violence as a legitimate action of the electoral dispute. Furthermore, they consolidated the Popular Church in the Parish of Nossa Senhora da Conceição do Coité between the 1990s and the 2000s, linking the ecclesial reality to the broader context of the “progressive” clergy, present in the Sisal Region in the early 1960s. Finally, the analysis of these clashes is a significant contribution to historiography, especially the Bahian one, since it allows to know the experience of subjects from other regions of Bahia, from places considered peripheral in the historical research. This relevance, therefore, is based on the understanding of how the study on a smaller scale illuminate and modifies certitudes previously crystallized by historiography of a more comprehensive character, not to say based on explanatory models disconnected from the reality, place, historical and full of possibilities for transformation.