Pelas rotas de Margarida(s): uma caminhada sociológica-política com defensores e defensoras de Direitos Humanos na Paraíba.

Abstract

This work presents as a research theme the struggles and resistances shaped by the hands of human rights defenders in the state of Paraíba, Brazil. The bottom line is the role they play in the dependencies of the State Council of Human Rights (CEDH-PB), one of the first institutional mechanisms of this nature created in the country, in the first decade after the redemocratization. Realizing the diversity of articulations, organizations and initiatives, our goal is to sketch a cartography of the defense of Human Rights struggles in Paraíba focusing on the trajectories of defenders. To this end, we used semi-structured interviews to construct the data (BEAUD; WEBER, 2014), which had the direct participation of four defenders (three male, one female). The theoretical framework used is based on the critical, anticolonial and counter-hegemonic contributions formulated by Boaventura De Sousa Santos (2019), Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2019) and Joaquín Herrera Flores (2009). We point out that the construction of defenders as political subjects has to do mainly with the symbiosis between the agency that individuals carry and the opportunities for access to groups, collectives, entities and human rights movements that arise at a certain moment in life. In the case of Paraíba, we identify that the Catholic Church, led by bishops adept at Liberation Theology, is responsible for the formation of the first human rights defense apparatus and, consequently, of the first generation of defenders. Our research conceives, in terms of sociology of absences and emergencies (SANTOS, 2004), human rights defenders as political subjects radically committed to denouncing injustices and the radical transformation of the world.