The land gives, the land demands

The struggle against the Time Frame thesis and the affirmation of quilombola identity in southern Brazil

Abstract

This article examines the Marco Temporal thesis and state bureaucratic delay as technologies of necropolitical governance aimed at the expropriation of quilombola territories in the Pampa biome and along the Brazil-Uruguay border. Drawing on the communities of Várzea dos Baianos (Candiota) and Vila da Lata (Aceguá), it investigates how the transnational expansion of soybean monoculture turns sociobiodiversity into dead capital and imposes a cosmophobic rationality that undermines the material reproduction of peoples rooted in the land. The study is grounded in Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), in dialogue with decolonial and intersectional critical theory. Through an interdisciplinary literature review and documentary analysis, it contrasts hegemonic legal dogmatics with the malunga diplomacy led by Black women, whose practices challenge state borders and the invisibilization associated with the condition of doble chapa. The article argues that state demands for identity purity and rigid temporal markers function as a form of genocide by denial. It concludes that defending quilombola territories requires affirming jusdiversity and building territorial sovereignties as conditions for biointeraction and community emancipation.