Disputes and conflicts with the State: quilombola strategies, the right to life and the pandemic

Abstract

In this article, I propose to analyze the ways in which the mobilizations of the Quilombola Community of Cumbe, located in Aracati (Ceará), intertwined, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the management of public health policies in this context, highlighting the disputes and the search for rights, which formed a field of conflicts that followed one another in the search for priority vaccination of these populations. I thus analyze the articulation between local mobilizations and the national management if public health policies in the pandemic context, considering the issue of the right to life of socioeconomically vulnerable groups. In the article, I describe the dispute surrounding the right to vaccination of the Quilombola Community of Cumbe, a dispute that had the direct involvement of judicial bodies such as public defenders, as I was able to verify from the virtual field research and the judicial documentation generated throughout the dispute. It is concluded that even with the law’s guarantee regarding the prioritization of quilombola populations in state and national immunization plans, this guarantee was relative, since it was necessary to mobilize, in the case of Cumbe, the judiciary to ensure compliance with the law. The law, therefore, does not apply by itself; there must be intervention by competent bodies for it to be forced in practice.