Aquilombar a saúde, contracolonizar as lutas: o projeto político do movimento quilombola para a saúde no Brasil

Abstract

Introduction: For around 454 years, quilombos have represented a form of social organization and Afro-Latin American resistance to slavery, coloniality and racism, with Quilombo dos Palmares as its exponent. Considered a Bantu technology, “Kilombo” as an institution, code and hemispheric phenomenon, has records in several Latin American countries. In the case of Brazil, the achievement of unprecedented quilombola social policies in the Federal Constitution (1988) represented a substantial advance in the search for citizenship, equality and guarantee of rights for quilombolas. Even so, there is currently no record of a national policy focused on the health specificities of the quilombola population, which has been the subject of demands from the National Coordination of Articulation of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (CONAQ) vis- à-vis the State, constituting a process of struggles based on a specific political project, which has rarely been the subject of studies in the field of Public Health, thus justifying the development of a scientific investigation on the topic. Objective: To analyze the process of building the political project of the Brazilian quilombola social movement for health in the period 1988-2023. Methodology: This is a political analysis based on qualitative documentary research, supported by ten public documents prepared by CONAQ, together with public bodies and Brazilian political parties, and published between 1996-2023. In turn, the documentary analysis and categorization gave rise to the following points: 1) characterization of CONAQ regarding its origin, objectives and structure; 2) CONAQ's health concepts and proposals; 3) CONAQ's action in the face of the 1988-2023 facts surrounding quilombola health. Results and Discussion: The results are presented in the form of a scientific scoping review article about the scientific production on quilombola health policies 1988-2023, followed by the dissertation, which in this case, illustrates the steps that constituted CONAQ as a political subject of the quilombola movement, leading the struggles around quilombola health through the Health Collective (2013). Thus, CONAQ has anchored its collective action in two main conceptions of health, “quilombola ancestral health”, a traditional and community dimension, and “quilombola health care”, an institutional dimension of public policies. With proposals to defend the public and universal Unified Health System (SUS), creation of a specific national health policy and a “health model” that takes into account the specificities of quilombos. In turn, CONAQ was present in the main facts and achievements of 1996-2023, such as the formulation of the National Policies for Comprehensive Health of Black Populations (2009) and Countryside, Forests and Waters (2014), mobilizations to guarantee protection against Covid-19 (2020) and at the 1st Free National Quilombola Health Conference (2023). Final Considerations: Therefore, the political project of the contemporary quilombola movement finds in the collective action of the political subject 'CONAQ', a praxis supported by the countercolonial and quilombola exit for health struggles, connected to a broader project of defending the right to land, emancipation, equality, freedom and differentiation in the exercise of citizenship, approaching at this point the ideas and characteristics of ethno-territorial mobilizations and left-wing black nationalism. So, in the case of health, the CONAQ project seeks to respect quilombola ethnocultural and territorial specificities, combining the defense of a 100% public, democratic and universal SUS, thus resembling the ideas present in the Reform Movement project Brazilian Health, with its own characteristics.