Entre linhas e fronteiras: a histórica questão lindeira entre os estados do Espírito Santo e Minas Gerais (1911-1963)

Abstract

This research aims at investigating the legal and institutional impasses of the frontier issue involving the states of Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais, whose imprecision, since the Brazilian colonial period, led to the emergence in the twentieth century of the dispute between both states, "agreed" only in the year 1963, by means of a treaty signed between the two federative units. Based on documentation that is still unexplored - documents from the Interior and Justice Secretariat and the State Secretariat of the State of Espírito Santo - we extract reports, letters, letters, telegrams and journalistic publications in order to understand, in a general way, how this dispute occurred in the area to establish the position of the government authorities of the states of Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais and the main arguments of both to defend and legitimize the jurisdiction of their state in the Disputed Zone. The hypothesis is that the dispute over jurisdiction in the area challenged by Minas and Espírito Santo was based on the logic of economic expansion, that is, on advancing over previously unexplored territories in search of new lands for economic purposes, and both governments they encountered the inexistence of the legal-territorial limits. In this sense, the question of boundaries accompanied throughout the history the colonizing "wave" that walked towards that border, at first to the south and later to the north of the river Doce, causing the conflicts of limits mentioned above. In order to reach the proposed objectives, regarding the methodological aspects, we follow the recommendations of manuals of scientific methodology, when they deal with documentary research in the human sciences. The sources used in the present study will be of several natures: we use sources of quantitative character, as they were also collated, sources of qualitative character. On the theoretical side, it was fundamental to launch the present concept of frontier, understood and used in two perspectives: geographical and sociological. We assumed that it was necessary to understand the meaning and tradition of the formation and consolidation of national boundaries to specifically understand the central object of our study - the border between the states of Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais.