Efficient Breach of Law, Community Dissolution, and Socio-Environmental Conflicts

Notes from Pashukanis, Induced Seismicity, and the Mineração Vale Verde Case (Craíbas/Arapiraca–AL)

Abstract

The article analyzes the concept of “efficient breach of law” by articulating Pashukanis’s Marxist critique of the legal form with Law and Economics (L&E) and with the protection of fundamental rights in socio-environmental conflicts related to mining in the Agreste region of Alagoas (Brazil). It starts from the Pashukanian thesis that the legal relation gains historical concreteness in acts of violation of law, rather than in abstract obedience to the norm, thus highlighting the centrality of conflict within the legal form. Next, it discusses the formulation of “efficient breach of law” in Law and Economics—especially through the theory of efficient breach—as critically reconstructed by Uchimura (2018, 2023), according to which law becomes one of the terms in a rational calculation between the cost of compliance and the cost of breach. From there, it examines how this market-based logic affects fundamental rights, particularly the right to an ecologically balanced environment (Article 225 of Brazil’s 1988 Constitution) and the liability regime for environmental damages, including in the context of induced seismicity associated with mining in the Agreste region of Alagoas. The text draws on the case of Mineração Vale Verde (Mina Serrote), in the municipalities of Craíbas and Arapiraca (AL), as a critical case study marked by conflicts involving cracks in houses, dam risks, low-magnitude earth tremors with a possible induced component, and mobilizations by peasant communities. Based on the category of “community dissolution”, developed by Uchimura (2020) in the study of the Gesteira community after the collapse of the Fundão Dam, the article analyzes how processes of reparation, licensing, and risk management can disaggregate community ties around mining operations, including in the Agreste. It argues that the combination of legal form, economic rationality, and reparation instruments tends to structure an “efficient breach” of environmental and social fundamental rights, insofar as damage, territorial dispersion, and community dissolution itself are internalized as predictable costs of mining accumulation. Finally, it examines the situation of family farming communities in the vicinity of the mine in light of the National Council for Human Rights’ Recommendations regarding the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants, as well as the socio-legal grounds for recognizing peasant communities as traditional communities in Northeast Brazil, indicating the consequences of this framing for licensing, consultation, and reparation.