“Trusting with one eye and distrusting with the other”: negotiations among catireiros in the Triângulo Mineiro and Alto Paranaíba regions

Although negotiation is regarded as one of the most fruitful business activities to address trust and honesty in decision making, studies on this topic are still necessary for the conceptual advancement of the field. This paper aims to analyze the relationships based on trust and honesty among the catireiros based in the Triângulo Mineiro and Alto Paranaiba mesoregions of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in their negotiations. To achieve the proposed goal, we performed qualitative research, with an exploratory approach. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 31 catireiros of the Triângulo Mineiro and Alto Paranaiba regions and analyzed according to the postulates of French Discourse Analysis. We concluded that, on the one hand, honesty and trust are paramount for some catireiros and contribute to the strengthening of their prestige and reputation withing the groups in which they are inserted. In other words, these values operate as a way of legitimizing who those catireiros are and how they negotiate. On the other hand, the catira is also characterized as a potentially opportunistic practice, which may involve mistrust, lies, manipulation, and dishonesty as elements inherent to its process and conditions for traders to obtain advantages in their catiras .