Luziânia (GO) – Agents of the National Security Forces starting a 6-month operation in the Federal District (2007)
That violence is pervasive in Brazil is a familiar and widely accepted narrative, backed by an immense volume of statistics, studies, articles, and even art. According to a study published by the Latin American Studies Center (Cebela), more than one million people were murdered in Brazil between 1980 and 2011, making it the world’s seventh-most violent country. It is perpetrated and perpetuated by state actors, private individuals, and civil society groups alike. Deadly police force is routinely used as a form of social control. Impunity is rife, with only 5-8% of all criminal cases investigated solved. In 1988, Brazil was the first country of its kind in South America to adopt a constitution that demanded harsh penalties for the infringement of a significantly large scope of civil liberties. With that in mind, the above makes for grim reading. What does it mean for a 21st century democracy that violence is part and parcel of its citizens’ everyday lived experiences?
Violence in Brazil is not endemic and neither is it of a particular sort. It is no longer concentrated in particular regions or in major metropolitan areas. It is not limited to criminal gangs or traffickers. The conventional narrative says that, without an effective rule of law, fundamental civil liberties are in jeopardy. Democracies in this position are held to be deficient, disjunctive, and incomplete. However the case of Brazil shows this sort of analysis is both shallow and brief. Brazil’s is a strong and consolidated democracy, enjoying a significant period of inclusive, competitive, and uninterrupted elections. What this shows is that widespread violence does not equate to the failure of democratic institutions, nor vice versa; pervasive violence and democracy, in other words, are not dichotomous. It is not the case that where one starts, the other ends. Violence, politics, and democracy have a much more complex relationship than that, especially in Brazil.
Understanding Brazilian politics means understanding how violence affects political practice and subjectivity, and how it remains an instrument for political rule and resistance. Violence in Brazil has created sub-state orders that exist separately from, but in constant interaction with, the rule of law. These are orders often built to control crime and maintain the social order, and thus maintain democratic institutions. In other words, police extra-judicial killings meant to suppress a particularly violent area and wars and truces between competing criminal gangs without any direct reference to the state all help to maintain social order and democracy.
Through its impact on the political subjectivities and sensibilities of Brazilian citizens, violence is constitutive of Brazilian democracy. Violence, in this respect, is symbolic: groups regularly dominated and subjugated come to believe that their domination is the natural order. With this view, they participate in, and perpetuate, their own subjugation. This affects how individuals, in both the dominated and dominating groups, view their place in society and the political order. An illustration of this is the widespread support for extra-judicial killings by the police, where the dominant groups that the police allegedly solely protect, do not recognise that the abuse of others’ human rights also puts theirs at risk. All of this affects the nature of civil society. Citizenship loses its meaning because social and economic rights are unfairly and forcibly undermined and restricted.
However, there is another side to this. For those against whom violence is routinely perpetrated, namely the poor, while violence institutes and reinforces this false ‘natural’ order, it is also the means by which said order is challenged. Even in democratic contexts, the struggle for equality and rights may not be separable from the violent encounters they entail. This is especially true when the goals of democracy have been appropriated by different groups – both the dominated and dominating. You can often find the goal of maintaining a semblance of social order, prized by elites, is thus challenged by a popular desire to achieve an effectively equal distribution of citizenship rights, if necessary by violence.
Pervasive violence is thus, paradoxically, both problematic for and central to Brazilian democracy. It needs to be recognised that while such violence degrades the quality of democracy for the individual, democracy and violence can and do coexist in Brazil. Moreover, important facets of the democratic process are impossible to conceptualise independent of violence. Thus, instead of making sweeping and simplistic generalisations about the deficiency and incompleteness of Brazilian democracy, it is more useful to study how violence interacts with politics and democratic institutions and what role it plays in everyday lived experiences.