Disappearances and Police Killings in Contemporary Brazil: The Politics of Life and Death
go through Sabrina Villeneuve
Routledge, 2021
Some people disappear voluntarily and we call them missing persons. Others are missing; that is, they were killed and buried in unknown locations and circumstances. The word “disappear” is an attempt to translate lost, The term was first used in Argentina to name “political disappearances” during the dictatorship period (1976-1983) and subsequently spread to other countries, including Brazil. This book Disappearances and police killings in contemporary Braziloffers an insightful and surprising critique of the concept of “political disappearance”, which is crucial for truth commissions digging into Brazil’s authoritarian past, but is unhelpful and even counterproductive for analyzing contemporary violence.
This book is consistent with the goal of the Intervention series to publish works that push the boundaries of the international relations discipline, such as the division between inside and outside, the difference between public safety and national security, or its Eurocentric and racial biases. Villeneuve’s book discusses these three issues, namely the role of militarized police (internal/external, public/national security) who act as sovereign agents determining exceptions in postcolonial and racialized states.
In Brazil, the category “political disappearance” applies strictly to people, mainly white, educated and left-wing elites who were allegedly involved in the guerrilla movement against the military regime (1964-1985). The term appears in the Law on Disappeared Persons (Law No. 9.140 of 1995), which established the Special Commission for Dead and Politically Disappeared Persons. Other actors, such as victims’ relatives, newspapers and the National Truth Commission, also referred to the “disappearance of politics” in their statements.
This means that those who disappeared during the dictatorship but were not directly involved in the political struggle, such as indigenous people and migrant workers, are not considered politically missing or lost. Since the term “missing” is specific to a specific group and limited to the military government period (1964-1985), missing persons who do not fit this definition do not have the same visibility in the media or institutional settings. By comparison, during the 21 years of the dictatorship, 243 people disappeared across the country, and 600 people disappeared in the city of Rio de Janeiro alone between 2000 and 2012. , the traditional understanding of politics as “engaging in organized activity” obscures the fact that other types of disappearances based on racial constructs are also political.
The question therefore remains: since the concept of political disappearance depends on the criteria of time and space, what is the framework for contemporary enforced disappearance in Brazil? By analyzing the history of police violence and its origins in the country’s colonial and racial structures, Villeneuve argues that, reason The war on security and drugs (similar to the war on terror) has shaped and depoliticized our understanding of the “missing bodies” of democratic times. It also legitimizes the killing and missing bodies of (mostly black) people in “poor spaces”. slum (shanty town). This logic is not new to racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000) and microeconomics aimed at eliminating the surplus of black labor (Montag, 2005). In this sense, the war on drugs framework is designed to hide the fact that Brazil is not a racial democracy. Instead, the country has eliminated race from explanations of police killings and disappearances. It is worth noting that despite criticisms of the concept of racial democracy by Lelia Gonzalez (2021) and Abdias do Nascimento (1980), among others, it remains the basis for much political and social debate in contemporary Brazil.
The book situates itself within discussions of governance and biopolitics (Foucault, 2008, 2019) and sovereignty, camps and exceptions (Agamben, 2005, 2009) in international relations. Nonetheless, Villeneuve claims that these theories are insufficient to understand state violence in postcolonial and racialized societies such as Brazil. Agamben’s state of exception–as well as Schmitt’s previous theory–confirms that the sovereign is the arbiter of exception. Scholars apply Agamben’s arguments to different contexts, but each context requires some qualifications. Contrary to the prevailing state of exception in democracies, a key point for Agamben, Brazilian police institutions function differently according to skin color, confirming Judith Butler’s argument that vulnerability is unevenly distributed.
The author makes an innovative contribution in elaborating on the concept of camp discussed by Agamben and Mbembe. Agamben identifies the camp as a special space outside the law. Although Mbembe agrees with Agamben’s broad definition, he insists that race plays a role in the definition of the space. Some groups of people are more likely to be included in exclusionary spaces than others. Villeneuve agreed with Mbembe but noted that slum has its peculiarities: the relationship between interior and exterior is more fluid than what is observed in the camp concept. slum Do not limit its residents. However, the “sovereign police” would decide who could act based on criteria embedded in colonial and racial structures. In this sense, police are constantly redefining and redrawing the boundaries of city and citizenship. In other words, the state of exception is not a place but a practice or movement that temporarily creates exceptions.
The examples Villeneuve gives may be unfamiliar to international relations students unfamiliar with Brazilian society. As the author clearly points out, police can do this by using a tool called ” self-resistance, It was established during the military government to protect police officers who allegedly killed people in self-defence. In democratic times, the police continued to use the same tactics, but now in the context of the “war on drugs”. In Brazilian legislation, there is no distinction between drug users and dealers, leaving room for police to define who is a dealer. As a result, police will define exceptions and say some killings were caused by self-resistance Fight traffic traffickers.
Mbembe is a key author of Villeneuve’s argument about disappearances because sovereignty will determine who lives and who dies, and how People will die. Although killings and disappearances follow the same logic as the drug war, killings receive more attention in the media than disappearances because the latter are more difficult to investigate and confirm. Due to its inherent characteristics, disappearance creates an information void and leaves no trace of how it happened. unlike auto de resistência (and the presence of the body)disappearances in a state of judicial limbo, where the line between Zoe and BIOSoutside and inside, presence and absence, are all blurred.
Despite the book’s relevance to contemporary debates on international relations, it does not address certain aspects of the body that are crucial to understanding racial bias in Brazilian police enforcement. As philosopher Adriana Cavarero asks, what does the condition of the corpse tell us about the specificity of contemporary violence? In her seminal work Terrorism: naming contemporary violenceCaballero looked at the dismembered, mutilated body, unrecognizable as human. We can say that contemporary killing takes three forms: self-resistance An identifiable corpse is produced (presence and identifiable); a corpse disappears (and therefore cannot be identified); following Caballero, a corpse is dismembered (presence, but cannot be identified as human).
Missing and Killed in Brazil The question has become even more important at a time when Brazil’s far right adheres to racial democratic discourse and criticizes affirmative action in Brazil. It also sparked an important discussion about the concept of political disappearance in a country still struggling to understand its past and demilitarize its police 60 years after its last dictatorship (1964). On April 2, 2024, the Chairman of the Amnesty Commission investigating crimes committed from 1964 to 1985 apologized to the indigenous people killed during the dictatorship. Despite its local nature, research on disappearances in Brazil could be applied to other “poverty-stricken areas” where the “war on drugs” is a guise for ridding disposable populations.
refer to
Agamben, G. (2005). exception status. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Agamben, G. (2009). What is a device? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Butler, J. (2004). An unstable life. The power of mourning and violence. London and New York: Verso.
Cavallolo, A. (2011). Terrorism: Naming contemporary violence. New directions in critical theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Nascimento, A. (1980). “Quilombismo: Political Choice in Afro-Brazil.” journal of black studies11 (2), Social Change Experience and Suggestions of Afro-Brazilians, pp. 141-178.
Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics – Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (2019). Security, Territory, Population – Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gonzalez, L. et al. (2021). “Racism and sexism in Brazilian culture” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly49(1), pp. 371–394.
Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Montag, W. (2005). “The Economics of Death: Adam Smith and Death in Universal Life” radical philosophy134, pp. 1-11.
Robinson, C. (2000). Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
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