Toward a dictatorship over the poor?: Notes on the penalization of poverty in Brazil

Like many countries of the Second World caught in the throes of post-Fordism before they could reap the full benefits of Fordist-style development, Brazil is tempted to import the US-style discourse and policy of 'zero tolerance' because, enshrouded in the aura emanating from America as the world's sole symbolic superpower and global Mecca of crime control, they appear cutting edge, effective and efficient; and because they are the indispensable order-maintenance counterpart to policies of economic deregulation and fiscal austerity adopted by Latin American countries under the press of international financial agencies. But in Brazil, as in neighboring nations, this borrowing promises to produce a social catastrophe of historic proportions because the depth and scale of urban poverty are much greater, violent crime is more prevalent and more entrenched in the history and economy of the country, and because the Brazilian police is not a remedy against violence but a major source of violence in its own right. Moreover, Brazil does not possess a rationalized court system capable of ensuring minimal protection of constitutional rights and its prisons are plagued by fantastic overcrowding, gross lack of access to food, hygiene and health and inordinately high levels of brutality, akin to concentration camps for the disruptive fractions of the (sub)proletariat. Under such conditions, to respond to the disorders generated by the rise of absolute and relative poverty associated with incorporation in the emergent neoliberal global order with the penal apparatus is tantamount to instituting a chaotic dictatorship over the poor, and therefore antithetical to the project of nation building on a pacified and democratic basis.