Neoliberalismo, democracia e violência: uma análise comparada da violência policial no Brasil e na África do Sul durante a década de 1990

Abstract

The objective of the research is to compare police violence in Brazil and South Africa during the 1990s based on an analysis of the international context marked by the hegemony of market democracy and neoliberalism, with profound impacts on the domestic reality of these countries. The research is qualitative, and reports from government, local police and other international human rights organizations and bodies - such as Amnesty International, the United Nations (UN) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa are analyzed. Books, scientific articles and news related to the topic covered are also used. From the systemic analysis of the neoliberal democracy model, it is concluded that this scenario favored the existence of structural violence and that police violence can be understood as the projection of Brazilian and South African state brutality. It can also be understood how neoliberal globalization has allowed police and military practices to change the perception of internal threats, in order to safeguard the privileges of economic and political elites above the rights and values of vulnerable social minorities. In this way, neoliberalism supported the perspective of militarization of the police in order to control, through repression, people who distanced themselves from the centrality of the neoliberal individual. Brazilian and South African police violence is discussed through the analysis of data and publications pertinent to this topic, as well as the evaluation of indexes and concrete cases of police violence in these countries during the 1990s. This analysis allows us to understand how the domestic reproduction of neoliberalism represented - in Brazil and South Africa in the 1990s - a reverberation of structural violence sustained by neoliberal democratic logic.