Security, watchword: the inflows of criminal authoritarianism in the application of Chilean and Brazilian anti-terror legislation

Abstract

The article analyzes the case Norín Catríman y Otros v. Chile, judged by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in May 2014, from a perspective that shifts it from the standpoint of an isolated case of misapplication of the anti-terror legislation and places it in the Latin American context of widespread violations of individual rights and freedoms of members of vulnerable groups through repressive criminal interventions. In this context, the treatment of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) is evidenced, in a context in which the rejection of political dissent and the denial of the rights and freedoms of protesters also occurred through criminalization, even before the creation of an anti-terror legislation. Thus, despite the unequivocal dangers arising from the typification of the crime of terrorism from a broad and open incriminating law, it is certain that in Latin America daily violations of constitutional rights and freedoms have occurred without the need to resort to an “exception legislation”. However, the use of anti-terror legislation is now also present in Brazil with the creation of Law 13.260 of March 16, 2016, as another mechanism for expanding and anticipating criminal control aimed at vulnerable groups, that are defined as “dangerous”, falling within a deep-rooted dynamic of selective and routine curtailment of rights and freedoms, anchored in the generic imperatives of defending security and maintaining order. Such cases corroborate a long history of undemocratic strategies to criminalize social issues.