A violência na sociedade brasileira: um painel inconcluso em uma democracia não consolidada

Abstract

After 21 years of political authoritarianism (1964-1985), Brazilian society has returned to constitutional normality and civilian government. In spite of the democratic conquests, it has not been enough to establish the democratic State of law. Grave violations to human rights have persisted, caused by an endemic violence, rooted upon the social structure and customs, and expressed through the behavior of social groups and of moral agents supposed to preserve the public order. Everything seems to indicate that, during the process of democratic transition, the opportunities to solve violently social conflicts and intersubjective tension have increased. A significant number of facts and situations have happened such as: mishandling and torture of prisoners within police districts and penitential institutions; murders and menaces to female peasant workers and their leaders; homicides, that seem deliberate, of children and teen-agers; violence of all kinds against women and young people, specially within the domestic space; lynchings and private justice; extermination of ethnical minorities. To explain these facts under the sociological perspective requires considering, among other aspects, the assymetry between social and political rights, the absence of institutional political and public mediations which can ensure the pacification of society, and also those characteristics of the dominant political culture which seem to point to a certain “socially rooted authoritarianism ”.