By SANDRA BARBOSA PARZIANELLO*
In electoral campaigns, the issue of public safety is used for its political character, without the people finding answers to their demands regarding violence.
The uncertainties surrounding the issue of public safety in Brazil did not arise in recent governments, nor are they demands that have arisen only in the last decade. At the beginning of the 2003st century, more precisely in the first government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2007-XNUMX), the newly elected President of the Republic stated: “Faced with the exhaustion of a model that, instead of generating growth, produced stagnation, unemployment and hunger; faced with the failure of a culture of individualism, selfishness, indifference towards others, (…) the overwhelming precariousness of public safety, (…) Brazilian society chose to change (…).”
In his inauguration speech for his second term (2007-2011), Lula once again prioritized that “vital areas for the population – and the object of permanent demand – are health and public safety.” The linear maintenance of political discourse, although progressive, was taken by a conservative discursive structure.
To make necessary changes was a condition sine qua non, engage with historical and at the same time more recent challenges, reflecting on the transition from an authoritarian model to a democratic one, something very typical of the beginning of the century, which required the ability to adapt and meet new social demands.
Na Letter to the Brazilian People, in 2002, Lula made a pact with the elites, literally: “The changes that are necessary will be made democratically, within the institutional frameworks”, and thus establishing a political discourse tied to institutional tradition, against the “frightening public insecurity”.
Given the social legacy and state regulation practiced for decades, being hostage to the authoritarian regime, accepting the process of redemocratization of a country was a practice far removed from reality, with public administrations being blocked from structural changes and the limited possibility of articulation in favor of effective public policies. It is no coincidence that today we are still dealing with the repercussions and remnants of the authoritarian period, with the visible, excessive and inappropriate use of force, parallel to the frank and decadent institutional fragmentation.
The foundation of our conservative society focuses on inefficient repression. Historically, institutional public security policies have prioritized repressive actions over preventive ones, with little or no integration between security agencies and the prison system.
There is an effort to demonstrate forced rhetorical constructions in defense of maximum security controlled by the State. However, this effective control never existed. After all, the failure and shame of “rock bottom” were never admitted, not even the shooting of citizens considered undesirable to the system, nor their disappearances or the torture practiced against political prisoners, all in the name of order and as if to impose respect (as if there were any such thing), in order to identify a people who were victims of the political contingency that constituted total authoritarianism.
Public insecurity is a demand that is articulated (and widespread) in Brazilian society. Because it deals with people's daily lives and real lives. It involves a complexity of demands that await solutions, reinterpreted by the many demands even in isolated cases and without ever being properly met. Not even in extreme situations such as when the Army occupied Complexo do Alemão in 2018, in Rio de Janeiro, during the Bolsonaro administration, have we seen significant progress. The balance has been left with the balance of inefficiency, incapacity and the blatant lack of institutional reporting (under the allegation of secrecy), which results in accumulated failures since the attempts made in the early 1990s.
The conservatism of security institutions has resisted necessary changes over time. To name a few of the political and social challenges, we have: (i) the lack of institutional integration, since the autonomy of states and political resistance hinder processes; (ii) discourses disconnected from public policies to implement a culture of prevention instead of repression, without giving due value to policies that combine security and the way of acting; (iii) democratic fissures, reflected in the structural causes of violence, in intolerance towards processes and protocols, in resistance to overcoming historical limitations and in the incompleteness of the institutional political culture.
In a game of political vanity, the people appear in the background, hostage to collusion in the dimensions of the economy, diplomacy (failed) and the installation of a parallel state, organized in a network, which challenges the very existence of public security.
The policy in this area adopted by President Lula in the 2000s was characterized as rigorous and efficient, according to popular assessment and the government itself. Lula classified the heinous crimes, massacres and lynchings that were observed in several Brazilian cities as “a war of all against all”. Assuming that the institutions were discredited, he believed in the possibility of an education policy for public safety, as well as in the search for peace of mind for the Brazilian people, without continuous violation of human rights and understanding the need to educate citizens, believing in the sowing of values and fostering the articulation of collective projects.
The government started from the understanding that it was time to redefine institutional structures, to address the precariousness of the system based on social changes in its relations, so that everyone would have the possibility of enjoying equal rights. The attempt to build a commitment with the people, so that the initiatives would guarantee a peaceful society, specifically in access to public security, was a high stake, as it involved training for citizenship, access to technologies, without discrimination, as well as attempting to limit and label individual and/or collective interests.
In the field of public security, ideas have been disseminated to analyze how discourses on crime and security shape public policies. What has been seen is the formation of antagonistic camps between “good citizens” and “criminals,” which can be interpreted as a discursive construction that legitimizes certain repressive practices or populist policies.
In our analysis, we took into account the thinking of the Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau (1935-2014), who considered that public security was vulnerable during the Lula administrations because it is an idea that confirms the criticism of foundationalism, that is, the observation that there are no universal or definitive solutions for issues that are always subject to overdeterminations, as in the case of public security, simply reaching contingent responses based on always political disputes. Factors such as the lack of structural reforms, the lack of resources and the excessive centralization of power revealed the government's difficulties in implementing effective policies aligned with the historical and daily challenges of the people.
In the same perspective that the redemocratization process took place in Brazil, the political agenda of public security proved to be a slow process in which institutional changes occurred gradually, based on the exploitation of gaps and ambiguities in the system, and were managed by political actors. It is also true that our country went through a path of circulation of new ideas, through the articulation between governments and intellectuals, through the maturation of groups and many academic studies, which were fundamental for the creation of better-designed public policies and accommodated in given moments.
The lack of focus on the people and the social demands of the most vulnerable population was very clear in the frustrations with the Bolsonaro government, which relied on the public security agenda to get elected, but left much to be desired in the performance of its institutions, with a drop in the rates of weapons seizures and cases of reports against drug trafficking, with a lower performance compared to the governments that preceded it. Under the leadership of Jair Bolsonaro, the budget for security was a record, but without proper execution due to the lack of government projects and programs, leaving a balance of politicization of the police forces and the weakening of preventive policies. The country was led in the opposite direction of the discursive formation used until then, which had been consolidated by the meaning of fighting corruption, institutional order and public security, built in that new government on the basis of authoritarian populism.
The problem with public safety has deep roots. In practice, it emphasizes issues that require good performance of the domestic and foreign economy, diplomacy, and good institutional relations between the three branches of government, which is one of the most disputed topics in heated debates between political opponents and their activists.
The issue of public safety must be treated as a fundamental right. Its promotion depends on the implementation of public policies, an agenda that must be articulated by the value of life and physical integrity, by the articulation of demands for prevention and training of police action, with transparency and social participation.
What people notice in their daily lives, however, is that institutions dedicate little resolution to security policies, while creating false narratives, without providing adequate actions for victims and without the due priority and prevention, lacking investigation and referral of crimes via legislation that has only recently been updated, such as in cases of violence against women, racial injury, among many others.
In the speeches, the coordinated and integrated political priority with the federation must corroborate the confrontation of cases, intervene in the direction of investment projects, with technology and a realistic vision regarding the dominant reality of organized crime, parallel power and the actions of militias.
Some democratic implications mark Lula's third term, highlighting initiatives such as the Constitutional Amendment Bill, the Public Security PEC, as a plan that includes the institutionalization of the Unified Public Security System (SUSP), enabling greater integration between the Union, states and municipalities, in addition to the creation of autonomous ombudsman's offices to monitor abuses. Another relevant initiative was the effective modernization and financing for the provision of permanent funds such as the National Public Security Fund and the Penitentiary Fund, and with them, we finance integrated actions, avoiding contingencies.
Expanding the powers of the Federal Police, transforming political attributions into institutional actions and integrating the different security forces of the State is another necessary and effective path. There are challenges to be overcome, but there is political awareness that it needs to be done. Unless the issue of public security continues to be just electoral rhetoric.
In a country like Brazil, the issue of public safety necessarily involves the construction of its own meaning amidst a hesitant social formation and given the geographic size of our territory, as well as its enormous cultural diversity. We will increasingly need to convince ourselves that this implies an educational culture, and that a technopolitical or even a partisan perspective is not enough. Neutral meanings in which information of public interest is constituted and which are clear and transparent contribute favorably to guaranteeing the right to freedom and the exercise of full citizenship by the people, resulting in the strengthening of the democratic institutional system.
The possibility of interdependence between political institutions and political discourses becomes essential for us to understand the articulations of political power, as well as the always precarious social implications of organized and integrated crime, in contingency with the belief in the National Congress that has been adjusting legislation to deal with the security minefield.
*Sandra Barbosa Parzianello it's jJournalist and PhD in Political Science from the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel).
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