By NEWTON BIGNOTTO*
Read an excerpt, selected by the author, from the newly released book
Illusions Fall: Democracy in Peril or Faction War
1.
Brazil has experienced, in recent years, a large number of social transformations and political movements. To help us in our analyses, let us try to remember the strong times of our recent past. Let's start with the year 2014. Shortly before President Dilma's re-election, the Federal Police discovered a case of corruption involving members of the government, politicians from different parties, traditional businessmen and, above all, directors of Petrobras. The so-called Lava-jato operation had a devastating effect on Brazilian political life, with repercussions comparable to the “clean hands” operation which, in the 1990s, profoundly altered Italian political life.
The issue of corruption, which has always been present in Brazilian history, once again occupied a prominent place and became a central accusation of opposition groups in relation to the PT government, but not just them. If corruption has been part of the country's public life at least since the Second Republic, the fact of exposing, in all the details, the means used by political actors, businessmen and former criminals convicted of justice to steal public money has contributed to putting into question the entire institutional apparatus on which the young democracy was based.
Almost at the same time, still in 2014, the country's economy collapsed. The inflation rate reached 6,75% in September, while the annual GDP growth rate stagnated at 0,5%. The inability of the Brazilian economy to respond to the many measures put into practice by the government, a fact combined with the fall in the international price of commodities, plunged Brazil into a negative spiral whose effects were soon felt in the lives of Brazilians.[I] Economic tensions mixed with the political crisis engendered by the results of the Lava Jato operation threw the country into a whirlpool from which no one seemed able to escape.
As Laura Carvalho summarized very well: “At the beginning of 2016, two main theses dominated the economic debate. The first maintained that the adjustment had not been made, ignoring that the increase in the primary deficit took place despite substantial cuts in discretionary spending, due to the even greater drop in revenues. The second blamed President Dilma Rousseff herself for the lack of investor confidence”.[ii]
None of these explanations were entirely valid, but, added to fears that much of the political system would be engulfed by anti-corruption policies, they constituted a powerful fuel that led to the coup that would cost the president her mandate. The legal element that served as the basis for the presidential impeachment, the so-called “fiscal pedals”, had little technical consistency, mainly because it referred to practices followed by all previous presidents. But this mattered little in the eyes of agents who were determined to seize power by any means.[iii] What was at stake was not a tax issue, but the survival of the presidential term, which was increasingly attacked by a growing number of political actors.
The years 2015-2016 saw a resurgence of large protest marches.[iv] The president took office for her second term under pressure from her opponents without knowing how to react. In late 2014, shortly after the elections, the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party), whose candidate Aécio Neves had come second in the presidential elections, contested the final poll results and demanded that the elections be annulled. The months that followed were extremely difficult and already heralded the collapse of the government. On the economic front, the president tried to turn to the right, by entrusting the Ministry of Finance to a technician close to the financial markets. However, Joaquim Levy was not able to revive the economy, which further isolated the government, attacked by right and left forces.
The result is known. The president lost her mandate. Her removal will go down in history as a blot on the course of Brazilian democracy. On April 17, 2016, Brazilians watched live a long parliamentary session in Brasília, during which more than five hundred deputies voted against or in favor of losing Dilma Rousseff's mandate. However, instead of referring to legal or even political reasons for their decisions, the deputies preferred to send messages to their family members, address religious issues, abundantly evoking the name of God and even revealing their gastronomic preferences.
Jair M. Bolsonaro, then an obscure member of the Chamber for more than 28 years, preferred to praise the president's executioner, Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, responsible for the torture of Dilma, a political prisoner during the military dictatorship.[v] A gap opened up that would serve not to renew Brazilian politics in its journey towards more justice and equality, but to strengthen all extremist movements, which openly preach the country's setback in the social, moral, legal and social fields. political.
This period was the subject of numerous interpretations in the press, in specialized magazines and books. I content myself with presenting two authors who seem to me to be representative of the most balanced analyses.
André Singer proved to be one of the sharpest interpreters of the PT's years of power.[vi] Having participated in the first phase of the Lula government, Singer managed to distance himself from the object of his investigations, demonstrating a deep knowledge of the way left leaders proceeded. In his book, Singer sought to understand the Brazilian political scene from the analysis of what he called the class structure of the conflict. In 2018, he again intervened in the public debate, publishing a book about what had happened in Brazil in previous years.[vii]
For him, the 2013 demonstrations contained contradictory elements in their composition, or, as he summarized: “the available material indicates the plausibility of there having been two Junes of classes in the same streets”.[viii] To support his point, he notes that no less than 43% of protest marchers had a university degree. To summarize his position, the thinker says: “June represented the intersection of different classes and ideologies, and in some cases, opposites”.[ix]
For André Singer, Brazilian democracy, whether during the Second Republic or the Third Republic, always had the same structure. “In both cases, a popular party and a middle-class party struggle over the crucial problem of how to respond to the aspiration of the masses for a greater share in the national wealth.”[X] To stabilize the system, there has always been what he calls the interior party. In recent years, it had been the PMDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party), which anchored its presence in public life with its clientelistic and, supposedly, non-ideological practices.[xi]
That system collapsed, leading to what he describes as a tragedy of Brazilian political life. Singer does not deny the PT's involvement in corruption scandals or the fact that President Dilma erratically conducted her government's economic policy. For him, however, without the hardening of the class struggle for the appropriation of State resources, the Brazilian crisis would not have acquired the alarming contours of recent years. Bravely, he raises an original hypothesis to understand the resounding failure of the Dilma government and its interruption in 2016. Brazilian state.”[xii]
Having displeased large sections of the Brazilian elite and breaking with the precarious balance between the three stabilizing elements of the Brazilian political system, represented by the “popular, middle-class and interior” parties, the president would have doomed herself to failure for all these factors and for not even having the decisive support of his own party and the social movements traditionally associated with it. In a way, she succumbed to a crisis that she neither had the necessary skills to face nor could she control.
The second thinker is Sérgio Abranches, author of one of the most influential theories in the social sciences on the dynamics of the Brazilian political system. It is, as I have already had the opportunity to show, the idea according to which democracy, in the periods of its existence in the country, could always be established having as a mode of operation what he called “coalition presidentialism”. Originally, the thesis was used to study the Second Republic; however, recently, the author expanded its use to the entire republican period. It was from this theoretical framework that he sought to understand the dynamics of recent events, which put Brazilian democracy at risk.[xiii]
Sérgio Abranches starts from the realization of the seriousness of the Brazilian crisis to try to understand the chain of events that dominated political life from 2013 to 2018. On the one hand, he remains faithful to the methodological approach that characterizes his studies and seeks to expose political facts in the most neutral as possible. On the other hand, in the serene account of events, Abranches weaves a series of comments that constitute a nuanced approach to the analyzed object. Thus, after showing the succession of actions taken by various political agents in 2015 and 2016 and the explosion of large demonstrations against Dilma, he concluded: “Mobilized society knew what it was protesting against on one side and the other, but it did not provide ways to the future. Congress, polarized and paralyzed. The Executive, cornered. Judiciary under pressure. A delicate institutional framework was set up, with a high probability of rupture, political or institutional.”[xiv]
The author's analysis focuses on the study of the government's balance point and the country's ability to live through its crises while preserving democracy. In other words, Abranches is an “institutionalist” thinker, for whom the understanding of democracy involves understanding the dynamics of its institutions and their modes of functioning.
In this logic, he follows the events seeking to interpret the signs of rupture of the “coalition presidency” model. Unlike other thinkers, Abranches is not content with the thesis that the president's impeachment was a coup d'état. This does not prevent him from noting the violation of the constitutional law present in many acts of the different powers in the recent context. Commenting on certain actions of the Judiciary, he notes that the politicization of this power was growing.[xv] If the president's impeachment process was a political procedure, it cannot be thought of according to exclusively legal references, since it was subject to challenges and will always be The author is very sensitive to the fact that, throughout the Third Republic, two presidents lost their mandates through the impeachment procedure: Fernando Collor de Mello (in 1992) and Dilma Rousseff (in 2016). What should be rare seems to be increasingly part of the way various political forces choose to resolve their conflicts.
In the end, Abranches' judgment is mitigated. On the one hand, he tries to measure the extent of the crisis based on the parameters he established to think about Brazil. Referring to the Temer government, he states: “Although the stress was great, the institutional apparatus of the Third Republic, put to the test, continued to function.”[xvii] Despite the apparent optimism, he notes that the Brazilian political system has known very violent crises and that it would be unlikely that the system, subject to such dysfunction, could remain intact.
One of the aspects of recent political history that worries him the most is the fragmentation of parliament's composition. In the 2018 elections, more than thirty parties competed for the posts of deputies and senators in the states and within the federal government. This fact proved to be decisive for the instability of the regime, since, with each vote in one of the legislative bodies, the president has to negotiate with a large number of political actors. On the other hand, the system proved to be completely permeable to corruption in different ways. One of them is directly linked to the illegal financing of increasingly expensive campaigns.[xviii] In such a deteriorating scenario, says Abranches, it is difficult to say whether Brazilian democracy will be able to survive itself.
2.
In my opinion, none of the explanations given by experts fully reflects what has happened in the country in recent years. This does not result from the imperfect nature of the considerations formulated by economists, historians, philosophers, political scientists and jurists, but from the fact that it is an ongoing process, which has not yet revealed its full meaning and its consequences. To stay true to the path I've taken so far, it seems reasonable to try to think about events from a theoretical operator that is part of the republican tradition. The concept I chose is that of faction warfare. I do not intend, with this, to replace all the analyzes presented so far with a more global vision of the phenomenon of deterioration of the country's democratic life. I think, however, that the chosen concept expands the field of analysis of the Brazilian situation. This choice has something unprecedented in the theoretical vocabulary used in our social sciences, but, from a phenomenological point of view, it can be a useful instrument for the purposes of this book.
3.
An attentive observer of the Brazilian public scene between 2013 and 2018 would have no problem saying that the country was divided in two. In the political sphere, there were those who ardently wanted the end of the PT government and those who defended the mandate of President Dilma and, after impeachment, the removal of Vice President Michel Temer, who took power after the coup d'état. This division was reflected in society, affecting not only the professional lives of individuals, but also relationships within families. This scenario is somewhat similar to what France knew at the time of the Dreyfus affair, at the end of the XNUMXth century, when, sometimes, residents of the same street did not greet each other because of their position regarding the condemnation of the Jewish captain. accused of espionage on behalf of Germany.
We can say that the description of the conflicts that cross Brazil from a binary logic is correct from the sociological point of view and corresponds to the behaviors that exist in society in general. This, however, is just one layer of the country's political and social reality. There is a second layer that concerns the struggle for political power and control of state mechanisms, which cannot be understood through the binary division of society. To understand this phenomenon we need to use another theoretical tool.
In the texts of the Federalists of the American Revolution is the necessary concept to demonstrate the plausibility of my hypothesis. In article number 10, James Madison studies the effects of the existence of what he calls factions in public life.[xx] At the time of writing the 1787-1788 document, when the attempt was made to ratify the federal Constitution, the division of the political body and the risk that the central state would not consolidate was a central problem for the Americans, who struggled to impose a vision of the future institutional organization of the country. Many citizens complained that the existence of different factions made political life unstable and risky, often threatening the rights of minority strata of society.[xx]
Madison defined a faction as “a collection of citizens, whether they form a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and act from some common impulse of passion or interest contrary to the rights of other citizens, or the constant and general interest of the commonwealth. community".[xxx] This is a classic theme of western political thought, but it finds a new meaning in modernity insofar as factions are considered a threat to popular sovereignty and its expression in the common interest.
Bruce Ackerman, converting the analysis of the Federalists into current language, states that we can speak of two types of factions: the “ideological” or “charismatic” factions, based on passions, and those based on private interests.[xxiii] The former are formed by a movement stimulated by a heightened feeling in the face of some aspect of reality and are, according to the thinker, of shorter duration. The second type is based on interests and is more resistant to time because it reflects essential characteristics of human nature. Nothing prevents a factious group from incorporating both types, but the distinction is interesting because it allows assessing the risks that the predominance of the part over the whole poses to the republican regime.
It is possible to see today the almost premonitory character of this approach to the political problem of the division of the political body into opposing particular actors. In the case of “ideological” factions, they prospered not only within the various strata of society, but also within parties and institutions. The storm caused by the adoption of particularist ideologies in contemporary societies shows how devastating the project of affirming a particular conception of society as a universal value can be.
Of course, the first thing that comes to mind when formulating this hypothesis is totalitarian regimes. But the action of this type of faction on the public scene has different gradations and does not immediately destroy institutions. In any case, its existence destabilizes the balance between powers and threatens the Constitution. What perhaps was not foreseen in the federalists' articles is the intensity that factional struggles can reach within the constituted powers.
To understand the radicalization induced by time in the field of disputes between factions, it is worth remembering that the second type of faction based on “diversity and inequality in the distribution of wealth”[xxiii] became almost a constitutive element of capitalist societies. In view of the current situation of our democracies, especially those that are far from being consolidated, it is imperative to recognize that they are crossed by disputes resulting from the struggle for possession of material means, which disguise oppositions with ideological arguments.
This combination becomes even more sulphurous when we remember that current societies, Brazil in particular, coexist with scandalous levels of inequality. In this context, the actions of factions formed by interests affect not only institutional life, which is no small thing, but the lives of large sections of the population subjected to disastrous material conditions. The existence of factions within the State, far from being a phenomenon of ordinary political struggle, reaches the structuring core of popular sovereignty. We are very close to this reality in Brazil.
Let's go back to the demonstrations of June 2013. Many of the demands expressed by participants in the marches were legitimate and related to real problems of the Brazilian population. In this sense, they expressed the conflictual dimension that defines the democratic regime and reflected the need and willingness of broad sectors of the population to participate in public life. This can be understood in light of the theoretical parameters used throughout the book. At that time, a demand for autonomy, coming from marginalized sectors of society, emerged, and the search for a sense of community, which seemed lost after the ebb of social movements under the PT governments, appeared in places traditionally neglected by the State.
This seemed to indicate that 2013 would be the year of democratic assertion in Brazil and not the other way around. As already pointed out, it is not possible to analyze what happened in that year in isolation. It is important to observe what happened over the years to risk an interpretation of events. In my view, the period discussed here was not one of consolidation of democratic institutions, but one of their weakening. The fragmentary nature of the demands migrated to and contaminated political life. The most direct result of 2013 was the emergence or strengthening of a large number of factions that, guided by their particular interests, openly contested power.
In the field of ideological factions, it is possible to identify several groups that arrived on the public scene to try to impose their values and claims as if they were universal values. This is the case, for example, of several Pentecostal churches, which used deputies and senators affiliated with them to impose, in Congress, regressive demands in terms of customs, which directly attacked minorities and fragile groups such as indigenous peoples.
At the same time, groups such as the Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) began to defend values and programs typical of right-wing parties, such as the reduction of the State and the radicalization of economic liberalism inspired by the policies applied in England during the period of Margaret Thaecher (1979-1990). . Hatred of the left and its ideas, often misunderstood, became current currency in important sectors of the middle class. An example can be found in the professional associations of physicians that launched a real battle against the More Doctors Program, aimed at the country's poorest citizens. As many of the professionals involved were of Cuban origin, Brazilian doctors, with the support of their professional associations, went to the Fortaleza airport to cheer their Latin American colleagues who arrived to work in communities hitherto deprived of all medical assistance.
In terms of economic interests, groups of parliamentarians began to radicalize the defense of their private interests and their factions without worrying about the common interest. This was the case, for example, with representatives of the agricultural sector and the arms trade. Jair Messias Bolsonaro had long-standing ties to the arms industry and promised, during the election campaign, to free arms sales in the country, even in the face of the fact that Brazil is one of the most violent countries in the world. Sometimes these groups act together. In others, they try to buy the support of members of Congress without trying to convince other political groups of the legitimacy of their positions.
There is nothing new in the existence of these groups of interests and purely ideological claims in national political life. As Sergio Abranches pointed out, this is a hallmark of our democratic history. What has changed in this scenario is that, in recent years, various groups, movements and parties have become political factions. Instead of fighting in institutions to assert their ideas, ideological and self-interested factions began to appropriate state mechanisms to make their points of view prevail at all costs. This behavior contaminated civil society, accentuating political conflicts.
The particular nature of the claims makes conflict resolution impossible since each faction behaves, as the federalists predicted, as if its interests were universal. This behavior became even more harmful from the moment that new actors began to act in the public scenario according to the logic of a true war of factions. Take, for example, the Judiciary. In a democracy, it is expected that it can serve as a forum for resolving conflicts according to a common agreement on the universal validity of the laws of the country. Over the last few years, however, members of the Judiciary have started to behave like political actors, who do not need to account for their actions when they believe they are acting in the name of the common good.
This is the case of Judge Sérgio Moro, responsible for the anti-corruption operation Lava-Jato, who, at one point, released illegal recordings of private conversations by President Dilma in the name of an alleged common interest. The recent revelations made by the site The Intercept show that this was the standard of action of the magistrate.[xxv]
Likewise, members of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) began to interfere directly in the political scene instead of focusing on the defense of the Constitution and its strict application. The plenary sessions of the superior courts turned into a real battle of egos, each minister defending his conception of the law instead of trying to understand the meaning of the Constitution. Along the same lines, some media have also begun to act as factions, not just interpreting events, which is part of the press's mission, but selectively influencing the course of political life, according to what they believe to be their legitimate interests.
We saw the same behavior, for example, in 2013, when journalists and actors linked to private communication groups encouraged people to participate in demonstrations that targeted the government. In the following years, factional behavior was confirmed by the unequal coverage of demonstrations against or in favor of the government. Of course, there is nothing wrong with a democracy, where there is no quasi-monopoly of the media, for a press body to publicly state its political positions. The problem arises when these bodies try to influence political life, acting as publicity organs for private interests, playing a direct political role and occupying a place normally attributed to political parties.[xxiv]
Another way of understanding the problem of factions is present in Machiavelli. Unlike the moralism that dominates certain current readings of the problem of corruption, the Florentine secretary believed that a corrupt society is one that no longer preserves freedom as the core of its institutions and no longer respects the legal equality of its citizens. For him, the stability of a society is not measured by the intensity of the conflict between its constituent parts, but by the way in which they are resolved.
In summary: a free society is one in which disputes are channeled to legal institutions, which prevent private violence from imposing itself in social relations. Without the channel of laws and their institutional expression, political struggles become private disputes, removing from the Constitution, in current terms, the ability to limit the terrain of action of the parties that act within political bodies. This situation appears in all its gravity in the cities that Machiavelli calls “very corrupt”, in which one can see the destruction of freedom at its highest degree. Corruption, in the Machiavellian sense, reaches the heart of republics. It marks the impossibility of living together, based on the set of values that place freedom at the heart of the political body and having the notion of common interest as a pillar of support for the institutional building.[xxv]
In other words, corrupt societies live a war of factions and can no longer be thought of according to republican or democratic principles. Its mechanisms for channeling conflicts do not work as they should, transforming politics into an open field of struggle between the parties. If we cannot speak of civil war in this situation, and if the notion of the state of exception, which has been used by many Brazilian thinkers, does not describe the fact that the State was colonized by particular interests, perhaps it would be more appropriate to introduce, as I did , the concept of faction warfare, to better characterize its form of existence. Leaving aside the optimism of those who believe in a natural evolution of political conflicts, and without adopting a radical pessimism, I say that in Brazil we are facing a particular stage of institutional degradation.
Aware that we are not an exception in the contemporary political scene, I note that institutions, although they may continue to exist, are no longer able to curb the momentum of parties that aspire to power. They behave like factions that place their ambitions and desire for command above any consideration of a universal order, on the moral plane, and the common interest, on the political plane.
The various actors who participate in public life, including political parties, institutional bodies, economic groups, all place themselves from the point of view of the particular, denying even relevance to the evocation of a universal dimension of the law. Believing everyone to have enough reasons to occupy an ever-increasing share of power, they turn the political scene into a terrain of war in which only their particular desires matter. Faction warfare is the visible face of corruption in democratic-republican societies.
It would be difficult to map the factions that operate in the Brazilian public scene. More than 130 years after the proclamation of the Republic, Brazil is still struggling to live in a truly republican and democratic way. To give one last example of the effects of factional warfare on Brazilian political life, let's look at the place the Constitution has occupied in recent years in the political arena. If the axis of the federalists' arguments is the opposition between private interests and the common interest, we must first define what could be the common interest of Brazilians in a moment of crisis.
If we accept that democracy is a regime worth living in, and that in modern times we cannot build a democratic Republic without laws based on the values of freedom and equality among citizens, the Constitution must be the insurmountable horizon of our life in common. To put it another way, in a democracy, all components of the body politic must do everything to support the fundamental laws of the State, without which we are forced to conclude that democracy no longer exists, leaving no references shared by all to solve our disagreements.
Between 2013 and 2018, factions vying for power made the Constitution a battleground rather than a bulwark against the deterioration of the rule of law. In this scenario, which still exists, each faction chooses not only an interpretation of the constitutional texts, but those that will be respected according to private interests. We see, for example, that the decision to arrest those who still have the right to have another trial is not taken in accordance with the Constitution, which prohibits the act, but depending on the more or less favorable political conjunctures for certain political groups..[xxviii] Without going into the details of individual sentences, it is legitimate to say that judges of first instance, but also the STF, act without taking into account the fact that we cannot intend that all articles of the law are subject to divergent interpretations without endangering the existence of democratic rule.
Thus, the conviction of former President Lula in a controversial trial ended up having a direct effect on the 2018 elections. As he was arrested before exhausting all legal remedies, he could not run in the elections, which unbalanced the democratic game. No one can say what the result of the electoral dispute would have been if he had been able to participate, but it is clear that a judicial decision, without respect for the letter of the Constitution, directly interfered in the political destiny of the country.
*Newton Bignotto is professor of philosophy at UFMG. Author, among other books, of Matrixes of republicanism (UFMG Publisher).
Reference
Newton Bignotto. Brazil in search of democracy. From the proclamation of the Republic to the 1889st century (2018- XNUMX). Rio de Janeiro, Editora Bazar do Tempo, 2020.
Notes
[I] L. Carvalho, op. cit., p. 98.
[ii] Ibid., P. 108.
[iii] Ibid., P. 106.
[iv]L. Schwartz; H. Starling, op. cit., postscript. “It was quite a turnaround. The country, which had already been showing signs of division, literally cracked during these 2015 and 2016 demonstrations. hitherto inexpressive, but with a conservative and regressive discourse, as among those who called for the return of the military to power, they advanced on the main vein of the demonstrations and started to control an important part of the acts.”
[v] For a chronology of events see B. Mello Franco, A thousand days of storm: the crisis that overthrew Dilma and left Temer hanging by a thread. For a detailed analysis of the president's dismissal process, see R. de Almeida, In the shadow of power: backstage of the crisis that overthrew Dilma Rousseff.
[vi] Um Cantor, The senses of lulism.
[vii] Um Cantor, Lulism in crisis. A puzzle of the Dilma period (2011-2016).
[viii] Ibid., P. 109.
[ix] Ibid., P. 124.
[X] Ibid., P. 156.
[xi] Ibid., P. 157.
[xii] Ibid., P. 185.
[xiii] S. Abranches, Coalition presidentialism. Roots and evolution of the Brazilian political model.
[xiv] Ibid., P. 303.
[xv] Ibid., P. 312.
[xvi] Ibid., P. 325.
[xvii] Ibid., P. 334.
[xviii] Ibid., p. 341-348.
[xx] A. Hamilton; J. Madison; J. Jay., The Federalist Papers, P. 76
[xx] Ibid., article 10, p. 77.
[xxx] Ibid., article 10, p. 78, free translation.
[xxiii] B. Ackerman, Au nom du peuple. Les fondements de la démocratie americaine, P. 242.
[xxiii] A. Hamilton; J. Madison; J Jay, op. cit., article 10, p. 79.
[xxv] In the course of 2019, the investigative journalism website The Intercept published, in partnership with other press organizations, a series of reports that showed that, in the course of the investigations into the Lava-Jato operation, which condemned many PT members and several businessmen to severe prison sentences, judge Sérgio Moro maintained a relationship with prosecutors outside the provisions of the law. This kind of promiscuity between public agents not only led Judge Moro to participate directly in investigations, which is prohibited, but also to seek to interfere in the political scene by disclosing data from investigations at key moments in national political life, such as on the eve of the elections. 2018 presidential elections.
[xxiv] V. Lima; J. Guimaraes, Freedom of expression: the many faces of a challenge.
[xxv] N. Machiavelli, “Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio”, vol I, I, 17, p. 243.
[xxviii] Imprisonment after trial in second instance, that is, by the regional courts (TJ), is not provided for in the Constitution which, on the contrary, guarantees that the defendant will only be judged guilty after exhausting all the remedies to which he is entitled by law.
