ABSTRACT
From the depths of intense political repression during the dictatorship to a flourishing democracy in the new millennium, Brazil’s human rights situation has changed remarkably over the last 50 years. Since 1985, almost every administration at the national level has strengthened the formal, institutional commitment of the state to the enforcement of human rights. At the same time, Brazilian society has become more violent, with the police contributing to that violence. To account for these outcomes, this chapter focuses on the creation and maintenance of state institutions charged with enforcing human rights and on the social movement that uses the banner of human rights to make claims on the state. The core argument is that human rights in Brazil suffer from cross-cutting pressures. On the one hand, federal-level coalitions have succeeded in gradually building the national state’s commitment to human rights through treaty ratification, participation in regional and international bodies such as the OAS and the UN, the creation of new accountability mechanisms to monitor and investigate state violence, and the building of new institutions, such as the Secretariat of Human Rights. In this process, the involvement of the human rights movement – as an incubator of ideas, lobbyist for change, and mechanism for monitoring the implementation of reforms – has been crucial. On the other hand, pervasive violence and fear have contributed to public acquiescence to heavy-handed approaches to criminal suspects in poor communities. These approaches, supported by various political coalitions, often violate human rights with impunity, and they celebrate a hardline perspective as the only effective means of coping with criminality. The result is a dualism in Brazil’s human rights situation: Official discourse about the sanctity of human rights co-exists with considerable public support for violent policing.
