“Viva o povo brasileiro (?)”: A construção da política criminal de drogas nos discursos parlamentares na democracia brasileira

Abstract

This work intends to carry out a critical analysis on the drug policy developed in Brazil, based on the debates and speeches given throughout the legislative processes that produced art.5, XLIII of the Federal Constitution, Law n.11.343/2006 and Law n.13.840/2019. Taking the legislative debates as documentary sources, this work sought to do not an analysis of the law, as is more commonly carried out in the field of legal research, nor a formal analysis of the legislative processes, but a critical thinking on how the issue was approached in Congress National in the “democratic” period. The harmonious coexistence between democracy established in the 1980s and the intense processes of violence operated by the Brazilian State (through torture, more or less arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances and deaths) throughout the New Republic encourages us to look more closely to this “democracy”, its limits and the authoritarian knots that accompany it, with a special look at criminal drug policy. To this end, the construction of these norms that permeate drug policy in the country was analyzed, thinking on what discourses supported them, what possible divergences were raised between different political fields and what grounds were presented for the creation of these norms. We sought to identify not only what these discourses explain, but also what they hide, how they are justified and what interests they represent within Brazilian society, which is deeply hierarchical. The parliamentary debates held during three legislative processes were analyzed from the theoretical-methodological perspective of ideology, thinking about ideology, from a Marxist conception, as a system of beliefs that “hides” part of reality aiming to legitimize power. Considering that racism structures Brazilian society and guides the country's criminal policy, punishment as an ideology was conceived based on its necessary articulation with racism and how it organizes our criminal system.