Criminalization as a policy for extermination

Abstract

The central aim of this paper is to understand the relationship between criminalization and extermination. To this end, after briefly reviewing the history of the formation of public security in the aftermath of the dictatorship, and the process of expanding mass incarceration and massacres and slaughters, we analyzed a case of state massacres, Operation Shield, located in the Baixada Santista region of the state of São Paulo. Using ethnography and comparison as investigative methodologies, we observed patterns of state action in these massacres, in order to develop a set of concepts that express techniques and ways of promoting crime and death by state and private agents. The conclusion of this work is that criminalization is constituted in the current democracy as a fundamental process for the legitimization, naturalization and perpetuation of extermination, in order to reproduce the genocide of poor, black and peripheral people in Brazil.