The Ministries of Justice and Civil Affairs in Brazil are discussing a new legislative package tied to public security. Led by Minister Ricardo Lewandowski, the current head of the Ministry of Justice and Public Security under the Lula government, the project envisions the creation of a federal fund to finance public security projects. Besides an increase in resources, the project includes significant constitutional changes and operational adjustments in specific law enforcement bodies, aiming for greater “carabinization” of security in the country, mirroring regional dynamics in this regard.
The project proposes the inclusion of the Single Public Security System, (Sistema Único de Segurança Pública or SUSP) in the Brazilian Constitution, in Lewandowski’s words, to “equip Brazilian policies and, above all, the Brazilian intelligence system.” The SUSP “provides a uniform architecture for the national sector and foresees data exchange, operations, and collaborations across federal, state, and municipal structures.” According to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, the current structure of the SUSP does not allow for direct federal government intervention in the day-to-day security of the population and foresees disagreement with projects carried out by state and municipal governments.
The proposal presented has many similarities with other recent experiences in Latin America. Generally tied to significant constitutional changes, with increased involvement of national governments in law enforcement, they have had an ambivalent outcome that we must pay attention to. With these measures, the police’s freedom to act violently against the population has mainly increased, raising important questions about its current political role.
The Latin American landscape of security federalization
Since the early 21st century, Latin American countries have grouped their security concerns under the so-called “public security threats.” Following the wave of liberalization and democratization that the region’s countries experienced in the 1980s and 1990s, military threats and levels of distrust among countries significantly decreased.
This built a regional consensus around the idea that the main threat to the security of Latin American societies was no longer tensions on the international stage but issues related to violence and the activities of criminal groups. This view was consolidated in 2003 with the signing of the Declaration on Security in the Americas, which established crime as a regional priority issue under the spectrum of the War on Terror promoted by the United States at the time. This perception has led to significant changes under the administration of governments with different ideological signs.
Between 2001 and 2020, Latin American governments introduced thirty-five changes in the organization, role, and responsibilities of the security forces. Many of them were due to the process of eliminating the authoritarian remnants of the 20th century and concentrated in the decade between 2001 and 2011. During this period, five countries introduced changes in their internal legislation on security forces: Brazil, Peru, El Salvador, Mexico, and Chile. The latter stands out for having made the most security reforms, with revisions of the State Security Law in 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, and 2010, and the Anti-Terrorism Law in 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2010.
In the following decade, other countries followed this path. The change in the law penalizing cannabis consumption led Uruguay to modify police actions on the matter in 2013, and in 2014, the Ministry of Security was created for the first time in Argentina. Peru made changes to its police forces in 2015, and between 2016 and 2018, El Salvador and Mexico modified their legislation. In these last two cases, the change was to toughen the penalties linked to the connection between police institutions and criminal groups.
In 2019, Mexico announced the creation of the National Guard, created from the Federal Preventive Police, which concentrates the federal executive’s capacity to act on local security. However, this is not an isolated change. In Latin America, local, departmental, and/or state governments are being relieved of their responsibilities to concentrate their capacity for action in the central or federal government of the nation. This is the proposal, for example, of the package under discussion in Brazil, which foresees the transformation of the Federal Highway Police into an ostentatious police force, under the command of the Brazilian federal government.
The “carabinization” of Latin American security
The changes made in public security by Latin American governments represent an important phenomenon in the regional scenario. The Brazilian proposal to transform the Federal Highway Police into an ostentatious police force, echoing experiences in other countries, raises the question of the politicization of these police forces and their indetermination in Latin America. It is worth remembering that this was the path adopted by the Mexican government: the National Guard created in 2019 traces back to the Federal Road Police, which was transformed into the Federal Preventive Police in 2000 and into the Federal Police in 2009. Ten years later, it would receive not only a new nomenclature but greater responsibilities.
This process is related to the idea that security forces in Latin America should be an important part of state mechanisms in the “war against crime.” This rhetoric, however, leads to the construction of police apparatuses that cease to act as mechanisms for crime resolution and damage repair, becoming instruments of social repression. It is no coincidence that the Brazilian Federal Highway Police was heavily involved in the repression of voter access to polling stations in the 2022 presidential elections.
However, effective alternatives should not appear under the banner of strengthening the police’s violent action capacity against the population. The excuse of fighting crime could lead to adopting exceptional measures as is happening in Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs, where the systematic torture of children and teenagers is being carried out under the excuse of fighting crime. The transformation of Latin American security forces into “carabinieri,” which are intermediary security forces between war and crime, tends to accentuate this dynamic in the region, a factor that could jeopardize the guarantee of the full exercise of the human and social rights of the populations of Latin America.
Autor
Doctor en Geografía por la Unicamp. Investigador en el Laboratorio de Geografía Regional y Geografía de las Relaciones Internacionales (LAGERE-GRI) de la misma institución e Investigador Invitado en el Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinares de la Universidad de Coimbra (CEIS20/UC).
