The Legacy of Authoritarianism in Democratic Brazil

Abstract

After the collapse of Latin American dictatorships in the 1980s, the major challenge facing the incoming political regimes was to exercise the state monopoly of physical violence within the limits of legality. In these brief notes we shall try to develop some preliminary remarks concerning the control of arbitrary practices by state agencies and of illegal violence in interpersonal relations or crime during political transitions and under democratic governments that emerged from them after the end of dictatorships. We would like to demonstrate that in some cases these governments were not able to ensure one of the basic cornerstones of democracy, the control of illegal violence, or to explain the processes and mechanisms that led to this situation.