About the policies of social slaughter in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

The article revisits the trajectories of both the building and the deconstruction of the Social Protection Network in Brazil until 2020. Its goal is to retrace the historical trends of the process, emphasizing the period prior to the 1988 Constitution, and how it advanced, up to 2016, in the construction of an institutional framework that was inspired in a Social Welfare State. Following this period, the article analyses the liquidation of this very framework and, from 2019 on, its destruction. Transitions which were defined as not bringing actual ruptures, be those on political regimes or between governments, are shown to have left their marks, by which conciliations and the weakening of ties between the State and civil society point out to the insufficiency of political projects that would have strong social content and which were experienced after 1988. This trend is even stronger during this century, and this insufficiency influences the capacity of resistance and maintenance of guarantees for keeping the conquered rights as established from their emergence and the struggle that founded them.