Policiais militares de Goiás: cidadania, identidade e direitos humanos

Abstract

It discusses citizenship issues and human rights proposals articulating them with the formation of the Goiás Military Police and its militaristic character, in order to understand how the Goiás military police build their identity, think human rights and elaborate their narratives about this theme. It uses the method called snowball, whereby an interviewee indicates another person or persons with whom the researcher comes in contact and so on. Fourteen military police officers from the state of Goiás, two of whom were women, were interviewed by applying a semi-structured questionnaire producing recorded interviews which were later transcribed. Interviews were conducted at locations indicated by respondents and they were informed that they could interrupt questions and leave the interview at any time, but all remained until the end. To reach the results, the answers were systematized and analyzed qualitatively. The results show that the construction of an authoritarian nation state in Brazil, as in the rest of Latin America, marked the construction of military police as they are today. Specifically in the case of Brazil, for the organization of the military structure of the army and the military police, it was essential to hire the French Mission in the early twentieth century, which brought a professional vision of what a modern police should look like, created military schools and established standardization uniforms. From that time the identification between the army and the military police was being built, producing a strong influence on the identity construction of the military police. This construction is made by the professionalization of the police, based on a set of rituals and rules that constitute a new relationship of the police with himself and with civilians. For respondents the PMGO of the present emerges as profoundly differentiated from the PMGO of the past, placed as unprepared. Research has shown that the military regime, begun in 1964, has exacerbated militarization as the axis of state military police, placing them under the supervision of the army. In the course of the interviews, militarism appeared linked to companionship, to a more structured form of organization than that existing in civilian life, starting to rank the other aspects of the military policeman's identity, his way of being and his way of perceiving the world. When the military regime was terminated, the police structures remained virtually intact and still retain many powers without undergoing real democratic restructuring. These permanencies constitute a strong obstacle for a rapprochement between military police and human rights researchers, affecting the full exercise of citizenship, constituting a mutilated citizenship for most citizens, civil or military.