A CASERNA NÃO ENSINA NA SOMBRA: a formação policial militar como racionalidade institucional explícita

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the training process within the Military Police of Espírito Santo (PMES), examining how an explicit institutional rationality organizes practices, rites, and regimes of conduct that produce subjectivities and strain the incorporation of Human Rights guidelines. It problematizes the use of the "hidden curriculum" category to explain the mismatch between the official discourse of citizenship-oriented training and the daily experience of the barracks. It argues that the decisive formative core does not operate through concealment, but rather through the publicization and repeated legitimation of a "pedagogy of form" that precedes content. A qualitative approach with an autoethonographic orientation is adopted, articulating the researcher's situated experience as an officer and instructor, the documentary analysis of regulations, manuals, and internal norms, and semi-structured interviews with soldiers and sergeants. The findings indicate that training acts as a technology of power that reorganizes body and time, produces a rupture with civilian references, and consolidates adherence to the military ethos through physical exhaustion, peer surveillance, exposure, and disciplinary moralization—progressively narrowing the field of the "sayable" and turning self-censorship into an institutional competence. It is argued that Human Rights discourse tends to enter as a prescription and is translated into a regime of adaptation to command, generating occasional shifts but frequently being reabsorbed as a language of compliance, evaluation, and proof. The study concludes that the limits of citizenship-oriented training stem less from curricular gaps and more from an internal moral economy that rewards toughness, virility, and silence; therefore, effective changes require reconfiguring the regimes of visibility, speech, and recognition that structure the barracks.