Battlegrounds: mobilizing humanitarian discourses in São Paulo detention centers

Abstract

The text presented here, based on ethnographic research conducted in institutions of social control in São Paulo, such as prisons, juvenile detention units, and custodial and psychiatric treatment hospitals, is an attempt to examine, in spaces of confinement that operate as battlefields, the distinct uses that are intrinsic to the lexicon of human rights. Starting from the power struggles that play out in spaces of detention, we focus on two important vectors: (1) the activation of the discourse of human rights as a tactic of struggle, mobilized by adolescents who dispute for control over internment spaces; and (2) the continuum between the legal lexicon and forms of institutional violence, where the humanitarian discourse is intertwined with the practice of torture in São Paulo detention facilities. In this analysis, it is important to shed light on the distortions, uses and mobilizations that permeate human rights discourses, a prism that allows us to pass from law as a promise of pacification to politics as permanent war.