The Age of Disasters in Brazil: from the agonizing phase of electoral democracy to the survival of rentier capitalism

Abstract

In recent decades, Brazil has been the scene of a worrying regularity in the occurrence of disasters, which raises questions about which social processes have contributed to perpetuate and/or increase the problem.  The diffuse narratives that report disasters as chaotic processes, due to the disruptive elements of the socio-spatial dynamics that constitute them, as well as the broadening of the horizon of uncertainty for the social groups that experience them, have justified the techno-political activation of a modus operandi of exceptionality in public management that is based on a narrative of control of chaos and commitment to a return to normality.  It so happens that, ambiguously, what is announced as an exceptionality has become the normal state of public management, in the spread and recurrence of emergency decrees, and it is worth considering that, under its mantle, a project of authoritarian power is nestled.  From a sociological perspective, this article aims to problematize the complementary narratives centered on the chaos-normality binomial and reflect how they instrumentalize the socio-political process of weakening the democratic rule of law while shielding the logic of rentier capitalism, whose result would be leading the Brazilian society towards a cycle of disjunctive public policies, weakening the promises of the democratic rule of law and social atomization, metaphorically referred to here as the Era of Disasters in the country.  On one hand, this reflection is made by highlighting the contributions of contemporary debate, in the critical field, which allude to the socio-political process of the fragility of electoral democracy and the socioeconomic process of shielding rentier capitalism, components of an undisguised drive for catastrophes.

Keywords: Democracy. Capitalism. Human Rights. Disasters. Brazil.