Description
Police violence in Brazil is one of the highest levels in the world. Framed as lawful killing although highly contested by human rights movements, it would be reasonable to conclude these are the totality of killings perpetrated by the police apparatus in the country. However, violence in urban areas, such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo also witness cases of disappearances, which I argue, are depoliticised in opposition to “political disappearances” that have happened during the dictatorship in the country. This paper discusses enforced disappearances in Brazil applying the concept of epistemicidio developed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014). The idea in this article is to explore how the episteme of political disappearances in Latin America, but especially in Brazil, during the dictatorships shaped the way disappearances are depoliticised nowadays to the point that these cases are classed under multiple categories that do not account for the specific type of violence, disappearances enact.
