State of exception and liquid authoritarianism in Latin America

Abstract

The perception of the authoritarian State´s presence in the core of democratic routines, mainly in recent democracies, in countries of late modernity and peripheral capitalism, like the ones of Latin America, for example, is a fact that cannot be despised by legal theory. In this field, the analysis is justified with the confirmation that, in the 21st Century, the authoritarian mechanisms adopted by politic power introduce a particular logic, if compared to the state authoritarianism verified in the dictatorships and totalitarian states of the 20st Century, operating the coexistence of two state forms, that live together simultaneously in a certain society: a democratic state, that realizes itself formally in the Constitution and is accessible only to part of the society – the economically included –, and a State of exception, that does not assume itself legally as such, but it´s adopted as a government technique, wich we can also call permanent governance of exception. The decision of the State of exception, theorized by authors like Carl Schmitt, would be an necessary exercise of sovereignty, once foreordained to national salvation, in which, verified a real threat to the State by an external enemy, it is decreed temporarily the suspension of citizen’s rights, with the objective of establish the order. Under this point of view of the State of exception, at least in the scope of the state theory, temporality would be something intrinsic to the determination of the rights’ suspension, because it is necessary for the recomposition of social pacification, even so, in reality lived, this mark of provisional has only been verified in the political discourse. The State of exception present in the 21th Century, on the other hand, does not interrupt the democratic routine, but coexists with it, resenting itself as permanent, even though its discourse of justification is the same as before: extermination of the enemy that threatens survival state-owned. The enemy in Latin American countries has a common trait that particularizes him: he is the poor and lives on the periphery of big cities. In this short essay, we will sketch out these questions in order to demonstrate that overcoming the police state and absolutist forms of government did not succumb to the advances of the enlightenment ideals and liberal revolutions that laid the foundations of the State of exception. These authoritarian forms continued throughout all subsequent historical periods under new conformations. We use the term liquid authoritarianism to talk about this new nature of the measures of exception within the democratic routines, because they are fragmented, surgical measures, triggered under a pseudo-legality, which makes their identification more difficult. We call attention to the Latin American scenario, which has even been used of the jurisdiction as a way of legitimation and agency of State authoritarianism.