The Unpast: Elite Violence and Social Control in Brazil, 1954-2000 (review)

Violence as a form of control of the lower classes has been intrinsic to Brazil's social fabric since colonial times. R.S. Rose has documented this violence in two previous books, Beyond the Pale of Pity: Key Episodes of Elite Violence in Brazil to 1930 (Bethesda: Austin and Winfield, 1998) and One of the Forgotten Things: Getúlio Vargas and Brazilian Social Control, 1930–1954 (Westport: Greenwood, 2000). The Unpast continues the narrative up to recent times. The title of the book comes from William Faulkner, but it is odd that Rose does not acknowledge or cite Paulo Sergio Pinheiro's "O passado está morto, nem passado é ainda" (The past is dead, nor yet past), his preface to Gilberto Dimenstein's Democracia em pedaços: Direitos humanos no Brasil (Democracy in Pieces: Human Rights in Brazil; São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), which expresses the same idea.

The Unpast's main argument is that Brazilian elites use what Rose calls subelites (including police, military recruits, guards, and gunmen) to instill fear in and divide the lower classes, as well as maintain their own unity. For Rose, the severity and persistence of this violence can be ascribed to the colonial period, in which the white Portuguese colonizers were vastly outnumbered by the slave population. The lower classes' attempts to fight back invariably fail, "met with the brute force of an elite definition of order via appointed sub-elite enforcers of that definition" (8). Rose calls his perspective "critical historical criminology" because it starts from the assumption that "the violent domination of one class by another is indeed a crime" (10, emphasis in the original).

The Unpast is really two books in one. The first four chapters offer a political history of the period from the suicide of President Getúlio Vargas in 1954 to the Riocentro bombing in 1981, four years before the end of military rule. A central thesis of this section is that President João Goulart offered the lower classes hope of a rupture in the endless cycle of elite violence, and for this reason was deposed by the military in 1964. Chapters 5 and 6 analyze rural and urban violence. The book's most original contribution, found in Chapter 6, is a study of death squads in the states of Rio de Janeiro (1951–1998) and São Paulo (1963–1999). Rose presents data on 32,675 presumed death squad murders culled from a newspaper in each state.

Rose is to be applauded for trying to study this topic in a social scientific way. However, his method of classifying the death squad murders, as well as his interpretation of them, is open to question. In order to be included in Rose's data base, victims had to have several (how many is not clear) of 24 keys (237–238), including that the bullets came from revolvers used by the police, a death squad symbol was left on or near the corpse, and so on. However, the revolvers that police use circulate widely in Brazil, and death squad symbols do not really settle the question of who was responsible for the killing. Rose's keys do not exclude internecine killings between rival gangs or individuals. It is therefore not clear whether all of the violence that Rose analyzes is really "elite violence" committed for purposes of social control. Much of it may have been violence within the lower classes, at times aided and abetted by different factions within the police. While it could be said that elites ultimately benefit from this kind of violence, this does not fit the hierarchical model of violence descending from elites through sub-elites to the lower classes presented at the beginning of the book.

The book ends with an anecdote from a visit to Brazil in 1832 by Charles Darwin, in which Darwin disgustedly describes a slave readying himself to receive a blow, unprepared even to defend himself...