Judiciary police accountability for gross human rights violations: The case of Bahia, Brazil

The dissertation investigates the recurrence of gross human rights violations by the judiciary police in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Although impunity is often quoted as a major problem for democratization, there are no studies that systematically analyze the reasons why accused police officers go unpunished. This study uses as primary material the investigative files of the Police Review Board in the period 1988--1996 involving citizens' complaints against members of this institution for torture and murder.; This dissertation shows that the Review Board consistently disregards the dispositions of the Brazilian Penal Code and the Brazilian Code of Penal Procedures. The Review Board classifies torture as corporal lesions, a lesser crime, and acts illegally by keeping investigations inconclusive for excessively long periods. The Board also orders torture and murder investigative files archived without the legally prescribed judicial intervention. The pattern of repeated offenses that go unpunished shows that impunity is a major fact both in the reproduction of victimization by torture and in the way the judiciary police stamps its approval on torture of suspects as an investigative technique. Victimization hurts disproportionally the black Afro-Brazilians.; The dissertation concludes that the Police Review Board is in fact a preemptive institution that protects police officers from judiciary prosecution. It also blocks the universalization of citizenship, as it treats differently people from the upper and lower classes and as it systematically turns down the demands for rights from disprivileged citizens, thus exerting a detrimental effect on the development of the civil rights of the lower strata of society. This research illustrates some of the more profound, albeit too often less visible problems that plague the effectiveness of democracy in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America.