Abstract
We have been studying and observing the phenomenon of state authoritarianism in contemporary Latin American democracies in the 21st century for some time, especially since the coups d’état perpetrated against the legitimately and democratically elected governments, as occurred in Honduras, Paraguay and Brazil, in the latter, upon the impeach of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, denouncing the role that the Criminal Justice System played as a producer of these measures in which the Judiciary, instead of correcting the illegalities committed, legitimized, through the construction of pure performative rhetoric, true “coups” perpetrated against the democracy of these countries. This article aims to broaden the approach of the analysis of the state authoritarianism’s phenomenon in order to prove that the strategy adopted in the mentioned cases, rather than mere distortions and occasional aporias, constitutes an institutionalized fraud and true governance technique of permanent exception which uses laws and democratic authorities to perpetrate systemic corruption and impose an authoritarian State, allowing the management and elimination of the undesirables, within what has been conventionally named “neoliberal rationality”.
Keywords:
State of exception; governability of permanent exception; authoritarianism; neoliberalismo; democratic coups