Democracy and citizenship in Brazil

Abstract

The theme "democracy and citizenship in Brazil" brings to the surface the most striking contradictions that characterize the history of our country. The main contradiction lies in our slaveholding structure. Our mentality has been characterized sometimes by contempt for the law — "the law, oh the law" —, in order to preserve and guarantee the permanence of slavery, and sometimes by submission to the law, slavery to the letter of the law in order to perpetuate the slaveholding order, under the full influence of liberal political thought. The same distance between the individual right enshrined in the Constitution and its effectiveness persists in Brazil at the beginning of the 21st century, with the confusion between public and private. Brazil, with more than eight million square kilometers, has become, in the last two decades, the country of large cities, and social disorganization is the most impressive mark that leads to the absence of a sense of citizenship. State and Community must be the basic binomial, since only through the interaction of both in the formulation and achievement of social policies will citizenship be built.