Human rights in “Bolsonarism”:

“decriminalizing outlaws” and “punishing police officers”

Abstract

This article aims to analyze relations between the human rights policy, as conceived and deployed by contemporary States, and its current representations. To do this, the corpus of analysis consists in representations of such rights produced in Brazil through the performance of the then Congressman Jair Bolsonaro, which built the so-called ‘Bolsonarism’ and were present in his presidential campaign, (re)producing considerable ideological opposition to this policy, expressed above all by the idea that ‘a good criminal is a dead criminal.’ Thus, we will see how anti-human rights propaganda constitutes an indispensable element to grasp Brazilian politics nowadays, either in electoral terms or in terms of (lack of) public policies.