Micro-technologies of disappearance by State bureaucracy: an archaeological perspective about necropolitics in dictatorship and democracy in Brazil

Trabajo presentado en el Salvador Allende Memorial Lecture, celebrado en Cambridge el 14 de febrero de 2020.Neoliberal policies and a shift to the far right have defined the recent political context in Brazil. Human remains, identified or not, become part of those policies where the technology of disappearance and bodies (especially of poor and black people) are transformed into commodities or undesirable objects that must be disposed of for the privatization of public spaces. This lecture will explore how archaeology can contribute to the unveiling of different mechanisms of disappearance that persist until today in the management of dead bodies. It will demonstrate that through the political processing of bodies in São Paulo city, their identities are often neglected or completely removed, becoming bare lives devoid of any citizenship. To do so, I will compare the management of the dead and the techniques of disappearance in public institutions during the dictatorship (1964-1985) with today’s governments, including deliberate omission as one of the key mechanisms of elimination