Escravidão contemporânea e a dinâmica da barbárie: imaginário, ruralismo e direitos humanos na constituição do Brasil de 1988

Abstract

This study presents contemporary slavery as a social, cultural and political phenomenon in the light of the History of the Political Imaginary, of International Human Rights Law, as well as from the perspective of the symbolism brought by the New Republic and its legal foundation, the 1988 Brazilian Constitution, highlighting the exploitation of slave labor from exclusively economic or philosophical considerations. Furthermore, it seeks to maintain that Brazilian ruralism, as an element imbricated to the formation of Brazil as a nation-state, was linked to the Latin, colonial, slavery and authoritarian cultural matrix that permeated Brazilian Political and Constitutional History, dissociated from healthy guidelines that are not are in line with a humanistic and cosmopolitan perspective inaugurated by the 1988 constitutional order. It is also intended to illustrate these hypotheses with the artistic representations of Brazilian ruralism in the 17th (in Frans Post) and 19th (in Rugendas) centuries, maintaining that there is a deep development in especially since the 19th century, due to the change in the political power structure between the crisis of the colonial system and the imperial period - the origin of Brazil as a sovereign country - as the agrarian economic elite is no longer composed of noble merchants planters and starts to be constituted by the so-called "men of great adventure" - ex-merchants of the Atlantic slavery business, who bring their social imagery condescending to the exploitation of slave labor in agro-export estates to the interior regions of the country, which was not exhausted by the publication of the Golden Law in 1888, only finding an effective counterpoint in the 1988 Brazilian Constitution, the which gave rise to greater activity in the current ruralist parliamentary bench, whose guidelines are guided by the deregulation of rural work, providing feedback to the aforementioned Brazilian cultural matrix, contrary to humanism, cosmopolitanism and to the constitutional values and international protection standards of human rights