Punishment and Authoritarian Liberalism : The Politics of Emergency Criminal Justice in Colombia (1984-2006)

• Main Author: Iturralde, Manuel A.
• Published: London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London) 2007
• Subjects: 320
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.499210

The continuousu seo f emergencym easuresb y Colombiang overnmentsi n the last decadesa, long with a complex combination of generalizedv iolence and social dislocation, has had a deep impact on the Colombian criminal justice system. Such a political tendency to enforce exceptional mechanisms and institutions to investigate, prosecute and sentence what governments and an emotive public opinion regard as dangerous criminals, has structured the Colombian emergency crin-dnal justice -a punitive system characterized by the hardening of criminal procedures and punishments, on the one hand, and the limitation of the human rights and legalg uaranteeso f thosep rosecuted,o n the other. The aim. of this dissertation is, to borrow Foucaules (1979) expression, to make a history of the present of Colombian emergency criminal justice. That is, critically to explain how it is currently structured and how it functions; how it came into being and how it has been shaped by the social, economic, cultural, and political transformations that late modernity has brought about. The normalization of emergency penality, together with the rise of conservatism and neoliberalism in the Colombian political and economic fields during the last three decades, have created a penal commonsentshea t encourages the hypertrophy of the penal state and the reduction of the social state. Thus, governments are mainly concerned with enhancing control mechanisms in order to provide security for markets and investment with the argument that only then can economic and social rights flourish. The normalization of emergency penality is by no means peculiar to the Colombian context, but is rather the manifestation, in rather extreme circumstances of violence, inequality, and social exclusion, of a global trend which I call authoritafian liberalism. that is, the intensive use of punishment to uphold neoliberalism.