Disincorporation and belief crisis on officership: The case of the Military Police Academy of Ceará

This paper discusses the deinstitutionalization of the Military Police Academy (‘APM’, from its original acronym) General Edgard Facó and its effects over the disincorporation of a military habitus within the training of Military Police (‘PM’) officers in state of Ceará, in Northeastern Brazil. For over decades (1929-2008), the APM was responsible for framing a hexis of the body for cadets through rituals of military institutions. The APM shutdown in 2008 soon revealed a belief crisis on this military model of internal social control, which affects the reproduction of personnel and officers as a corporate group. This analysis is based on the data from fieldwork research the authors conducted between the years of 1998 and 2000, furthermore new source documents were added, as the research was resumed in 2010, gathering newspaper stories and articles and interviews conducted after the school was closed, in order to recover the social memory of a decade (1998-2008).