The emergence of the figure of the victim and its political impact

In this paper we intend to reflect about the process of emergence of the figure of "victim contemporary" in the West and the centrality of his discourses on the regional (Latin America) and internationally political scene. Referring, initially, to sacrificial contexts (Girard, 2008) and the meanings that death it incorporates in this arrangement, we aim at contributing to the debate about the historical processes that made ​​possible the inversion anthropological (Wieviorka, 2009) the figure of the victim in our societies. Reversing this, which marks, the one hand, a significant institutional change, to move the demarcation lines that divide the public space and private space; and secondly, the transformation of a category that was invisible, or almost, in public spaces, in one of the great figures of contemporary modernity, subject to a "new voice". The deaths already do not exist more only in their contributions to social order or for the restoration of equilibrium threatened for wars or natural disasters that reflected the will of the gods. In this sense, we focus on our work historical considerations about the impacts of the deaths of “opponents” of the Brazilian military regime (1964-1985) for the conditions of possibilities of democracy in the country, and then we will observe its scopes and results in the light the recent political experiences of a group of mothers who were mobilized after the death of their husbands and sons in 2006 in the city of São Paulo / Brazil (Association of Mothers and Family Victims of Violence - Mothers of May).