Military Officers and Politics: An Analyzes of Officers Elected to the Brazilian Congress

Recently we have observed an increasing role of Military Officers in Brazilian institutional internal politics. A representative number of military personnel in the Armed Forces in executive, legislative, and even some judicial advisory positions. A less careful reading may suggest that this participation started to happen after the election of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro (2018-2022). However, the enrolment of Military Officers in politics is well documented in the Brazilian social sciences and has continued even after the Brazilian Military Dictatorship (1964-1988), mainly in the context of public safety. especially with Guarantee of Law-and-Order operations. In this sense, the present work seeks, starting from a theoretical framework built on the interpretation of the political performance of the Armed Forces in Brazil historically; and from the reflection that has been built in the field of sociology about the militarization of public security in Latin America, to analyze the cases of military officers elected to the Brazilian National Congress. To this end, we will carry out an analysis – in the light of the framework above – of the data from the officers’ candidacy between 2014 and 2022. Using available documents, files, and data from Brazilian Electoral Court, we analyzed data from 3 national elections and examined the cases of officers elected that mobilize a punitive discourse. We argue that those officers who obtain electoral success are those who mobilize crime and punishment discourses. This paper presents part of an ongoing research that examines the enrollment of Military Officers in internal public safety operations in Latin America.