Serviço militar obrigatório no Brasil: uma reflexão atual das práticas e representações usadas na construção da identidade militar (2000 – 2008)

Abstract

This work is the result of trying to construct a vision of the Compulsory Military Service in Brazil. It focuses on the role of the Army, understood as a total institution, whose task is to promote, through the recruitment of soldiers, as well as homeland defense, the construction of patriotic, civic society and the discipline. It also shows the resistance, cunning and conventions, developed by the recruits to confront powers with which they are subjected. In this confrontation of powers, these individuals reflect the intentions of the institution and rework them according to their interests, reinventing their daily lives, their lives. The present research also collaborates with the expansion of issues facing the Brazilian military history, including in their analysis and social actors who have long been forgotten in the name of a elitist and exclusionary historiography. Taking the case study as a tool, it selects the practice of Military Service in the city of Dourados/MS between 2000 and 2008 as a sample of the object for analysis. It covers, therefore, a current issue which is known by the Academy as the History of the Present Time. It operates methodologically with qualitative and quantitative data. The supporting documentation of the sources that feed the research is quite diverse, encompassing bibliographic material, information collected by electronic means, in addition to substantial support from oral sources, arranged from interviews with people who have lived the experience of life in the barracks, as Brazilian Army recruits. To finish with, it plots considerations about the mistake in thinking that the Military Service is responsible for the construction of patriotic, civic and disciplinary identities of youth, but rather a means of survival than an example of love of country.