"Pau neles, não nos nossos ": as representações sociais do tráfico de drogas na revista Veja (1968-2010) e suas implicações nas dinâmicas identitárias

Abstract

This paper focuses on one of the criminal activities with higher expression in Brazilian media, the drug traffic. Its social, economical, political and organizational structures have aroused the interest of a great number of scholars. The research conducted has exploratory and documentary feature, and seeks to comprehend the process of social construction of the phenomenon throughout the country recent history. We intend to identify and describe the elements present in drug traffic Social Representations, aiming to comprehend the relations between social representations and the intergroup identity dynamics, that is reflected in mass media production and greatly contribute to the relations and social inequalities. The journalistic documentary production not only records the events experienced, but plays / reinforce peculiar ways of thinking, in a time and space, being a rich source of research for human sciences. We gathered reportage and fragments of reportage from Veja Magazine from the period between 1968 and 2010 which dealt with the theme. The data selection and collection were performed at the website digital collection; from the terms traffic, trafficker and drug trafficking. The selected set of reportages was stripped from an exploratory reading, including one exemplary per month, what totalized 321 items. The corpus was submitted to lexical analysis, developed with the aid of ALCESTE software. The analysis resulting dendrogram showed seven classes, organized in two big groups. The textual elements cover drugs consumption; the social and individual effects; the violence; the threat; and the combat over drug traffic, its contexts and characters. Both in the international and national levels, the protection strategy of social identity of the dominant groups leads to construction of social representations of drug trafficking as something that belongs to the foreign or to the out group. Thus, the globe "suburbs" or poverty territories of large cities are seen as a reservoir of the risk of drugs, which are expressed emblematically in the slums and prisons. The figure of drug user is not the main concern of the state. The enemies to be combated are the "producers of evil", farmers or drug dealers. Most reportages are organized around technical-scientific arguments of experts, features of the communication system of broadcasting that restore and re-edit scientific eugenic and hygienists theories, which were born in the nineteenth century, and support discrimination against "dangerous classes" . When the drug trade is represented as "thing of poor people", consumers of middle and upper class remain safe from social criticism. Very few stories bring contrasting elements, criticizing the victimization of the middle class in Brazil. Thus, we understand that the media is an important tool for dissemination of versions of social factors, contributing to the construction of the reservoir of meanings attributed to the phenomenon, materializing marginalized and without control characters, which plague the social imagination and become key elements in Social Representations of Drug Traffic.