Entre a criminalização do conflito com a lei e a proteção contra o trabalho infantil: adolescentes amazonenses no tráfico de drogas

Abstract

This research represents the result of an investigation into the involvement of adolescents in drug trafficking in the state of Amazonas, with the objective of analyzing the concrete determinations to which adolescents who committed this type of act in the state of Amazonas are subjected. The study starts from the understanding that crime, as well as punishment, is something transitory and socially constructed. To reach this goal, the historical-dialectical materialism is the theoretical-methodological referential, which supports the analysis of the documental and historiographical research. Thus, the initial research focuses on understanding which were the preponderant determinations for the commercialization of psychoactive substances to become a crime in contemporary society. This methodological choice also contributed to the identification of conceptual and concrete transformations that the category of work underwent during the twentieth century when related to the care of minors, delinquents, offenders, and adolescents in conflict with the law. Finally, the study analyzes medical records and identifies the profile of adolescents who committed offenses analogous to drug trafficking in the city of Manaus, between the years 2020 and 2021. The documentary research guided the examination of 14 medical records from two socioeducational centers, the Centro Socioeducativo Assistente Social Dagmar Feitoza and the Centro socioeducativo Senador Raimundo Parente, both for male internment. The study was based on the analysis of the technical team's instruments and sentences and allowed us to conclude that these adolescents follow the profile of those who are at social risk, being all male, 85.7% black/pard, 92.8% out of school, and 50% working informally, that is, belonging to the social class most affected by the social refractions resulting from structural transformations in the world of work. It was also verified that, in spite of the fulfillment of a measure of internment, 85.7% of the adolescents had progression of the measure to the open environment, understood as a form of continuity of the state control in relation not only to what they did, but to what they will be able to do after the fulfillment of the measure. In some ways, this indicates that the Judiciary acts under the minorist perspective of the danger of becoming a juvenile. The analysis also showed an inconsistency and scarcity of information that effectively links the adolescent to involvement in drug trafficking, with little information on membership of any faction or the type of function exercised in the work of the traffickers, and in this sense, an invisibility of the problem and a disconnection between the Individual Plan of Attendance (PIA) and the concrete reality. Finally, regarding the sentences, the quantity of substances that could have been considered drug trafficking was analyzed, but what was presented was a tangle of contradictions and the coincidence of reports and reasons repeated in different sentences, even in cases in which the adolescents were caught in the act on different dates and in different places, which demonstrated the negligent role of the public defender's office and the State in their function as guardian of the laws (in terms of the constitutional principle of motivation), as well as the discourse produced in the sentences follows a prohibitionist and moral logic about drugs, leaving the adolescent in a penal situation.