Abstract

CASTILLO, Federico del. An Anthropological Look at the Uruguayan Police Reform and its Decline. URVIO [online]. 2023, n.35, pp.25-41. ISSN 1390-4299.  https://doi.org/10.17141/urvio.35.2023.5823.

Why do police reforms fail? The literature on public policies proposes rationalist and scientific approaches to questions of this kind, frequently disguising cultural and symbolic elements hard to ponder, and even difficult to identify. In this article, I propose a look at the interruption of the Uruguayan police reform (2010-2020) highlighting these elements while seeking to provide clues for understanding the failure of police reforms in Latin America. Data for the study was gathered within an ethnographic investigation about the National Police of Uruguay, and I analyze them through theoretical notions from classic anthropology, such as the notions of holism, person and individual. I conclude that the Uruguayan police reform failed to adequately interpret symbolic and cultural elements of the Police (such as police cosmology, the modes of social relationships between its members and the symbolic value assigned to death), and that is in this inability where we can find some keys to understand its interruption.

Keywords : death; police; police reform; public policy; Uruguay.

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