Bureaucratic Practice as Violence: Managing the List of Dead and Disappeared Prisoners in Brazil

In this text, I analyze the case of disappeared prisoners from the Alcaçuz Penitentiary in the Brazilian State of Rio Grande do Norte, in 2017. I follow the flow of official communication between the National Mechanism for the Prevention and Combat of Torture, hereafter the MNPCT) and state institutions in Rio Grande do Norte—Rio Grande do Norte Public Prosecutor, Judiciary, and Executive state branches—between January 2017 and November 2018. My intention is to understand in what ways the bureaucratic practice disputes the naming of the phenomenon of the disappearance of prisoners as a public cause and how it produces the management of disappearances. Guided by the ethnography of documents, I examine documents under the perspective of time, form, aesthetics, and content.