Event: WEDS TALKS: State Violence Through Material Evidence: Disappearance and Massacre in a Brazilian Prison

ABSTRACT: This talk presents research I have been developing since 2019 on the former House of Detention of São Paulo, commonly known as Carandiru. In 1992, a police operation resulted in the deadliest recorded prison killing in Brazilian history. Days later, the government acknowledged the deaths of 111 incarcerated men. Since then, this number has been contested by survivors and

witnesses, although it has never been formally incorporated into legal proceedings. My research examines how these informal allegations can guide an investigation of the remaining material traces of Carandiru, asking how claims of human rights violations are expressed in material evidence. The project combines methods from forensic anthropology, urban archaeology, and material culture studies. Preliminary findings point to public tolerance of everyday violence, institutional complicity, the lack of control inside the prison, the destruction or concealment of evidence, and multiple problems in the postmortem examination reports. Together, these elements may contribute to questioning the official death count. By strengthening survivor accounts as valid lines of evidence, this work also raises methodological challenges: how can researchers document and analyze material evidence when the State itself participates in its erasure, deploying sophisticated mechanisms of disappearance under the veneer of legality?

BIO: Marília Oliveira Calazans is a staff researcher at the Center for Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology (CAAF–Federal University of São Paulo). She is a PhD candidate in Archaeology at the University of São Paulo, currently completing a Fulbright-supported visiting research period at UCLA. Her work focuses on investigating and producing evidence of State violence. Her research moves across Archaeology, History of Science, Cultural Heritage, Forensic Anthropology, and Human Rights.