Fear, disinformation and surveillance: Operation Shelter as a border device

Abstract

This proposal analyzes Operação Acolhida (OPA) as a border device, that is, as a structure under civil-military management that uses digital technologies to control, select and notify migrants. Since 2018, the OPA has been carrying out documentation, health screening and sheltering of Venezuelans in the northern region until they are internalized throughout Brazilian territory. Migration control mechanisms have been widely established on the European continent (Marino, 2021; Louers, 2023) and on the border between Mexico and the United States (Miranda, 2022; Miranda, Hernandez, 2023), supported by discourses that frame migrants as a threat to national security. Based on fieldwork and interviews with migrants, the heads of the entities involved and documentary analysis obtained through the LAI, we sought to understand the OPA as one of those devices that separates "bare life" to be inserted into another bios, the media or virtual one, through which it "seeks to neutralize and dissolve the human community, absolutizing itself (Sodré, 2021, p. 113). The discussion revolves around the triad of surveillance, sovereignty and disinformation (Linares, 2023, Cogo, 2022), reading sovereignty in terms of the practices that aim to subject migrants to living on the edge of life (Arantes, 2020). This policy of manufacturing "undesirables" is compounded by the destruction of their possibilities for community self-management, through the mobilization of the fear of vulnerable people, the partiality of the information disseminated and the ecosystem of false discourses that circulate both in the local media and on social networks.