Subverting Criminal Selectivity. The Guarantee Challenge for Latin America

Abstract

This research constitutes a critical-re?exive approach whose aim is to provide criminal law with legitimacy. Its objectives are mainly based on the contributions that critical criminology can make to criminal-legal knowledge so that it can be based on human dignity, as a knowledge that favors the welfare of Latin American society. Because of this, the multifaceted method of criminological criticism is used, which allows not only to observe the real operation of the penal system, but also to transform this reality, deconstructing Latin American penalism. In this sense, the documentary research technique is used to approach different texts on the hypothesis raised to generate inputs to promote a possible epistemological rupture of this legal knowledge regarding its purposes. Thus, some contributions are established for criminal law to leave behind its past of persecution of the excluded, its inherent criminal selectivity, as well as its indolence before the injustices perpetrated by the State through the punitive power, all of which is incompatible with the guarantee premises, and to direct it as a legal knowledge worthy of being called Law and, therefore, destined to prosecute system or global crimes that seriously affect our contemporary societies.