On the 60th anniversary of the coup, experts analyze initiatives aimed at creating memory and responsibility for the atrocities of the military regime and the support it still finds in society.The widespread way in which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) addressed the problem the 60th anniversary of the 1964 coup sheds light on a broader aspect of the relationship that the Brazilian state has with the dictatorship that officially lasted until 1985. Lula established that the government would not organize specific celebrations for remember the coup, but the PT participated in it acts in memory of the date of Sunday (31/03).
Analysts consulted by DW argue that the strategy repeats a modus operandi common throughout Brazilian redemocratization, with the state’s inability to systematically investigate and adjudicate acts carried out by the military during the exceptional regime. Furthermore, the mistake of not adopting strategies to fuel the debate on what the period was is repeated.
“Until the establishment of the National Truth Commission in 2012, initiatives to clarify crimes against humanity and serious human rights violations came from civil society and groups of former political prisoners and families of the dead and missing,” claims Marcos Napolitano, professor of Brazilian history at the University of São Paulo (USP).
He explains that many names of torturers have been known since the late 1970s and that the first major public report on this topic was the Justice and Peace Commission’s book Brazil, Never Again, published in 1985. However, efforts to identify and punish The spread of repression agents has long been limited to civil society.
“In addition to investigating on their own and collecting documentation and testimonies on these violations, these groups of affected people have also carried out a long process of requesting before the Brazilian state for responses to these serious violations”, underlines Carla Osmo, professor of law at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp).
Civil pressure movements began to have some effect in the 1990s, with the creation of Special Commissions in the National Congress to discuss deaths that occurred during the dictatorship, under law 9.140/1995, called the Law of Political Disappearances in Brazil . “This legislation not only recognizes state responsibility for deaths and disappearances, but also encourages the carrying out of research and analysis necessary to identify missing persons,” says Osmo.
The Unifesp professor claims that the production of evidence within the commissions was decisive in founding the only judicial decision that recognizes an agent of the dictatorship as the author of serious human rights violations, in a case brought by the Almeida Telles family against Colonel Carlos Brilhante Ustra, in a 2008 decision. In the 1970s, Amelinha Telles was tortured by Ustra in the premises of the DOI-Codi in São Paulo.
Another lawsuit against Ustra was filed by the Merlino family in 2010, after the torture and death of journalist Luiz Eduardo Merlino, also in the 1970s, in the same DOI-Codi. Ustra had been ordered to pay compensation at first instance, but the decision was overturned by the Court of Justice and, late last year, followed by the Superior Court of Justice. The Merlino family has appealed.
Osmo claims that the failure to punish military personnel investigated for crimes committed during the dictatorship has already resulted in sanctions for the Brazilian state at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in cases involving Gomes Lund and members of the Araguaia guerrilla and in the death of journalist Vladmir Herzog. “There are often charges by the Prosecutor’s Office, but criminal proceedings against officers do not progress through the judiciary, also in contradiction to international human rights conventions.”
The disputed memory
Promulgated in 1979, still during the dictatorship, the amnesty law pardoned crimes committed between 1969 and 1979. Its revision was a long-standing request of civil society, which never happened. At the end of February, the Minister of the Federal Court (STF), Dias Toffoli, declared that he intends to resume this debate in the second half of the year.
The basis of the request for revision of the law is the complaint of non-compliance with the fundamental precepts (ADPF) 320, presented in 2014 to the STF by the PSOL, following a report by Minister Luiz Fux. Toffoli became speaker in February 2021. She calls for the amnesty granted to public, military or civilian agents involved in crimes during the dictatorship to be annulled, as they committed “serious human rights violations” against citizens accused of committing political crimes during the dictatorship.
The way the amnesty law came into force is linked to the Brazilian state’s proposed oblivion of crimes committed during the dictatorship, Napolitano argues.
“Since the end of the 1970s, Brazilian civil society has created a critical memory of the dictatorship that has become hegemonic in the press, in the school system, in the most sophisticated cultural and artistic system, among the trade union and social movements. At this moment , including several liberal voices who supported the 1964 coup, began to condemn the dictatorship, but, at the same time, to defend it by “forgetting” the violence committed by military governments in the name of “national pacification”. approved the terms of the law of amnesty of 1979.”
It highlights that the political conditions of the Brazilian political transition, overseen by the military still in power, have made it difficult to implement actions to counter the discourse of appeasement against the military. “Moreover, in the 1980s, even progressive and democratic leaders and social movements, against the dictatorship, never gave priority to the issue in the political transition process or even in the Constituent Assembly. The goal was to eliminate authoritarian laws and guarantee social rights.Hegemonic and liberal memory isolated both the far-right voices nostalgic for the dictatorship and the human rights movements that defended a politics of memory and truth.
“But this repression has left that past full of poorly healed scars that have exploded since 2014-2015, aggravated by the fact that the dictatorship has become a reference for the current authoritarian sectors under the aegis of Bolsonarism. I confess that I am very pessimistic regarding the initiatives of the Brazilian State towards a politics of memory and effective legal punishment of the guilty, because not even when the progressive sectors were strong in society did this happen”, added Napolitano.
Osmo, of Unifesp, says that Brazilian elites have defended overcoming the past by simply moving on, without investigation, recognition and accountability for these violations. “It is not possible to build a true democracy without reviewing these violations,” he analyzes
For Pedro Campos, professor of History at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil did not bother, for example, to create museums and public spaces to contextualize what the military dictatorship was. In Chile, for example, there is the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. In Argentina there is the Esma Museum, a former torture center which last year became a World Heritage Site thanks to a title granted by UNESCO. In the whole country there is only one memorial center dedicated to the theme, the Memorial da Resistência, in the city of São Paulo.
The limits of the CNV
Created in 2011 and established the following year, the National Truth Commission (CNV) was an attempt to investigate crimes committed during the military dictatorship and, in some way, show society the horrors of that period.
Osmo underlines that one of the contributions of the CNV was to demonstrate the systematic nature of the serious human rights violations committed during the dictatorship. In other words: that the torture perpetrated, the extrajudicial executions, the forced disappearances were not about individual choices. “But it was a state policy organized by the leadership of the military government, and this is very important for the characterization of the crime against humanity according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to which Brazil is a signatory.”
Until mid-2014, the documentation produced by the Commission, in parallel with civil society, showed gender violence and the participation of private companies not only in supporting the military coup, but also in acts of torture during the regime. The commission’s final report, which also called for a review of the amnesty law, identified 377 people as responsible for killings and torture, as well as listing 210 people missing and 191 deaths during that period.
“The CNV provided valuable information. But there was a strong reaction from the Armed Forces, who retain veto power over further investigations. The situation worsened when an entire far-right sectarian memory, in explicit support of the dictatorship, began to contest public space. The absence, in short, of a pedagogy of memory as public and educational policy ended up allowing the growth of a dormant authoritarian memory”, says Napolitano.
For Osmo, the limited nature of the commission, despite significant progress, was something to be taken for granted, given that its existence, in addition to political obstacles, had a fixed duration. “The CNV itself even recommended the creation of a specific body to continue the work and also the strengthening of the Special Commission on Political Deaths and Missing Persons. But what we have seen recently is its extinction.” The collegiate was shut down at the end of 2022 under the Bolsonaro government, but there is pressure from civil society for it to be reinstated by the PT administration.
Criticism of Lula
While the PT defends the party’s participation in the demonstrations commemorating the 1964 coup, also as an approach to the January 8 coup, Lula preferred to adopt a conciliatory tone towards the Armed Forces. In the context of the Federal Police investigations investigating the participation of high-ranking military personnel in the coup attempt in Praça dos Três Poderes, the president moved to approach the barracks.
At an event in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday, he said he felt “affection” for the Armed Forces and defended that they are “highly qualified to guarantee peace.” The president’s decision to avoid demonstrations on March 31 to ease tension with the military is viewed with fear among experts.
“The decision not to authorize ministries to carry out acts of repudiation of the coup is a terrible and harmful choice for Brazilian society, because it contributes to the persistence of denialist acts praising the dictatorship and encourages serious violations not to be seen as something that deserves to be be repudiated”, comments Osmo. “Remembering the coup does not mean dwelling on the past, but contributing to strengthening democracy in the present and future. Thinking about the type of state we want.”
“It is an enormous frustration and an immense failure that the current government does not promote any form of expression of repudiation towards the dictatorship. The government should save the recommendations proposed at the end of the CNV report, in order to develop a policy of advancement with respect to the agenda of memory, truth and justice in relation to the crimes committed during the period of the dictatorship”, concludes Pedro Campos.
Source: Terra
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