TO FORGET AND TO REMEMBER: CONFLICTS OVER THE POLITICAL MEMORY OF THE BRAZILIAN MILITARY DICTATORSHIP (1965-1984)

Maria Celina D'Araujo(a) daraujo@fgv.br

Nobody who meditates about history and politics can ignore the enormous role that violence has always played in human activities, and at first sight it is surprising that violence has so rarely been the object of our attention.(1)

Most Latin American countries living under military dictatorships during the second half of the 20th century used economic growth indicators - even though such growth was not sustained - as a basis for the legitimacy of arbitrary politics. In the words of Amartya Sen(2), happened in the region was a growth model “built on blood, sweat and tears”, a strategy that is typical of authoritarian governments.

These dictatorships followed the logic of the Cold War and as such their goal was to defeat “internal enemies” - leftist groups, armed or not, and opposition parties. In the name of the war against Communism, they generated a series of exceptional pieces of legislation that authorized persecution, arbitrary imprisonment, banishment, and, in many cases, they gave implicit authorization to kill members of the opposition. This climate of ideological terror produced several types of victims: politicians of the opposition, innocent by-standers and thousands of families.

As these countries moved towards redemocratization, there came a need to grant amnesty or to revise the authoritarian measures, and this brought about a serious competition over the memory of these governments. On the one side, the supporters of the authoritarian regimes tried to reconcile themselves with the past by means of having society forget what happened, while, on the other side, social groups linked to the protection of human rights fought for truth, justice and the judicial prosecution of those responsible for exceptional measures and acts.

This article will deal with the topics of repression and amnesty. It has two goals. First, to examine how Brazilian military officers argue in favor of the strategy of forgetting. Second, to show that recent Brazilian democratic governments have taken positive steps in the form of policies aimed at recognizing the crimes committed by the Brazilian state during the military dictatorship.

Most Brazilian military leaders consider that remembering the violations of human rights, acts of torture and the “dirty war” does not help the country’s history. There is an almost unanimous opinion among them that “exceptional facts” and “excesses” did occur during the confrontation between the military and the left, armed or unarmed, but they also agree that it is not relevant to insist on these points. Much to the contrary, to insist that the memory of such facts means moving backwards, looking into the past, not to the future.

The insistence on overlooking these facts, many times described as an act of “turning the pages of history”, was central to the definition of the political agreement that put an end to the military dictatorship (a transition commanded from above) and that remains a central tenet of Brazilian politics. Despite this, Brazil, among all Southern Cone countries(3), is the one in which the policy of compensation for the families of the victims of political repression advanced the most.

The military dictatorships of the Southern Cone countries started to take roots in the 1950s and lasted until the 1980s. Paraguay went through the first and most durable dictatorial experiment (1954-1989), followed by Bolivia (1964-1982), Brazil (1964-1985), Uruguay (1973-1985), Chile (1973-1990) and Argentina (1976-1982). Although the effectiveness of violence does not depend on numbers, as Arendt(4) wisely reminds us, the aftermath of these regimes is nothing less than terrifying. Besides the thousands of people who were imprisoned, there were about 1,000 dead in Paraguay, about 300 killed or missing in Bolivia, 213 dead and 152 missing in Brazil, about 310 dead or missing in Uruguay, about 2,300 in Chile, and between 10 to 30 thousand missing in Argentina. In the aftermath of the traumas caused by these facts, the move towards redemocratization of these countries was coupled with strong pleas for justice.(5)

Each country found its own way of reconciling with the past and all of them - except Paraguay and Bolivia - passed a law granting amnesty. It is relevant to recall that all such acts of amnesty, although with different colorings, were dictated by the military who were stepping down from power. This process became known as self-amnesty. In all countries there continued to exist demands for reforms in these laws and the search for truth and justice became a common aspect of their post-dictatorship political life. More recently, the international prosecution of two ex-dictators - Augusto Pinochet, from Chile, and Jorge Rafael Videla, from Argentina - introduced the novelty of extra-territorial judicial processes. Apparently, this precedent may be able to expand and include dictators from these countries, and from other countries. Inside or outside their borders, we see that the pleas for justice remain strong in Southern Cone countries, while the forces linked to the ancien regimes insist that such facts should be forgotten

This competition between remembering and forgetting leads us to the issue of which memory each society wants to (or can) build about itself. About this matter, Jacques Le Goff has stated that there are “the owners of memory and forgetting”, when he explains that collective memory can be understood as an instrument and a goal of power. According to him, “the act of forgetting and the silences about history reveal the mechanisms by which collective memory is manipulated”.(6)

The acts of political amnesty that resulted from the processes of transition towards democracy in some of the countries mentioned above are illustrative of this discussion between forgetting and remembering. Indeed, the word and the concept of amnesty have been interpreted in several ways, and there are those who believe that it is possible to erase the past. From the judicial point of view, amnesty is a legal act dictated by public authorities, “erasing” the criminal character of certain acts. As a consequence, the relevant crimes cease to exist and those who practiced them are no longer criminals. An important detail is that amnesty is something that cannot be refused. Those who receive amnesty cannot refuse it and neither can they demand a review.

In the field of politics, amnesty has been a convenient solution or tool for the State. When the conditions that caused punishments and excesses change, the State has been able to use the strategy of forgetting. The usual allegation is that societies victimized by political violence must heal themselves(7). In this sense, the concept of forgetting is joined by the concept of forgiveness. The State plays the role of using a political instrument to redeem balance and peace between social segments or social actors that antagonized each other.

Symptomatically, as we look at the etymology of the word amnesty, we find that in Greek it meant forgetting, and that in Latin it meant forgiveness. To forgive, however, is not the same as to forget. It does not erase the traces of traumatic events, neither does it mean social amnesia. Much to the contrary, as societies thrive on their memories, forgiveness (a liberating event) works also as an instrument that interferes in the future of memory(8). Besides, those who receive amnesty many times have nothing to be forgiven for. They may have been the victims of violent acts of an authoritarian government that managed to convict them as criminals only because they said or thought something that did not please the powers that be. Nothing better than to cite a poet who meditated about the meaning of amnesty as forgiveness, when Brazil was going through its own process of political amnesty in the late 1970s:

Amnesty, your name is forgiveness. But how does one forgive a person who committed no wrong or crime and, despite not committing them, was punished? […] Forgiveness is something that must come from who was offended […] Amnesty, I am beginning not to understand what you mean. You come with a olive branch in your right hand, but in the other hand you hide something that looks like a whip. You forgive those who need not to be forgiven, but honored.(9)

However, the fact is that societies choose how to manage their dramas and traumas. It is legitimate to suppose that a society may choose to throw a blanket of silence over its past, such as Uruguay, when a national plebiscite decided, in 1989, to maintain the amnesty granted by the military. This amounted to a decision not to engage in a more detailed reexamination of victims and acts of persecution. It is also legitimate that a society chooses to exhaust the matter from the factual and legal points of view and to keep it on the political agenda for a long time, as a means to exorcise the ghost of arbitrary rule. This is what happened in Argentina and, to a large extent, in Brazil. Brazil, despite the fact that the military insisted on the virtues of forgetting, adopted over the last few years a strategy that is close to a conciliation with the past - it does not incriminate directly those responsible for crimes, but it keeps alive the flame of memory and recognizes the perils of arbitrary rule.

Amnesty in Brazil was granted in 1979 and included people punished for political activities between 1961 and 1979. It was “broad, general and unrestricted”, meaning that winners and losers were equally protected. More specifically, the major goal was to guarantee that there would be no reprisals, that crimes committed during the dictatorship would not be prosecuted in courts - such as happened later in Argentina - and that the military personnel directly in charge of political repression, together with their commanders, would not be tried, under any circumstances.

This law was strongly influenced by the limitations of a political transition to democracy controlled from above. One of its goals was to insure legal protection for the military institutions responsible for the “dirty war”. It responded to the demands of the moderate political opposition and at the same time it created limitations to any pleas for expanded civil and political rights and to any attempts to seek justice through the judicial system. Precisely because of this, it did not consider the situation of missing persons, most of them killed as a consequence of the repression of guerilla warfare in the Amazon region. This topic was extensively discussed until December 4, 1995, when the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration approved Law number 9140. This law created a Commission, linked to the Department of Justice, responsible for reviewing and making determinations about the situation of missing persons whose disappearance might be linked to participation, or alleged participation, in political activities deemed illegal by the military dictatorship. The law was valid for persons missing between 1961 and 1979, the same period covered by the 1979 amnesty law.

This issue of missing persons was the most delicate one for the military, as most of them had been killed while fighting the repression of the Armed Forces. For the military, what happened was an armed conflict in which those who were killed were simply enemies. It was alleged also that the bodies of the deceased had not been formally identified and buried because of the exceptionally adverse circumstances of the war in the tropical jungle. The deceased were considered to be enemies of the country and there was nothing to be corrected.

The topic was indeed sensitive, because any investigations would lead to military personnel being held responsible, an outcome that was unacceptable to the Armed Forces. The government found a way out: It would recognize that there were missing persons, but it would not recognize that any military government, institution or personnel was responsible for this. The responsibility would fall to the State. The Brazilian State would recognize that citizens had been killed as a consequence of political conflict, that their bodies had been hidden, and it was willing to clarify their legal situation and to give support to their families.

These were the circumstances under which the Commission on Persons Missing for Political Causes, composed by representatives of several social sectors and institutions, including the Armed Forces, was formed. It was under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. The Commission convened between 1995 and 1998, examined 366 cases, recognized 280 and denied 86. The value of individual monetary reparations varied between 100 to 150 thousand reais(10). The most controversial decision emanating from this Commission was to recognize Carlos Lamarka, a military officer who deserted the Army to join the guerrilla, as missing for political reasons. Lamarka, in the words of the military, had “betrayed his superiors”, because he used his standing as a young officer to smuggle arms belonging to the Brazilian Army to a leftist organization, having joined the group in order to command a guerrilla warfare front. The Commission decided that the State was responsible for his death, because he was killed by police forces after he had been captured.

This finding of the Commission was harshly criticized by several military organizations representing reserve officers. Active military officers, however, did not address the issue publicly, although most of those interviewed by us considered this decision to be disrespectful of the institution. However, the institution did not take an official stand and publicly accepted the decisions of the Commission, approved by the presidency.

This episode was, of course, an important landmark in the process of democratic consolidation in Brazil. By accepting this decision without a scratch in discipline, the military corporation displayed an attitude of acceptance of civilian rule, a basic tenet of military institutions in all stable democracies. More than this, though, even if it did not investigate individual responsibilities, the Brazilian state proved that it wished to reconcile itself with civil society by acknowledging acts of injustice committed in the past. Symbolically, the President himself received in his office several family members of missing persons, adding a public dimension to the acts of reconciliation. The federal government also proposed to extend until 1990 the period for filing new petitions by those who were victimized by terrorism or discretionary political behavior of State agents. The search for bodies and burial sites is still going on, and even military personnel have helped in these efforts, side by side with medical doctors, anthropologists and coroners who try to identify the remains that have been located.

Anyhow, groups who stand for human rights still consider the Brazilian government to display a weak stance on this matter, as it chose to pay reparations and not to request the forgiveness of the victims’ families, nor to open judicial proceedings against those responsible for undue behavior. To a large extent, the pact of silence around the “dirty war” continues to exist.

One may think that the idea of forgetting such episodes appeals only to the officers who held command posts during the military regime or who went to the military academies during the harshest years of the dictatorship. However, this is not true. More than a generational expression, those who are in favor of forgetting actually take an institutional stance. Thus, the idea that society must be generous and dismiss the memory of past maladies is shared even by military officers who had no involvement at all with the military dictatorship. As the institution was perceived to be threatened, the bulk of the officer corps chose to defend the institution.

In our oral history research projects, we divided our interviewees in two groups: those who held high-ranking positions in the repressive apparatus and in government during the dictatorship, and those who commanded the institution after 1985, when the democratic period called New Republic was born. This second group consisted of generals who were still very young in 1964 (year of the military coup) and who built their careers independently of the military groups that shared political power during the dictatorship. They were closer to being what has been called “professional soldiers”, to use a term coined in the military sociology literature(11).

However, the feeling that predominates among them is that forgetting is preferable to the building of a memory that factors in these traumatic episodes. Besides, they all feel exposed when an officer appointed to a public post is denounced as a torturer by human rights groups. Over the last 10 years the position of the federal government, in face of such accusations, has been to cancel these appointments. This has generated comments such as this one, made by a ranking Navy officer:

As I always say: amnesty was a one-way deal. We granted amnesty, but we were not granted amnesty. There was amnesty, but it worked only in one direction.(12)

The military claim that, because of the amnesty, human rights groups are not entitled to monitor the lives of people involved in political repression. Despite murmured protests, however, the federal government has systematically cancelled appointments of publicly accused officers, claiming that such an attitude is consistent with the official policy of respecting human rights. In this respect, the military often complain about the media, which has indeed given extensive coverage to these cases. In the words of the previously mentioned officer:

"The 1964 revolution lost the media battle. Our press is radically against the Armed Forces. No positive news about us is ever printed."(13)

Another officer has this to say about the attitude of the media:

"The only explanation that I have for this tension is an urge for revenge. They want to do away with the Armed Forces".(14)

The expression urge for revenge is a strong one and is present in most of the statements that military officers make about the media and the civil and religious groups that defend human rights and criticize the excesses of the dictatorship. According to still another military Secretary of the New Republic:

"We knew that an urge for revenge would exist, but we did not imagine that it would go so far and be so conspicuous".(15)

What is called urge for revenge is many times limited to demands made by human rights groups that certain people linked to the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship be denied public offices. They want the Brazilian State, that now has a democratic Constitution, to reject the presence of people with such a biography in its apparatus. This position is described by another military leader in the following words:

"The urge to revenge does not mean putting all officers in front of a firing squad. It means creating a stigma. It is as if the military officers were, from the start, dirty, full of evil intentions, perpetually planning things against others, or seeking privileges, controlling everything and everyone, always looking for an edge over others".(16)

This same Secretary, in a tone of complaint, expresses the process of creating Brazilian political memory over the conflict-ridden years of the dictatorship:

"The responsibility for turning this page of history falls to the Brazilians who are more balanced. However, there is always somebody poking at these things. And this is a way of freezing, in the minds of Brazilian, a condemnation of facts that were indeed traumatic, but that we can also see - if we compare them with what happened in Uruguay and Argentina - were not as widespread. It was a distortion, an open war. But, is there a more serious distortion than the kidnapping of two ambassadors?(17) [...] The nation indeed had to turn this page".

In other words, statements such as these confirm that the military lost the battle over the memory of the period, but they insist on the convenience of social amnesia. As if forgetting was superior to remembering, as if it were a collective good. The struggle to keep memory alive is being evaluated as a form of revenge, even of injustice. We can also see that, despite limitations, the Brazilian State has had an agenda of reconciling past and present, recognizing the existence of crimes and abuses committed by political authorities in relation to political opponents.

In terms of civil rights, Brazil is only beginning to adopt a public safety policy based on the principles of human rights. The horrors of the dictatorship gave legitimacy to political rights before the same happened with civil rights. But this is a matter for another investigation.


Text prepared for the XIIth International Oral History Conference
(Sub-theme Trauma, memory and reconciliation)
Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, June, 24-27, 2002


(*) Maria Celina D'Araujo, Doctor in Political Science, professor at Federal Fluminense University and Getulio Vargas Foundation, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This article results from a long-term research project conducted by the author and a team of colleagues. This project has originated several publications, among which we may cite Maria Celina D'Araujo, Glaucio Ary Dillon Soares and Celso Castro, Visões do golpe: a memória militar sobre 1964; Os anos de chumbo: a memória militar sobre a repressão; A volta aos quartéis: A memória militar sobre a abertura (Rio de Janeiro, Relume Dumara, 1994 and 1995); Maria Celina D'Araujo and Celso Castro, Ernesto Geisel. Depoimento; Democracia e Forças Armadas no Cone Sul; Os militares e política na Nova República (Rio de Janeiro, Editora da Fundação Getulio Vargas, 1997, 2000 and 2001). Translated into English from the Portuguese language original by José Drummond.
(1) Hannah Arendt, Da violência. Brasília, Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 1970, p. 6.
(2) Amartya Sen, Desenvolvimento como liberdade. São Paulo, Cia da Letras, 2000.
(3) We refer to the following countries: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia.
(4) Arendt, op. cit.
(5) For a comparative analysis of the processes by which these countries decreed amnesty, see Ludmila da Silva Catela, "Em nome da pacificação nacional: anistias, pontos finais e indultos no Cone Sul", in Maria Celina D'Araujo e Celso Castro, Democracia e Forças Armadas no Cone Sul (Rio de Janeiro, Editora da FGV, 2000). Information used here about people who were arrested or considered missing was taken from this article.
(6) Jacques Le Goff. "Memória", In Enciclopédia Eunadi, vol. 1 (Memória e História). Rio de Janeiro, Imprensa Nacional/Casa da Moeda, 1984.
(7) About how societies must, in certain moments, seek healing, see Norbert Elias, Os alemães: a luta pelo poder e a evolução do habitus nos séculos XIX e XX. Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar, 1997.
(8) About amnesty and forgiveness, see, for example, Paul Ricouer, Sanção, reabilitação, perdão", presentation delivered at the colloquium "Justice ou vengeance". Paris, April 30, 1994.
(9) Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Jornal do Brasil, June 28, 1979.
(10) During this period, the value of the Brazilian currency "Real" varied from one US dollar to 50 cents.
(11) This expression was introduced by Samuel Huntington, O soldado e o Estado. Rio de Janeiro, Editora Biblioteca do Exército, 1979.
(12) Henrique Sabóia, Secretary of the Navy (1985-1990).
(13) Henrique Sabóia, Secretary of the Navy (1985-1990).
(14) Carlos Tinoco Ribeiro Gomes, Secretary of the Army (1990-1992).
(15) Sócrates Monteiro, Secretary of the Air Force (1990-1992).
(16) Mauro César Rodrigues Pereira, Secretary of the Navy (1995-1999).
(17) This is a reference to acts of urban guerilla groups in Brazil.