5 - The Search for Truth

Summary

The previous chapters have offered a historical account of the long struggle for truth, memory and justice in Brazil. Chapter 3 begins by recounting the history of the 1964 coup, the emergence of the armed struggle and the ensuing Years of Lead (1968–74), when state agents systematically resorted to GVHRs against political dissidents. I have explained how the regime's gruesome tactics, in particular the forced disappearances, had unforeseen consequences that contributed to the fall of the dictatorship. By ‘disappearing’ members of clandestine organisations, the regime paved the way for the appearance of another movement of resistance: the mothers, daughters and partners who, in the absence of bodies and death certificates, were unable to mourn their loved ones. In this atmosphere, when personal grief became politicised, the Feminists for Amnesty (1975) spearheaded a nationwide movement demanding the amnesty of exiles and political prisoners and the punishment of perpetrators. This movement was frustrated by the 1979 unilateral amnesty passed by the military. The chapter also traced the long march towards the institutionalisation of the right to the truth in Brazil, from the first unofficial attempts to break with the regime of silence that followed the amnesty law (1985), to the officially sanctioned national plans for human rights (1996, 2002, 2009).

This exercise of historical contextualisation was driven by a central goal; I wanted to show that HROs operating in Brazil during the transition were not only seeking the implementation of justice but, in a disciplinary and ideological sense, were also creating the conditions of possibility for such justice. By framing their demands in the language of human rights and tactically promoting the imperatives of international law, they associated their struggle with the tenets of an emerging discipline. A discipline that, as part of a larger ideological field described in Chapter 3, was partially responsible for disciplining the political transition by defining what counted as unacceptable violence, delimiting the goals of justice and drawing the boundaries of the promise of ‘never again’. These practices also had their own unintended consequences: if the authoritarian regime ‘disappeared’ the bodies of radical leftist militants, it was the unreflective acceptance of the liberal and humanitarian vocabularies that, in a sense, ‘disappeared’ their radical project of deep structural change.