Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil

Abstract

A conventional approach that takes into account only official reckonings might lead one to believe that Brazil has lacked a culture of memory of the military regime, at least until recently. Widening the scope to include cultural production, however, provides a different view: one of a long tradition of reckoning with the dictatorship. In postauthoritarian Brazil, the process of transition has been marked by a disjuncture between the profusion of cultural responses to the dictatorship era and the legalistic silence resulting from the 1979 amnesty law, which continues to grant impunity to former human rights perpetrators. An approach that, instead of emphasizing political measures, asks how cultural production may have impacted Brazil’s particular way of approaching its violent past helps to answer such questions as how to reconcile the lack of popular mobilization in the 1980s with the fact that guerrilla memoirs turned out to be best sellers and whether culture served as a catalyst for debates about the authoritarian past. In the Brazilian context cultural production appears to strengthen the amnesty framework (“reconciliation”) rather than to undermine or overcome it (mobilizing for punishment). The function of cultural and memory work is double-edged, requiring a close reading of both the portrayal of violence in each cultural work and the larger historical and political context of each country case.

Estudos convencionais sobre o processo de acerto de contas no Brasil, que somente consideram mecanismos institucionais, podem dar a impressão de que ao país tem faltado uma cultura de memória sobre o regime militar, pelo menos até recentemente. Contudo, ao ampliar o escopo da análise para englobar a produção cultural, percebe-se uma ótica diferente: uma longa tradição de embates e reflexões sobre a ditadura militar. No Brasil pós-ditatorial o processo de transição tem sido caracterizado por um desalinhamento entre as várias respostas culturais aos crimes da ditadura e o silêncio jurídico resultante da anistia de 1979, que continua agraciando com impunidade os agentes que outrora violaram direitos humanos. Um tratamento que, ao invés de enfatizar medidas políticas, questiona de que maneira a produção cultural pode ter impactado a forma específica em que o Brasil lidou com seu passado violento ajuda a explicar como se reconcilia a falta de mobilização popular nos anos 80 com a transformação de certas memórias de ex-guerrilheiros em verdadeiros best sellers no mesmo período. Ademais, permite avaliar se a produção cultural serviu como catalisador de debates sobre o passado autoritário. No contexto brasileiro, a produção cultural tende a reforçar a moldura reconciliadora criada pela anistia. A função da cultura é uma faca de dois gumes: requer uma leitura meticulosa tanto da retratação da violência em cada obra cultural como dos contexto histórico e político do país em questão.

Keywords

Brazil Artistic-cultural production Dictatorship Impunity Memory work

In 1986, a little over a year after their military stepped aside for a civilian president, Brazilians were riveted by a telenovela that dramatized the contemporary political moment. Titled Roda de Fogo (Wheel of Fire), the drama featured a cast of villains from the military as well as the economic and political elite. One of the subplots revolved around a young woman named Maura, a former political prisoner struggling with whether to confront the man who had tortured her years earlier. Roda de Fogo made history by discussing political torture before a mass audience, many of whose members first became aware of the issue by watching the hit telenovela. It also invited spectators to extrapolate Maura’s dilemma to that of their country: should Brazil, like Maura, confront police and military torturers? Roda de Fogo aired in the context of Brazil’s political transition, a time when the state took virtually no steps to reckon with the dictatorial past, thus exemplifying how artistic-cultural production can help fill the void by raising questions that were not being discussed in the political and legal domains. The case of Roda de Fogo illustrates the central concern of this article: what role has artistic-cultural production played in Brazil’s history of reckoning with the military past?

Latin Americanist scholars in the field of memory studies have increasingly focused on the role of artistic-cultural production—works of literary fiction and testimony, film, plays, television shows, art installations, and memory sites—in the remembrance of authoritarian or conflictual pasts.¹ For the sociologist Elizabeth Jelin (2003: 25), cultural goods are an important manifestation of or vehicle for memory work (what she calls the “labors of memory”), for through them “social agents . . . try to ‘materialize’ the meanings of the past.” Steve Stern (2010: xxii) emphasizes that memory studies allow us to research the “underexplored ‘hearts and minds’”—people’s emotions. He suggests conceiving of memory as an interactive dynamic struggle allowing us to transcend the abstract dichotomy between a top-down, elite perspective and a “bottom-up perspective that sees its obverse” (xxiii). In a similar vein, other scholars have called attention to the fact that artistic-cultural works may constitute a necessary alternative or complement to official truth-telling projects such as truth commissions, particularly in Argentina, Chile, and Peru (Atencio, 2014; Bilbija and Payne, 2005; Kaiser, 2002; Milton, 2007; n.d.; Rosenberg, 2010; Stern, 2010; 2012).

While a full elaboration is beyond the scope of this article, we argue that the relationship between “transitional justice” and “collective memory” remains undertheorized, in particular with regard to artistic-cultural productions. “Transitional justice” refers to a larger set of official accountability measures including prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations, forms of memorialization, and education.² While the complex concept of “collective memory” has the benefit of focusing on culture as the social and cultural everyday practices of society as a whole—the state and civil society—it tends to be rather vague. The cultural historian Peter Burke (2004: 58), for one, observes that it remains unclear when it is justifiable to generalize from personal memory to a collective or national memory. Most scholars concur that multiple memories coexist. There is less consensus, however, as to how to evaluate the relative influence of a given interpretation of the past or the relationship between competing memories. Steve Stern (2010: xxix) suggests historicizing memory struggles and their dynamic nature. He contends that memory studies often fail to take into account the “wider political, economic, and cultural contexts” (xxii). Whereas most works analyzing artistic-cultural productions after mass violence tend to relate exclusively to the collective memory approach, assuming it as an abstract given regardless of the historical evidence and political context, reckoning histories or so-called transitional justice accounts tend to ignore the role of culture and focus narrowly on legal and political initiatives. In sum, publications that connect the role of art, “collective memory,” and the reckoning history (or transitional justice) process are lacking. Myopic scholarly analyses—focusing narrowly on either the political reckoning history or artistic-cultural artifacts—are insufficient to grasp the complex dynamics experienced in postauthoritarian countries. While Stern and other scholars have called for moving beyond top-down binaries, this article combines disciplinary approaches in order to transcend the boundaries between artistic-cultural work, history, and politics.

A look at the way memory of dictatorship has been constructed through artistic-cultural production is particularly illuminating in the Brazilian case. Whereas a focus on official reckoning mechanisms alone might lead one to conclude that Brazil lacked a culture of memory until recently, broadening the perspective to include artistic-cultural production reveals a long record of grappling with the dictatorship and its legacies. For three decades, artistic-cultural productions—along with the central protagonists of the memory struggle, the families of the dead and disappeared as well as human rights groups—has helped keep the memory question alive in Brazil while the state failed to address it.

Postauthoritarian Brazil’s reckoning history has received considerably less attention than that of other Latin American countries. The scholarship available focuses on the roles of the Brazilian state and its official responses (particularly in the form of reparations and, more recently, the National Truth Commission) and of international law (the Inter-American Court of Human Rights). In this article, we focus on the critical role that artistic-cultural production plays in reckoning with Brazil’s authoritarian past. The first section explains that Brazil’s protracted and complex political transition was fundamentally shaped by the 1979 Amnesty Law, which was the product of widespread popular mobilization, on the one hand, and tight control from those parts of the military regime negotiating a highly constrained process of political opening, on the other. The second section summarizes Brazil’s comparatively late and less radical posttransition accountability measures, including an extensive if frequently criticized reparations program and various state-sponsored artistic-cultural memory projects from 2006 on. The third section then contrasts these official responses with other, cultural ones, providing an overview of the construction of memory in best-selling testimonies as well as in telenovelas and fiction film. Drawing on the analysis of these three means of cultural production, the fourth section presents what we call the “double-edged role of artistic-cultural production.” This discussion leads us to conclude that while it may not be possible to draw causal connections between artistic-cultural production and official truth-seeking, compensation, and legal reckonings with dictatorship, culture deserves greater attention in reckoning histories or so-called transitional justice studies (see, e.g., Rush and Simic, 2014). Conversely, cultural memory studies profit from more attention to the historical context and the sociopolitical interests that shape the struggle over memory.

The empirical facts in Brazil are—and this is what is striking and what is the core point of the article—that the cultural production on reckoning was early and pervasive at a time when political measures inititated by the state were absent. In the Brazilian process these measures were not complementary at first; the Truth Commission was established only in 2012, and none of the Brazilian perpetrators has ever been punished. A conservative approach that takes into account only official reckonings might lead one to believe that Brazil has lacked a culture of memory, at least until recently. Widening the scope to include cultural production, however, provides a different view, one of a long tradition of reckoning with the dictatorship.

From Dictatorship to Democracy

While cross-country comparisons are complex, the history of political transition in Brazil differed from that of other Latin American countries in terms of both time span and nature. Brazil’s transition was long and gradual, initiated in 1974 by the military president Ernesto Geisel’s policy of distensão (literally “depressurization” [Montero, 2005: 20]). Scholars diverge about the end date of the dictatorial period, whether it was 1985, when the first civilian but not directly elected president and former regime collaborator José Sarney took office, or 1988, with the Brazilian Constitution, or 1989, with the first direct presidential election. Some even regard the transition as incomplete (Teles and Safatle, 2010). The generals engineered a very controlled democratization process (Gaspari, 2004), which, however, was partly a victory of massive popular mobilization (the socially and ideologically broad amnesty movement) as the regime’s popularity declined in the 1970s (Alves, 1985; Lamounier, 1980: 7).

In Brazil, the transition to democracy and subsequent memory politics were hugely influenced by the amnesty question. In 1979, six years before the formal return to democracy, the Brazilian regime promulgated an amnesty law that covered not only the members of its own security forces but also parts of the opposition. Political prisoners who had been involved in the armed struggle, participated in attacks on other persons’ lives (“blood crimes”), or been charged with establishing illegal parties were excluded, however. This was done grudgingly after months of nationwide mobilizations by large sectors of civil society demanding amnesty for all political exiles and prisoners. At the time Brazil was still under military rule and memories of state violence were still fresh. For this reason, the Brazilian amnesty could be—and was—promoted as a victory for civil society (even as human rights groups saw it as a defeat) and a gesture of national conciliation. Even though at its height the national amnesty campaign and some influential political exiles had demanded punishment—not amnesty—for state torturers, much of civil society desired reconciliation and ultimately chose to celebrate the blanket amnesty rather than to mobilize against it.³ Even some of those who spoke out most passionately about the need for punishment in the months preceding the law’s passage (e.g., Fernando Gabeira [Atencio, 2015]) fell silent on the subject almost immediately thereafter.

After the passage of the Amnesty Law, the demands for truth and justice that had formerly animated parts of the amnesty movement (Fico, 2009: 1; Reis Filho, 2004: 46) were overshadowed by more future-oriented concerns. The formerly massive popular mobilization was redirected into other political projects and forms of organization. New parties were being formed (including the Partido dos Trabalhadores [Workers’ Party—PT]), Brazilians took to the streets in 1984 to demand—unsuccessfully—direct presidential elections, and throughout the 1980s a variety of civil society movements emerged, including the women’s, gay, and black movements, along with environmentalist groups. Civil society and the left reorganized, but reckoning with the past was no longer a key demand for either. One might have expected the left—reconstituted in the PT, the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (Brazilian Social Democracy Party—PSBD), and other parties—to push for truth and justice, but instead it “joined the game of ‘let’s forget’ dictated by the old right” (Seligmann-Silva, 2010: 60). According to Seligmann-Silva, 1985 represents less the end of the dictatorial period than the collapse of the left: “I wouldn’t say that in 1985 there occurred a pact between the right and left. What happened was more serious: it was a kind of drawing together and almost fusion of the two.”

Official Reckonings with Dictatorship in Brazil

Overall, the Brazilian state took accountability measures in a slow and gradual process lacking a clear point of rupture with the authoritarian past (for an overview on the reckoning history in Brazil consult Brito, Gonzalez-Enriquez, and Aguila, 2001: 119–161; Mezarobba, 2007; and Payne, Abrão, and Torelly, 2011; Pereira, 2005). Until 2006, most state initiatives deliberately targeted individual victims rather than Brazilian society as a whole, and, as Pereira (2005: 163) has noted, governments (the Lula government being no exception) seemed afraid to publicize memory-making initiatives. The lack of “transparency” has also been a key point raised by critics of the National Truth Commission (O Estado de São Paulo, June 14, 2013). Brazil has so far resisted (especially international) pressure to hold torturers criminally accountable.⁴ In lieu of criminal trials, Brazil initially sought to redress dictatorship-era human rights crimes through a two-step reparations program (1995/2002) and official truth-seeking and memory initiatives including the recent National Truth Commission. However, these initiatives did not come easily but resulted from the families’ of victims and their supporters’ decade-long struggle (Coimbra, 2001: 11–19; Mezarobba, 2007; Santos, Teles, and Teles, 2009: 472–495; SEDH, 2007: 32–33).

In 1995 the state passed the Law of the Disappeared, which established reparations for the families of the killed and disappeared; the burden of proof, however, still fell upon the families. In 2002, a second program known as the Amnesty Commission (Law No. 10.559/02) extended reparations from those affected by death and disappearance to survivors of torture and dismissal not covered by the 1995 law, a much larger group of victims (Abrão and Torelly, 2011a: 443–485; 2011b: 217; Ministério da Justiça, 2008: 39–51; 2009: 110–149). In contrast to its predecessor reparations commission, the Amnesty Commission itself investigates complaints.⁵ While the president of the Amnesty Commission, Paulo Abrão, and his colleague, Marcelo Torelly (2011b: 444), regard the reparations program as the “linchpin of transitional justice” in Brazil and a starting point for further accountability measures, Glenda Mezarobba (2007: 307–308, 322, 359) has criticized it for its unfair payment procedure and the individualization of the victims, disconnecting them from society as if compensation were a private rather than a public gesture. The very name—“Amnesty” instead of “Reparations” Commission—associates reparations payments with the conciliatory framework set by the 1979 amnesty. Since 2007, however, the Amnesty Commission has tried to change the meaning of “amnesty” from “impunity and forgetting” to “freedom and reparations” and “reparations and memory” (Abrão, 2012; Abrão and Torelly, 2012). Under Abrão’s leadership it has, furthermore, developed into the primary official institution to mobilize for prosecutions (Abrão, 2012: 30; Schneider, 2014).

Truth-seeking measures prior to the National Truth Commission included a vital commission with limited personal and financial support to investigate the past human rights crimes—the Comissão Especial sobre Mortos e Desaparecidos Políticos (Special Commission on the Dead and Disappeared Political Activists), also established by the 1995 Law of the Disappeared. While the military regime first denied deaths and disappearances altogether and only later acknowledged some cases as “excesses” rather than a systematic state practice (Green, 2010: 209, 219–222), the 1995 law officially acknowledged murder victims, and President Fernando Henrique Cardoso issued an official apology, albeit a timid one (Schneider, 2014).

The Brazilian state abandoned its “politics of silence” only in 2006, when the federal government started honoring the left-wing opposition groups that bore the brunt of human rights crimes. During the second Lula administration, Paulo Vannuchi, then human rights minister, launched two major culture-oriented initiatives: The Right to Memory and Truth (2006) and Memories Revealed (2009), projects that encompassed educational programs, monuments, museum exhibits, and official reports. The most important of these official reports from the mid- 2000s is that of the Special Commission of the Dead and Disappeared, titled O direito à memória e à verdade (for analysis see Atencio, 2014). The state’s new politics of memory—another important shift in Brazil’s reckoning process, which for the first time addressed society as a whole, making torture a public rather than a private concern (Schneider, 2011a)—clearly operated on the cultural level: instead of pressuring for prosecutions, it championed the remembrance of victims.⁶ Since 2008, the previously mentioned Amnesty Commission has also fostered public memory work, partly in response to the criticism leveled at the reparations procedures and their effect of privatizing rather than publicizing the question of torture. Abrão began bringing the amnesty sessions to different Brazilian cities and making them public by means of what are called amnesty caravans, often accompanied by artistic-cultural events related to the dictatorship (Abrão and Torelly, 2011b: 465; Ministério da Justiça, 2009: 110–149). The Amnesty Commission has furthermore published numerous reports and books, kick-started renewed discussions about impunity, and been a driving force behind the so-called Amnesty Memorial currently under construction in Belo Horizonte (Peixoto, 2013).

Many important accountability measures, however, remain to be developed, among them institutional reforms within the military, the police, and the judiciary and criminal charges against the perpetrators. Whenever individual statesmen have attempted to move beyond reparations, truth-seeking, and memory initiatives and challenge impunity, they have ultimately faced defeat. Vannuchi, for example, encountered major resistance when he demanded that the 1979 Amnesty Law be reconsidered and when creating the National Truth Commission (Schneider, 2011c: 164–170). The fate of Vannuchi’s more ambitious attempts at radical steps demonstrates that bold legal-political steps have so far been opposed by powerful sectors within the state, including the armed forces, the Supreme Court, and the Defense and Foreign Ministries.

Not all the blame rests with the state, however. The lack of public mobilization for the clarification and punishment of past torture has also been a decisive factor, since Brazil lacks a movement with broad appeal similar to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina (Abrão and Torelly, 2011a: 227, 237–239, 244; Pereira, 2000: 224). Empirical evidence from Latin America has shown that transitional justice processes cannot be reduced to one-directional, top-down policies and that civil society plays a key role in addressing the authoritarian past (Jelin, 2007; Stern, 2006; 2010). But what if neither the state nor the larger public takes an interest in addressing the military past through legal-political mechanisms, as until 2012, when the National Truth Commission started its work, has been the case of Brazil? Before 2006 the state failed to launch official memory campaigns (Schneider, 2011a), and memory work in Brazil has been largely reduced to the private realm, that of marginalized victims and their families supported by the Catholic Church, lawyers, and local and global human rights activists (Coimbra, 2001: 12; Green, 2010; Pinheiro, 1997; Santos, Teles, and Teles, 2009). Besides the governments’ silencing of torture prior to 2006 and a widespread public approval of police aggression,⁷ some scholars note the public perception that the repression was less intense relative to that of its South American neighbors and that in the eyes of ordinary Brazilians the violence of the present is more pressing than that of the past; in 1997 police killings in São Paulo amounted to triple the victims under the whole dictatorship (Brito, 2001: 119–160; Pereira, 2000: 233–234, 228).

Still, it would be misleading simply to interpret public lack of interest in torture and punishment as a benevolent attitude toward the military regime. The larger public’s lack of enthusiasm for and mobilization around the clarification of violence and punishment contains many shades of grey, as a look at the cultural arena reveals.⁸ The proliferation and popularity of artistic-cultural works such as published testimonies as well as telenovelas and films that engage the dictatorial period point to a larger phenomenon in Brazil: a tendency to address past human rights crimes outside the institutional sphere.⁹

Cultural Reckonings with Dictatorship in Brazil

A conventional approach that takes into account only official reckonings such as the one outlined above might lead one to believe that Brazil has lacked a culture of memory, at least until recently. Widening the scope to include cultural production, however, provides a different view: one of a long tradition of reckoning with the dictatorship. Immediately after the passage of the Amnesty Law, former guerrillas began publishing their testimonies of armed struggle. The first and most influential were Fernando Gabeira’s O que é isso, companheiro? (What’s Going on Here, Comrade?, 1979) and Alfredo Sirkis’s Os carbonários (The Carbonari, 1980). These survivors of dictatorship, who had experienced armed struggle and often imprisonment, torture, and exile, told the side of the story that had been suppressed during many years of censorship of the newspapers, television, and radio. Gabeira, a member of MR-8 (October 8 Revolutionary Movement), provided the first inside look at the kidnapping of U.S. Ambassador Charles Elbrick, arguably the most successful guerrilla operation and the only one to gain popular sympathy; he also recounted the several months he spent in political prisons, including the torture he endured and witnessed. Sirkis, whose book came out six months later, recounted his own trajectory from high school student activist to member of the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (Revolutionary Popular Vanguard—VPR). He had participated in not one but two successful revolutionary kidnapping operations involving foreign dignitaries (the Swiss and German ambassadors). His account became a cult classic on how to become a revolutionary.

Both books were huge hits, attaining every measure of commercial and critical success. At a time when the book-publishing industry was suffering a downturn, they flew off the shelves, requiring multiple reprintings. Each occupied the best-seller list for months and eventually won the prestigious Jabuti literary prize in the “best autobiography/memoir” category. Gabeira’s, the more popular of the two, sold 200,000 copies in the first five years after it was launched. By comparison, the Archdiocese of São Paulo’s unauthorized report on torture, Brasil Nunca Mais (one of the best-selling books of all time), sold 200,000 in two years. Companheiro did not achieve the same readership, but its success was considerable nevertheless. Together with dozens of similar accounts, they laid the foundation of the left’s memory of the armed struggle and the dictatorship’s repression (Atencio, 2014; Martins Filho, 2009).¹⁰ The success of the two works and the flood of testimonies that followed belies the notion that memory work was entirely absent in the wake of the Amnesty Law.

Even more far-reaching than published testimonies are telenovelas and film. After 1985, full-length novelas and shorter miniseries gradually began to revisit the period. The 1986 novela Roda de Fogo, described earlier, was the first to address torture. Yet, significantly, the novela did not dramatize the period itself. That “first” fell to Anos Rebeldes (Rebel Years) in 1992. That miniseries, inspired partly by Sirkis’s testimony, presents a typical story of star-crossed lovers: the idealist João is caught between his calling in radical politics and his passion for Maria Lúcia, an individualist who dreams of a traditional middle-class life. The plot follows the lives of the two romantic leads and their group of high school friends from 1964 to 1979, reimagining key historic moments such as the coup, the student protests of 1968 and the subsequent hardening of the regime in December of that year, and the return of political exiles to Brazil with the 1979 Amnesty Law. Anos Rebeldes pioneered the dramatization of political violence and censorship on Brazilian television, although it simultaneously played down the brutality of the security forces.¹¹ The result was a hit: the program drew 30 million viewers during its initial broadcast and inspired spin-off products including an LP of its soundtrack and a paperback book. The miniseries, which features scenes of protest marches from the 1960s, has been rerun several times on Globo’s regular and paid channels—most recently in May and June of 2013, not coincidentally while protests swelled around the issues of rising public transportation costs, endemic corruption, and other injustices.¹²

Anos Rebeldes broke the taboo and opened the floodgates for discussing the dictatorship on prime-time television (Atencio, 2011). Globo followed up with several other novelas and miniseries, as well as other kinds of programming. One of the most popular was the novela Senhora do Destino (Lady of Destiny), which tells the story of a woman’s search for a daughter who went missing during a protest march in 1968. The first four episodes are set in the dictatorship period (most of the novela takes place in the present) and feature stronger scenes of violence than Anos Rebeldes, including a scene of sexual violence. Other networks have followed Globo’s lead in revisiting the dictatorship: rival network SBT broadcast the relatively less successful 2011 Amor e Revolução (Love and Revolution), a love story set against the backdrop of the harshest years of the dictatorship that ran at the time the Brazilian Congress was debating the law to create the National Truth Commission, and TV Cultura featured the 2009 Trago Comigo (I Carry It with Me), a four-episode miniseries in which a former guerrilla decides to revisit his past by staging a play about it.

Cinema has provided another space for the public to engage the memories of dictatorship. The corpus of works is vast and heterogeneous, with great variations in sophistication and quality as well as commercial and critical success. Nevertheless, two important characteristics are evident: the attempt to create memories of the dictatorship and an increasing emphasis on the legacies of the authoritarian period in the present. While genres run the gamut, the political thriller and documentary (including fiction-documentary hybrids) are particularly well represented (Seligmann-Silva, 2010).

Many if not most of these films seek to restore dignity to the victims. Often they do so through the focus on real-life people and their suffering. Director Sérgio Rezende dramatized the lives of Carlos Lamarca, a former military officer who joined the resistance and was ultimately killed, and Zuleika Angel Jones, an internationally renowned fashion designer whose dogged pursuit of the truth about what happened to her son ended in a suspicious car accident, in the 1994 Lamarca and the 2006 Zuzu Angel, respectively. Helvécio Ratton’s 2006 film Batismo de Sangue (Blood Baptism) retells the story of Frei Tito de Alencar Lima, who survived the torture chamber only to commit suicide in Paris (in Brazil, suicides are included in the official count of deaths caused by the dictatorship). Not all films feature real-life victims; others tell the stories of fictional characters. One of the first and most successful was Roberto Farias’s 1983 film Pra Frente Brasil (Onward Brazil) about two apolitical brothers who inadvertently get sucked into the vortex of the political repression. More recently, Caio Hamburger’s critically acclaimed 2006 film O ano que meus pais saíram de férias (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation) presents the brutality and terror of the dictatorship period as seen through the eyes of a young boy.

In surveying cinematic production since transition, one notes a growing emphasis on the legacies of dictatorship in the present.¹³ Rather than a simple dramatization of the authoritarian period, these films explore the effects of impunity in the present and the timidity of Brazil’s official reckoning process, as well as the factors contributing to them, such as the left’s reluctance to push the issues of memory and justice. An excellent example is Beto Brandt’s 1998 Ação entre amigos (Friendly Fire), in which a torture survivor, dissatisfied with the impunity resulting from the amnesty, persuades three of his former comrades to impose their own form of justice on the man who tormented them during the dictatorship. More recently, in Tata Amaral’s 2012 film Hoje (Today) a woman receives a reparations check for the political disappearance of her husband, and his unexpected reappearance symbolizes how the dictatorial past continues to haunt Brazil’s present. The film’s message was all the more poignant because of the timing of its release, which came at the time when the Brazilian Congress was debating the National Truth Commission (Atencio, 2014). Lúcia Murat’s 2013 A memória que me contam (The Memory They Tell Me) explores the role of the 1960s generation in contemporary Brazil and particularly the inability of the left to remedy the inequalities it denounced decades ago despite its rise to political power. Other Murat films, including the 1986 Que bom te ver viva (How Nice to See You Alive), featuring interviews with female torture survivors, and the 2005 Quase dois irmãos (Almost Brothers), depicting contemporary violence and social injustice as legacies of dictatorship, also fit into this category and illustrate how filmmakers have produced cultural reckonings with the dictatorial period.

The Double-Edged Role of Artistic-Cultural Production in Reckoning with Dictatorship

Brazil has a robust tradition of artistic-cultural production that engages with the dictatorial period, one that dates back at least to the 1979 Amnesty Law. In a society in which official responses have been timid and where there was little effort by the state before 2006 to generate discussion about the past, cultural producers have stepped in and offered testimonies, telenovelas, films, and other works in an effort to “ ‘materialize’ the meanings of the past” (to reprise Jelin’s words). Yet what is the role of this vast and varied cultural production and the “labors of memory” it performs in the reckoning with the military dictatorship and its legacies?

In an important sense, artistic-cultural production that revisits the authoritarian past or explores the legacies of dictatorship in the present has the potential to promote further memory work within society. For the most part, the creative works described in the preceding section have served to draw or renew attention to the authoritarian past. Cultural works have the potential to disseminate and validate counter memories of the authoritarian past, thereby helping to contest the official narrative put forth by the dictatorship. While artistic-cultural production cannot rectify impunity, many individual works invite Brazilians to critically rethink the systematic human rights violations of the dictatorship. In this sense, cultural works constitute a privileged arena in which alternative memories can circulate and trigger discussion (Atencio, 2011; 2014). They denounce dictatorship-era political torture, murder, and disappearance and, through storytelling, humanize and arguably restore dignity to the victims of the repression, mitigating the stigma of “terrorists.” Novelas and films bring the past to a new audience, one of massive proportions thanks to the packaging of memory as “entertainment” (Bilbija and Payne, 2005: 6). Anos Rebeldes, for example, attracted an audience 50 times the size of the readership of Brazil’s first truth report. While the numbers for cinema are not as high, they are still substantial. Moreover, their entertainment value has allowed them to reach people who might otherwise avoid the dictatorial past as “too political.”

Of course, cultural production is not a monolith, and there is a vast spectrum of ideologies represented. By its very nature as creative expression it allows for multiple meanings and interpretations, not all of which are necessarily consistent with promoting memory work and the human rights message of “never again.” As the critic Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2010: 66) explains, Brazilian televisual and cinematographic engagements with the dictatorship period all too often encourage “catharsis in its negative sense, producing an effect of forgetting.” He contends that while cultural production can serve as a vehicle for constructing memories of past trauma, the memories constructed have “little political density.”

Anos Rebeldes is a case in point. On one hand, the miniseries promotes the human rights message of “never again” through protagonists, including João and Maria Lúcia, who forcefully denounce torture and other human rights crimes. On the other hand, it tends to play down the harsh realities of life under dictatorship in numerous ways, including by presenting military characters as benevolent father figures, by avoiding showing scenes of torture or other forms of violence, and by portraying the one violent death of a main character as the result of a tragic accident rather than the product of systematized violence. The result is a watered-down depiction of the political violence, a kind of “repression lite” (Atencio, 2011: 52). Moreover, because the conflict between dictatorship and opposition is presented as the backdrop for a romance between the guerrilla João and his apolitical girlfriend Maria Lúcia, romance invariably overshadows—and mutes—political issues. João’s political activism matters in the plot primarily because it creates tension in his relationship with Maria Lúcia. Similarly, when another main character in the series, Heloísa, is tortured, the focus is placed on the tension that her predicament causes with her father (a dictatorship financier). The state’s abuse of power over the individual is reduced to a familial conflict, thereby draining it of its political significance.¹⁴ While the “repression lite” message in Anos Rebeldes must certainly be recognized and contested, it does not necessarily negate but rather coexists uneasily with the “never again” message in the miniseries.

Yet it is not just in this sense of transmitting competing meanings or messages that cultural works can cut both ways. Culture is one force among many that influences how societies remember a painful past, and its influence is double-edged. Looking at the larger picture and comparing it with official truth-seeking, reparations, or legal reckoning mechanisms, cultural memory work’s power is limited to raising awareness and providing “moral condemnation.” This moral condemnation can mobilize accountability demands by acting as a stepping stone to juridical condemnation, but it can also demobilize them if treated as a mechanism for bypassing juridical condemnation. In Brazil, the latter possibility seems to predominate in that popular enthusiasm for “hit” books, films, and novelas denouncing the dictatorship does not seem to translate into popular enthusiasm for human rights trials. In this sense, consumption of cultural works about the dictatorship does not challenge but arguably supports the paradigm of reconciliation imposed by the 1979 Amnesty Law. Bearing in mind Brazil’s history of political transition, public lack of interest in the question of torture and the widespread reception of guerrilla memoirs, telenovelas, and movies do not represent a paradox but rather make perfect sense.

This double-edged role of culture (as one form of reckoning among others) and its contribution to the reconciliatory amnesty framework is especially evident in the case of the guerrilla testimonies discussed earlier. These works played a critical role in contesting the official version of the repression (as a dirty war against terrorism) at a time when the regime was still in power. Yet a careful look at Gabeira’s and Sirkis’s books reveals that, for all their denunciation of torture, they are curiously silent about the Amnesty Law and the extension of its benefits to torturers; in fact, both former guerrillas would eventually come to defend impunity (Atencio, 2014). Their denunciations of political torture, murder, and disappearance notwithstanding, these two iconic books have done much to reinforce the framework of reconciliation imposed by the Amnesty Law (Atencio, 2014; Avelar, 1999; Reis Filho, 1997).

While, especially in the context of the Chilean and South African truth and reconciliation commissions, the term “reconciliation” was often invoked in a positive way associated with a “new social contract” following a period of violence (Hazan, 2010: 34–39), the empirical history of Brazil’s reckoning process paints a different picture. As in many other Latin American countries, “reconciliation” became a euphemism for impunity, leading scholars to use alternatives like “social reconstruction” instead (Roht-Arriaza and Mariezcurrena, 2006: 12).

Conclusion

Assuming that cultural strategies shape reckoning processes, form peoples’ memories and thoughts about past human rights crimes, and deserve to be studied, what are the possible advantages and disadvantages of cultural memory work in dealing with the authoritarian past? Critics could argue that cultural tactics are insufficient, most importantly, when the state evades its own responsibility for systematic crimes and fails to punish perpetrators. Similar accusations have been made against nonretributive measures, which critics see as “cheap” substitutes for prosecutions (Subotić, 2012: 120).

While the role of artistic-cultural productions in contexts of democratic transition should not be overemphasized, it certainly forms part of any serious, comprehensive study about long-term processes of reckoning with the military past and has larger implications for both scholars and practitioners. Official responses do not take place in a vacuum but rather are conditioned by their social, political, and cultural milieu. In certain cases, artistic-cultural works may even interact more concretely with official steps, such as when a film engages with the reparations program for the disappeared (as in the case of Hoje) or when state actors sponsor cultural memory policies (Atencio, 2014). Artistic-cultural production can furthermore serve as an alternative and less official form of truth telling (Atencio, 2014; Bilbija and Payne, 2005; Milton, 2007; n.d.).

Yet does the act of agenda setting—of making the military past a frequently discussed and publicly visible issue—advance the quest of memory, truth, and justice, especially if the way the history of the dictatorship is told is perpetually subject to romanticism or manipulation? Does it perhaps rather fill a void left by arguably half-hearted or belated accountability measures and, most important, impunity? In the specific Brazilian context, it appears to strengthen the amnesty framework (“reconciliation”) rather than to undermine or overcome it (mobilizing for punishment). This article’s central argument is that the function of cultural and memory work is double-edged, requiring a close reading of both the portrayal of violence in each cultural work and the larger historical and political context of each country case.

In theoretical terms, we conclude that just as official responses do not take place in a vacuum but are conditioned by their social, political, and cultural milieu, cultural production occurs in a specific historical context in which different agents struggle over how to read the past. Only by combining these two approaches can we research both the dynamic interrelations in a memory struggle and the meaning of cultural productions in a specific reckoning process, because, contrary to the framework of scholarly disciplines, “real life” is not compartmented but an integrated whole. We agree with Stern (2010: xxii) that memory studies, on the one hand, and reckoning histories, on the other hand, benefit from taking into account the “wider political, economic, and cultural contexts” of memory struggles over a violent past, and we suggest testing this holistic methodological approach in other cases.

Most postauthoritarian societies have also used cultural forms of engaging with the dictatorial past. Taking a holistic approach that combines cultural work and the larger historical context, what role has cultural memory work played in other postauthoritarian societies at different junctures in their reckoning processes? In Argentina and Chile, the millions of citizens who struggled for memory, truth, and justice initiatives faced different kinds of challenges. While the Full Stop Law and the Law of Due Obedience hindered prosecutions in Argentina for nearly a decade, Chile never officially revoked its amnesty law. Even though the Brazilian experience with amnesty was unique (it was both demanded from below and highly controlled by the military), the general question can be raised: Have not other postauthoritarian countries struggled against discourses of “reconciliation” in comparable ways, preventing a clear condemnation of the authoritarian past? Future scholarship can build upon the already substantial research on individual creative works and countries to investigate and theorize more fully what role cultural production has played in transition processes throughout Latin America—not as an isolated question but taking an integrated view of artistic-cultural production alongside truth seeking, reparations, and trials.

Footnotes

Notes

Nina Schneider is a senior research fellow at the Global South Study Center of the University of Cologne, Germany, and the author of Brazilian Propaganda: Legitimizing an Authoritarian Regime (2014). Rebecca J. Atencio is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of Tulane University and the author of Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil (2014). They thank Idelber Avelar for generously providing feedback on an early version of this article and the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Support for this research was provided by the German Academic Exchange Service and the EU FP7 Marie Curie ZIF Program, University of Konstanz (Grant no. 291784), as well as by Tulane University.

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