Traumatic memory and the right to the truth: the legacy of the military dictatorship in Brazil

Abstract

The present article seeks to discuss the lengthy trajectory taken by Brazil’s political-legal systems leading up to the State’s effective commitment to its duty of memory and its role in guaranteeing the right to information, memory, and the truth in terms of the legacy of the military dictatorship. At the outset, it aims to outline the difficulties of the process interlinked with the Amnesty Law and the policy of silence and forgetting forged by the Armed Forces. Next, it aims to discuss the permanent effects of the Amnesty and of the policy on the earliest democratic governments of the 1990s, as well as the limited advances that were possible. Finally, it seeks to demonstrate the transformation to the profile of the Brazilian Federal Executive Power as a political actor, based on the governments of the 2000s, when the effective commitment to the rupture in the Amnesty Law and the deepening of human rights was incorporated into the presidential agenda. To do so, the deductive method is employed alongside the historical monograph strand of procedural methodology, with a basis in the documentary and bibliographical research technique.