THE COMMISSION OF THE TRUTH AND THE COUP D'ETAT OF 1964 IN BRAZIL (original) (raw)
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Brazilian Political Science Review, v. 9, p. 143-163, 2015, 2015
This essay reviews the main analyses produced for publication in 2014 alluding to the 50th anniversary of the 1964 coup and the dictatorship that followed (1964-85). It is noteworthy that most of these analyses, authored by historians and journalists, relativize several Manichaean concepts and versions; chiefly, they enhance society's responsibility for this authoritarian experiment. The coup, they claim, was not an atypical event in the country's political history; it simply expanded conservative and authoritarian values. In daring fashion, they point out the precarious or absent democratic vocation of the forces of the Left, as well as the advances in terms of the country's economic and social modernization under the military governments. The duration of the dictatorship is also questioned. In the eyes of some, it lasted only from 1964 to 1979, and arguments to this end are exhaustively presented. The fact that the report of the National Truth Commission (NTC) was released also in 2014 raised an intense debate in the press and in academia about repression and the crimes of the dictatorship, especially against urban guerrilla organizations, which are also examined in instigating fashion in this bibliography.
Trabalho e repressão: memórias de um ferroviário sobre a ditadura civil-militar de 1964
2012
Esse artigo discutira como o movimento sindical dos trabalhadores ferroviarios de Rio Grande – RS foi afetado pela ditadura civil-militar de 1964. A analise sera feita a partir das memorias de um ferroviario que vivenciou esses duros anos de fechamento politico, enfocando como os trabalhadores entenderam aquele periodo e quais a formas de luta sindical passaram a adotar.
The Americas, 2020
ABSTRACTThis article traces resistance among members of the armed forces who opposed the military dictatorship in Brazil during the first four years of the regime, 1964–67. I show that despite scholars’ efforts to depict the 1964 coup as a project supported by the armed forces as a strategic and ideological unit, there were battle lines within those forces along which hard-liners and moderate interventionists battled for government control. There were, in fact, hundreds of officers and soldiers who opposed the coup and organized against it. To contain resistance efforts inside the armed forces, the generals who orchestrated the coup labeled opponents to intervention as communists and expelled them from the institution, in many cases under considerable duress. This article discusses the first opposition efforts of officers and soldiers, particularly the Nationalist Armed Resistance (RAN) and the Caparaó Guerrilla Movement. Members of the military who were opposed to the coup shared a...
Counterinsurgency in Brazil Lessons from 1968 to 1974 MAIN c
Preface The counterinsurgency warfighting during the last of the military governments period in Brazil contributed to the shaping of the current relationships among civilians, politicians and military inside the Brazilian society. If the military governments from 1964 to 1985 are currently perceived by influent sectors of the Brazilian politicians, press, writers, artists and musicians as the only responsible for the deprivation of the population of democratic rights for almost twenty years is, as a whole, partly due to the methods used to fight and defeat the insurgent leftist groups that flourished in Brazil from 1968 to 1974, which included the control over the media, the suspension of the habeas corpus and the use of violent methods to search for information. The decision of these governments to use violence in the search for information and strict control of the information in order to defeat insurgences has not been an exception, but a common rule in history. In many counterinsurgencies, these methods contributed to tactical victory, like in Brazil, Argentina and Chile. But it also has brought consequences for the future relationships among civilians, the military and politicians inside the society. In the Brazilian case, although the tactical victory over the insurgents was absolute, the loss of control over the intelligence apparatus and radical sectors inside the military complicated the transition from the military to a civilian administration, planned by President Ernesto Geisel and his Chief of staff, General Golbery do Couto e Silva. As a result, conservative sectors of the Brazilian society gradually lost power in the political arena and politicians who were connected in the past to leftist insurgent armed groups, are in charge of sectors of the government and dominate the 2010 presidential and governmental democratic elections.
História da Historiografia, 2013
The aim of this article is to focus on the final years of the course of history at the FNFi/UB (1958-1968), in order to recover the political and historiographical conflicts that took place there, and to understand the trajectory of this disciplinary field and its professionalizationprocess at a moment of great transformations. The article's coverage extends to the discussions related to the issues that characterize the memories of traumatic events and the History of the Present Time. Different types of sources were used, such as oral statements, newspapers, FNFi documents, and police archives.
An Overview of Political Torture in the Twentieth Century
Journal For the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 2010
The present essay focuses on political torture during the twentieth century. It takes a multidisciplinary approach, because it entails insights from history, politics, ideology, anthropology, psychology and literature. The aim of the present essay is to discuss the relation between "Classical" torture (in the past centuries) and "Modern" torture (in the twentieth century), analyzing the phenomena in a comparative perspective and paying attention to the hidden and unconscious motives behind historical facts. What I am interested in is the mechanism by which, in the twentieth century, torture has been reintroduced particularly for political prisoners-that means torture for ideas and conscience, torture as a technique of power and not merely as a technique of punishment. What torture destroys first is the dignity and privacy of the victim; only then does it destroy the victim's freedom and integrity. For this reason, every torture is an act of rape, even a symbolic one. I mean this in psychological terms, not as a demonstration of feminist vocabulary. Every touching of the victim's body is rape, emphasizing the "virility" of the torturer. First of all, the torturer wants to become a master of his victim's body, and only later, a master of the tortured person's mind. I include imagination in the concept of torture, imagination being one of the tools of the act of torturing. In torture, imagination becomes, in my demonstration, a never-ending weapon. Torturable v. non-torturable individuals. The twentieth-century breakthrough: brainwashing and electroshocks. The Armenian genocide. The Gulag and the Nazi camps. Experimental torture. Mao, the re-educator. The modern European machine. Fin-de-siecle horror: Chechnya and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Africa: tribal torture and imported torture. South-American "Catholicism." Fidel, the exterminator.
Brazilian Military Dictatorship theoretical and historiographical approximations
As is common in the History of Present, there is a significant interconnection between politics and academic research regarding the history of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Consequently, it is essential that well‐established theoretical formulations guide archival research. This article discusses the alleged revisionism of the historiography on the Brazilian military dictatorship, argues that the recruitment of young left‐wing students for the armed struggle has generated a traumatic memory, shows the weakness of the debate about the civil‐military character of dictatorship, argues that the institutional framework of the state of exception was still active in 1985 and demonstrates that the military controlled the project of "Abertura" .