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Legacies of Authoritarianism

In countries undergoing redemocratization, as throughout Latin America, where torture and murder were systematic government practices, remembering and forgetting have a political as well as a personal dimension. How an authoritarian past is reconstructed by those who experienced it can influence whether past torturers and murderers receive blanket amnesty or submit to a trial with possible civil and criminal punishment or the scrutiny of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission or some other public acknowledgment of their acts. Each course of action shapes personal and political healing among participants in a particular way. Amnesty for those in violent security forces may demoralize their victims while providing a "political bargain" that promotes overall political stabilization, at least for a while. Political trials may foster victims' healing but undermine the perpetrators' political transformation and public acknowledgment of their wrongdoing: seeing trials as threatening, perpetrators may reject self-criticism and go more deeply underground to avoid their and their families' becoming "victims." This outcome may have an impact on social memory by keeping information about the character of repressive regimes from becoming public history. This in turn may hinder political transformation, since, as Walter Benjamin (1968) has argued, what becomes collective memory can promote or inhibit collective resistance to oppression and political transformation toward democracy. How does a country remember its violent past? This study attempts to reconstruct Brazilian historical memory of the military regime's security forces through interviews with police about the torture and murder they