Legacies of Authoritarianism

Brazilian Torturers' and Murderers' Reformulation of Memory

Bibliographic Data

ID4500957
AuthorsMartha K Huggins (Union College, corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume27
Issue2
Pages57-78
Publication date2000-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLatin American Perspectives (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-582X • E-ISSN: 1552-678X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0094582x0002700204
OpenAlexW2064331904
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited17

In countries undergoing redemocratization, as throughout Latin America, where torture and murder were systematic government practices, remembering and forgetting have a 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 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 stabilization, at least for a while. Political trials may foster victims' healing but undermine the perpetrators' 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 transformation, since, as Walter Benjamin (1968) has argued, what becomes collective memory can promote or inhibit collective resistance to oppression and 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

Amnesty · Authoritarianism · Collective memory · Criminology · Culpability · Democracy · Forgetting · Human rights · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Torture · Wrongdoing · Brazilian cultural history and politics · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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