Democratic Brazil Divided by Peter Kingstone & Timothy J. Power

Author:Peter Kingstone & Timothy J. Power [Kingstone, Peter & Power, Timothy J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, World, Caribbean & Latin American
ISBN: 9780822964919
Google: Rac4vgAACAAJ
Amazon: B0785G5KP1
Barnesnoble: B0785G5KP1
Goodreads: 40049851
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 2017-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

7

Progress or Perdition?

Brazil’s National Truth Commission in Comparative Perspective

Anthony W. Pereira

The error of the dictatorship was to torture and not kill.

—Federal deputy Jair Bolsonaro, August 7, 2008

The government’s project for the Truth Commission could disappoint many who hope it will deliver the definitive gesture against the coup-mongering [golpista] sectors of society. Nonetheless, the commission is an undeniable step forward.

—Gabriel Landi Fazzio, September 24, 2011

We look to the future. We don’t look in the rear view mirror.

—Adhemar da Costa Machado Filho, March 15, 2012

ON DECEMBER 10, 2014, the Brazilian National Truth Commission (NTC) issued its report, the result of two and a half years of investigation. Its formal brief was to research the state’s responsibility for grave human rights violations from September 18, 1946, to October 5, 1988, although its principal focus was the dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. The commission heard the testimony of 1,116 witnesses and produced a three-volume report consisting of 1,193 pages. The report, part of a process of transitional justice that began in the early 1990s, identifies 434 people who were killed by the dictatorship (including 210 disappeared).

The report reaches two main conclusions. These are that the violations of human rights under the dictatorship were the result of state policy, and that the 377 perpetrators of human violations named in the report (or at least the 191 of them who were still alive) should not benefit from the Amnesty Law and should be held responsible in a criminal, civil, and administrative sense. The report, signed by all six members of the commission, also made twenty-nine recommendations, most of which were aimed at curbing contemporary human rights violations (Comissão Nacional da Verdade 2014).

How does the NTC report compare with others released in Latin America over the last three decades? Does the NTC represent a break with the prior pattern of Brazilian transitional justice? And what are the implications of its work? The Brazilian case is important because the country is an outlier in a region that has seen the most transitional justice activity in the world since the late 1970s. Latin America innovated in the use of, although it did not invent, the truth commission, and has been the location of more than half of the domestic human rights trials in the world since 1980 (Sikkink 2011, 22–23, 139). The Truth Commission is also a potent illustration of a major theme of the current volume, that is, the deep divisions in Brazil’s democracy. Loathed by its critics as a waste of time and money, seen by many of its supporters as too long delayed and not vigorous enough, the NTC provoked strong feelings and revealed the extent of polarization within Brazil’s political system.

The chapter proceeds as follows. First, it summarizes some of the important characteristics of the transitional justice process in Brazil, and the role of the NTC in that process. This section emphasizes the distinctiveness of the Brazilian approach to transitional justice compared to that of others in Latin America, and the extent to which the NTC can be seen as representing either continuity or a break with the prior pattern.

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