In 1964 the military seized power in Brazil, overthrowing the democratically elected government of João Goulart.  The military ruled Brazil for the next 21 years relying on increasingly repressive measures to retain its grip on power.  The most infamous decree, Institutional Act Number 5, known simply as AI-5, empowered the government to imprison and torture thousands of suspected enemies of the state.  The period between 1968 and 1974 became known as the “years of lead” (Anos de Chumbo) because of the hundreds of perceived enemies of state who were murdered or disappeared by the military regime.  How was it possible for Jair Bolsonaro to manipulate the memory of the period of dictatorship to help catapult himself to the presidency in 2018?  How did the memory of military rule contribute to the unnecessarily high loss of life in Brazil during the Covid-19 pandemic?  How do disagreements over the memory of Brazil’s recent past deepen the divisions in Brazilian society?  These are the questions that Leda Balbino, Brazilian researcher, journalist and deputy editor of the foreign desk of the O Globo newspaper in Brazil, explores in her recently published book, Digital Memory in Brazil: A Fragmented and Elastic Negationist Remembrance of the Dictatorship.

Leda argues that corruption scandals were the single most important factor in Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to political prominence.  The most important corruption scandal began in 2014 as an investigation into a money laundering case involving a seemingly insignificant gas station with a car wash.  What became known as Operation Car Wash exposed a massive exchange of bribes between executives from Brazil’s powerful state oil company (PetroBras), its most important construction company (Odbrecht), and elected officials reaching the highest levels of government in Brazil and across Latin America.  While politicians of all stripes were on the take, public outrage focused on the ruling Workers’ Party whose leaders had long boasted about their squeaky clean reputation.  Lula da Silva, who finished his term as president in 2010 with an over 80% public approval rate, was convicted on corruption charges and spent nearly two years in prison.  His successor and Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, was cleared of charges but then impeached and removed from office for manipulating the budget to finance her 2014 presidential campaign. 

Beyond the issue of corruption, many Brazilians were reeling from the worst recession in over a century.  Beginning just before Operation Car Wash, international commodity prices began to plummet.  Lula da Silva and the Workers’ Party had relied on commodities, the engine of Brazil’s economy, to fund allowances for poor families (Bolsa Familia), housing, and education support that helped lift millions of Bralizians from poverty.  As the economy nosedived, inflation and unemployment rose, and gratitude of many toward the Workers’ Party and its leaders soured into scorn and resentment.  

Compounding the problems of corruption and economic dislocation was the unease which many conservative Brazilians felt about efforts by the Workers’ Party to pursue progressive social policies.  Measures taken to support historically disadvantaged Afro-Brazilian and indigenous peoples or to expand LGBTIQ rights clashed with deeply rooted attitudes.  Bolsonaro, sometimes referred to as the “tropical Trump,” much like his American counterpart, skillfully exploited widespread fears that not only was the government not providing for the basic needs of Brazilians but it was also threatening to undermine core traditional values.  Bolsonaro made himself into a crusader both against corruption and for the defense of traditional values.  

Capitalizing on anxieties about the present, Bolsonaro was able to exploit the nostalgia for the period of dictatorship.  Even within her own family, Leda notes, the dictatorship is recalled nostalgically as a time when there was less crime and more security.  If people were arrested and tortured, then they must have done something wrong and deserved the punishment.  Often relying on simple black and white dichotomies about the good and bad, the then and now, Bolsonaro made it easier for Brazilians to understand all that they felt was wrong with their country.  The left, by contrast, tended to be more academic, more intellectual in its explanations of societal problems using language that was difficult for ordinary Brazilians to understand.  

What set Brazil apart from neighboring countries like Argentina, Chile, or Uruguay, which also experienced dictatorships with human rights crimes, was the failure to undertake any kind of transitional justice program.  Instead of creating truth commissions or prosecuting perpetrators of past crimes, a general amnesty law was passed in 1979.  Whereas amnesty laws in neighboring countries were revoked soon after the transition to democracy, Brazil’s amnesty law remains in place today.  Given that the military in Brazil controlled the transition to democracy, the desire was to secure immunity from future legal recourse.  While the amnesty law protects all sides from prosecution, it was the military and military-run state that was responsible for most of the violence.

Besides denying a civil-military coup in 1964, Bolsonaro describes the 21 years of the subsequent authoritarian regime as the Army protecting the Brazilian democracy and averting a communist regime in the country. Thus, Bolsonaro was the first president since Brazilian re-democratization who rejected the historic scientific consensus recognizing the 1964 coup and the dictatorship until 1985.  Leda Balbino, Digital Memory in Brazil: A Fragmented and Elastic Negationist Remembrance of the Dictatorship.

Although it was possible to secure legal protection from persecution, Brazilians themselves never remained silent about the past.  Those who suffered from arrest and torture, those who spent years in hiding or exile, told their stories.  Through everything from telenovelas and testimonial literature to plays and novels, a rich corpus of creative work took shape recounting the period of dictatorship.  Most prominent among these works was a book by Cardinal Paulo Steiner Arns. In Brazil Never Again (Brasil: Nunca Mais) Cardinal Arns used secretly photocopied military records to document the thousands of victims of torture and murder at the hands of the military regime.  

As a rising international power Brazil came under increasing pressure to conform to international human rights norms.  It was within this new context, beginning in the late 1990s, that President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had opposed the dictatorship as an academic and activist, called for the release of classified documents pertaining to the military’s role in Operation Condor.  Operation Condor was a coordinated effort between eight South American dictatorships (four-fifths of the continent), between the mid-1970s and 1980s, to crack down on leftist sources of opposition.  With US support and cooperation, Operation Condor expanded state terror across Latin America contributing to tens of thousands of deaths and disappearances.  

Brazil’s first National Truth Commission (CNV), however, was not created until 2012, 27 years after the end of the dictatorship.  Charged with covering the period from 1945 to 1988, it focused primarily on the period of military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.  Submitting its final report in 2012, the CNV fixed the number of murder political dissidents at 191 and missing at 242.  The CNV estimated the number of victims of torture between 2,000 and 20,000.  If we add the number indigenous peoples who died through efforts to develop the Amazon region, the death toll would increase by another 8,000.  

It was in response to the memory of the victims of the military dictatorship that the military began to craft its own narrative of the past.  The most prominent account was called Orvil, drafted by the Army Information Center between 1985 and 1988 (CIE).  Orvil remained in the shadows until excerpts were published on a website in 2000.  The full 953 page version was released on line in 2007.  Orvil cast the events of 1964 not as a coup but as the joint effort on the part of the military and civil society to thwart the threat of communist revolution in Brazil.  According to Orvil, the coup was not a coup but rather a healthy intervention that saved Brazil’s democracy and prevented the country from becoming another Cuba.  

Orvil presented the left not just as a revolutionary threat thwarted in the past, but as an ever present cultural menace in the present.  What makes this threat particularly insidious is that it is ever lurking and at risk of subverting traditional cultural norms and values that underpin Brazilian society.  In short, what was once a war waged by armed forces on opposing sides of the Cold War divide has now become a cultural war.  Everything from political correctness to minority and LGBTQ rights are now framed as the greatest threats to the traditional family, religious beliefs, and love of country.  

Bolsonaro’s framing of the period of dictatorship has been adopted wholesale from the Orvil narrative.  His defense of traditional values and his stance against all of the threats posed by the left are presented as a continuation of the fight against communism which remains an ever present menace to Brazilian society.  Although Bolsonaro served as a congressman for 28 years he depicted himself as an outsider to the political establishment dominated since the end of the dictatorship by the forces and supporters of the left.   Leida notes that not only did Bolsonaro make frequent and nostalgic references to the period of dictatorship in his speeches, he also openly celebrated many of the authoritarian regimes in Latin America.  Behind Bolsonaro desk, in his congressional office in Brasilia, he hung portraits of the generals who presided over Brazil during the period of dictatorship.

Leda identifies four patterns in Bolsonaro’s treatment of the period of dictatorship through his use of social media platforms like Twitter and Youtube.  She labels the first pattern as a “one-sided memory” in terms of the heavy reliance on the military community’s narrative of the past and the complete disregard for or diminishing of aspects of the past that might challenge that narrative—such as memories of torture and political repression.  An emphasis on the authority of first person accounts is the second pattern.  First person accounts given by those who opposed the dictatorship are often taken out of context or recast in ways that justify the repressive measures of the past.  The third pattern is what Leda describes as the “double role of the media”. The media from the time of the dictatorship, which was supportive of the coup, is cast as a reliable and truthful media.  The media of today is conversely lambasted as untrustworthy because it adheres to the findings of scholars who document the reality of the Brazil history of brutal military rule.  The fourth and most important pattern is the elastic nature of the memory dictatorship.  Elements of memories from the period dictatorship can be applied to a wide variety of contexts in the present.  For example, Bolsonaro framed Dilma Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment as yet another foiled attempt, much like 1964, by the left to usurp power in Brazil.

By drawing parallels between the past and present, the elastic nature of the right’s memories of dictatorship instills fear in the minds of Brazilians that the threat of leftist subversion is still very real and dangerous.  During the Covid-19 pandemic the elastic nature of the memories of dictatorship proved disastrous for Brazil.  Mayors, governors or other members of the left-leaning establishment were cast as zealots who used the pretext of the public health crisis to try to strip Brazilians of their right to work and live freely.  Whereas Bolsonaro was typically framed by the left as the greatest threat to Brazilian democracy, Bolsonaro used the pandemic and related public health measures as evidence that the real threat to Brazil’s democracy and the freedom of Brazilians was on the left.  It was the manipulation of memories of the dictatorship that contributed to the disregard for public health protocols and the unnecessary high loss of life in Brazil during the pandemic.  According to the World Health Organization, Brazil followed the United States with the second highest number of deaths caused by the pandemic. 

Leda warns that the dangers of Bolsonaro’s manipulation of memories of the dictatorship are unlikely to recede after Bolsonaro’s departure from the political scene.  Bolsonaro’s presidency gave wide circulation and legitimacy to narratives that had previously been restricted to right-wing groups in Brazil.  If many Brazilians today, even those who are not supporters of Bolsonaro, question the value of human rights, Leda sees this as a lasting legacy of the distortion of the past.  If many Brazilians now have little faith in institutions such as the legislative or judicial branches of government this is also a legacy of the Bolsonaro presidency.  Despite the protests and attack on the capital that followed the January 2023 defeat of Bolsonaro in the presidential elections, Brazil’s democratic institutions continue to function.  A peaceful transfer of power did take place.  Yet more than ever, Brazil remains a divided society with the memory of the period of dictatorship as the most important fault line.  ci