Memory has become the central battleground of Brazilian politics over the last decade. With the rise of the far right, the reconstruction of a narrative about Brazil’s past, its failures, its detours, and the possibilities of its regeneration, became a foundational project for the new far-right movements. Bolsonarismo, understood as an ideological coalition, took as one of its core missions the recovery of something ostensibly lost: a military legacy allegedly obscured by a hegemonic left-wing narrative said to have dominated Brazilian public life since redemocratization. Not only memory, but the 1988 Constitution, the electoral justice system, and the public health system, important democratic conquests, were all cast by the far right as targets for reconquest.
It is true that the memory of the dictatorship as a regime of systematic violations was constructed over the course of redemocratization, culminating in the truth commissions. But this was not the outcome of a leftist conspiracy, as the far right would have it; it was the product of the sustained activity of activists, intellectuals, politicians, and members of civil society who negotiated with institutions and with the remnants of the old regime a transition that, far from unfinished, was a process of movements and countermovements, testimony to a living and negotiated political dynamic.
This is precisely the work undertaken by Disputed Pasts. Centered on the narratives surrounding memory and on how memory could ground negotiations and consolidate institutional practices, the book moves between the trajectories of individual actors and the disputes over giving institutional form to demands for memory and reparation. The authors depart from the premise that the transition was not a failed or incomplete process, but rather one negotiated with gains and concessions, like any political-institutional process.
The transition produced meanings around dictatorship and democracy, justice, continuity and rupture, meanings that came to underpin the new democratic order after 1985. But the dispute over narrative did not begin with redemocratization; it began with the coup itself, from attempts to justify it as a salvation of democracy against communism to the narratives forged by the military to justify torture and disappearances. Legitimating political action has always depended on constructing a narrative capable of unifying disparate political dimensions.
The book also traces how the language of human rights played a decisive role in resistance to and denunciation of the regime, at a moment when domestic rights were suspended. This repertoire allowed activists, militants, and lawyers to internationalize protest, recasting it as a universal rather than domestic concern, a dynamic that translated politically into the tensions between the Carter administration and the Brazilian regime.
The dispute over whether violations were occasional excesses or a structural feature of the regime, known and sanctioned by the executive, was central to the battle over how the regime would be remembered. The Catholic Church’s efforts to counter the families’ memory of the disappeared with the military’s preferred oblivion were fundamental here, and in the struggle over language, “disappeared” was set against euphemisms like “escaped” or “fugitive” deployed to obscure the regime’s responsibility. The language of affect, family unity, and solidarity, mobilized by the women’s movement, rose precisely as the left’s vocabulary of revolution and class struggle declined, hardly surprising given a regime that violently suppressed the left. This adaptation was itself a negotiation conditioned by opposition actors’ limited room for maneuver, one that marked the trajectory from resistance through to the amnesty campaign, combining, in the authors’ words, “a strong sense of rupture with concessions to forgetting” (p. 57).
When actors such as Teotônio Vilela, converted from Arena to the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, entered the transition, the vocabulary of “conciliation” came to the fore, alongside language of “disarming” and “forgetting” embraced by new democrats and former militants alike. This language of conciliation also reveals the limits of the transition in clarifying dictatorship-era crimes, limits only meaningfully addressed four decades later with the truth commissions. Phrases like “forget the past” and “look to the future” were, and remain, used by the military and sympathizers to resist investigation, exposure, or punishment.
The clash between these narratives crystallized in books such as Brasil: Nunca Mais and Orvil. Despite the authors’ insistence that the transition was not incomplete, their own narrative cannot escape civil society’s perception of the process’s limitations: its incapacity to deliver justice and the timidity of politicians such as Brizola and Ulysses Guimarães in demanding accountability. Justice and reconciliation appeared, again and again, as opposites; reconciliation functioned as a political instrument that fell short of full justice. The evidence assembled suggests that elites broadly, including the judiciary and even the left once in power, have tended to favor forgetting, reacting only under pressure from movements organized around the defense of memory. This sense of incompleteness motivated society, from redemocratization onward, to keep the memory of the dictatorship alive as an instrument for justice, setting the stage for a lasting tension between the right to truth and accusations of revanchismo. With the creation of the Special Commission on Political Dead and Disappeared, the military’s vocabulary of “terrorism” was pitted against the opposition’s vocabulary of torture and persecution.
These tensions intensified as the language of amnesty gave way to that of transitional justice, and intensified further as truth commissions gained institutional traction. The proliferation of commissions at federal, state, and municipal levels brought the association between memory and justice to its peak: exposing facts and reconstructing narratives became the privileged form of justice available absent full criminal accountability. This solution, which the authors call “commissionism,” placed the dispute over memory at the center of justice itself. Commissionism did not serve solely to redress violations against political prisoners; state and municipal commissions also revealed violations against Indigenous populations resisting highway construction, communities affected by resource contamination, and workers exploited through corrupt state-private arrangements, demonstrating that human rights violations under the dictatorship were rooted in the regime’s very conception of state, economy, and society.
Yet in public debate, resistance to commissionism took the form of an “economy of violations,” built on false equivalences between military violence and the “terrorism” attributed to those who resisted. When civil society pressed the judiciary to revisit the Amnesty Law, following Argentina’s example, the dispute between remembering and forgetting again moved to the center of the Supreme Court’s response to the past.
Amid the crises preceding Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, members of the military helped produce a narrative linking the truth commission’s activity to the erosion of government, framing the crisis as the result of transgressing Brazilian tradition and values. If forgetting was the natural stance of a conservative worldview, truth-telling could only be an act of confrontation. Once reparative memory politics was framed as a Gramscian cultural war against traditional values, the old anticommunist rhetoric was reactivated, offering a coherent narrative for the far right’s renewed advance.
Set against the far right’s counter-narrative, the book’s central thesis, that the frustrations of the transition should not be read as failure, gains considerable force. It is precisely because the transition succeeded in constructing a memory of the dictatorship, and a foundation for the new democratic order, that the far right must rise up against it in pursuit of its own revolution. This is part of what the authors term the “consequences of remembering” (p. 6): because Brazil reconstructed itself around a positive memory of overcoming the regime, the right-wing backlash has been able to identify the current political crisis with the totality of post-dictatorship democracy. Just as the transition depended on a shift from “terrorists” and “revolutionaries” to “persecuted political actors,” the far right has sought to invert this language once again.
Disputed Pasts offers a rigorously documented and theoretically sophisticated account of how forgetting, remembering, and celebrating operated as competing master frames throughout five decades of Brazilian political life. By refusing normative judgments about how the transition should have unfolded, Hollanda and Szwako produce a study that illuminates, with unusual clarity, why the very success of Brazil’s memory politics became the condition of possibility for the backlash we are facing.
Note: this text was translated and reviewed with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence.
