Disputed Pasts: Forgetting and Remembering the Dictatorship in Brazil

How Brazil’s reckoning with the memory of military dictatorship shapes today’s political divides and populist revival. Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985, but its history still looms large over the country.Since the restoration of democracy, national politics have been shaped by heated contestation over the dictatorship’s legacy.Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and JosÉ Szwako examine how the state, the military, and civil society have variously mourned, celebrated, and suppressed memories of Brazil’s violent past-and to what ends. As the dictatorship faltered under pressure from the opposition in the streets and in Congress, popular opinion favored democracy, which often meant forgetting.Today, the Brazilian left contends that the past has been silenced, paving the way for Jair Bolsonaro and the far right.Yet the past has been intensely contested: media outlets, social movements, and official commissions have long documented the dictatorship and spurred reparations.Disputed Past