Civil-military dictatorship: traces, remains and testimony
Dictatorship. Testimony. Oblivion.
The present work aims to investigate what remains of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship. The dictatorship’s end was marked by an Amnesty Law that made it impossible to do a legal investigation and a creation of spaces that the victims could talk about what they lived and suffered. We start from the hypothesis that this impossibility brought consequences for the way the country was organized after the dictatorship, in such a way that part of society denies the abuses committed by the regime and asks for its return. Differently than what happened here, post-war Germany carried out a legal transition that was marked by the condemnation of several agents of the Nazi command and allowed the surviving victims not only to receive compensation, but also have spaces for remembrance and speech. Even so, there are denialist theses about what happened during the Nazi regime and a desire to forget the facts. With or without legal treatment, something remains. Thereby, it was possible to infer that the court did not end the trauma and that the dictatorship’s rest in Brazil does not depend only on the absence of a court. In this way, we use the testimony in other to locate what remains of the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil, because the testimony welcomes what is silent, what is impossible to say. Flávio Tavares’s testimony, in the book Memórias do Esquecimento, points that there is a return of a certain aesthetics of morality, which makes it possible to transform violence into a State policy. From that, we point it out that what remains of the dictatorship in Brazil is this morality model that reproduces a war logic, a death governability of and a disappearance.