Brazil and South Africal: the democracy´s paradoxes - political memory in democracies with autoritarian legacy

Author(s)

Edson Luis de Almeida Teles

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2007-08-31

Examining board members

Renato Janine Ribeiro; Jeanne Marie Gagnebin de Bons; Claudia Perrone Moises; Vladimir Pinheiro Safatle; Márcio Orlando Seligmann Silva

• Advisor: Renato Janine Ribeiro

Abstract

The collective catastrophes imposed by authoritarian regimes, be they of racist character, like apartheid in South Africa, or be they of strictly political character, like the military dictatorship in Brazil, require daily efforts of reflection as well as political action. These governments were characterized by their systematic violation of their citizens\' rights by brutal military and police apparatus. Worst of all, the whole scheme was set up and maintained by a State which institutionalized imprisonment, torture, disappearance and murder. Thus, these societies are left today to face a difficult issue: how to reconcile such painful past with a democratic present, and still manage the conflicts that do not end with a mere institutional passage from a dictatorial government to a democratic one. Human rights violations were not limited to political institutions, but went far beyond; they reached individuals, and they modified the subjectivity of those societies significantly. The opposition between the State pacificatory political reason and the painful memories regarding Brazilian military dictatorship obstructs public expression of pain and reduces memory to private emotions. In contrast, by valuing the narratives of the past, the South African society tried to recover the memory of the painful moments making these experiences public by publishing their narratives. South Africans gave up punishing those State criminals with the only condition they would confess everything, in order to foster a national conciliation. In Brazil, however, the ideal of a national conciliation to put an end to military rule paid the huge price of silencing the memories of pain, torture, and death. This had an impact on society, on its subjectivity and even on the public politics adopted later. Our point of view is that due to the lack of investment in the dialogue and in the democratic social communion the publicizing of traumas and resentments by means of narratives could contribute to realization of the mourning, thus promoting social bonds. (AU)