Memória na Justiça: A mobilização dos direitos humanos e a construção da memória da ditadura no Brasil

• Main Author: Cecília MacDowell Santos
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra 2010-03-01
• Series: Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais
• Subjects: Brazil; human rights; military dictatorship; transitional justice; memory; transnational judicial mobilization
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/1719

This article examines the role of the mobilisation of human rights in constructing the memory of the dictatorship in Brazil, based on the Araguaia Guerrilla case, brought before the national courts in 1982 and forwarded to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1995 and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2009. Entering into a critical dialogue with literature on “transitional justice”, an analysis of the case reveals that, not only the state but also non-government organisations and civil proceedings, play a significant role in the processes of creating political memories. For their part, the actions of the state are more contradictory than this literature tends to suggest. Finally, the judicial trajectory of the case reflects a long, though dynamic, journey in which the object of the dispute changes and acquires new meanings, and the petitioners themselves alter according the scales of the dispute and the national and international contexts in which conflicts unfold around the construction of the memory of the dictatorship.