Persisting Abscences: The Socio-political Dynamics of a Desaparecido in Post-dictatorial Brazil

Abstrakt

The construction of memories following the last Brazilian dictatorship is as plural as the number of social actors implicated and as fluid as political circumstances can be. From investments on institutionalized forgetting to the creation of policies of memory, governmental initiatives affected the way society processed the acts of terror perpetrated by the military regime (1964–1985). The development of such initiatives, however, cannot be understood without accounting for the persistent struggle of victims’ relatives and human rights’ advocates. This paper aims to reflect on the Brazilian post-dictatorial mnemonic conflicts by observing how different levels of memory interacted with the political sphere in the process of coping with political disappearance. Drawing on relatives’ testimonies regarding the disappearance of Fernando Santa Cruz and the institutional mechanisms developed by different governments, this text intends to demonstrate how State-sponsored absences during the dictatorship are constantly being (re)constructed according to social and political circumstances of the present.