Amnesty between memory and oblivion

Authors

  • Carla Simone Rodeghero

Abstract

This article discusses the different conceptions of amnesty which marked the engagement of militants who have fought for such ideal from 1975. The leading roles played by the lawyer Therezinha Zerbine, by the writer Mila Cauduro and by General Peri Bevilacqua can be taken as representations which associated amnesty with national reconciliation, with the “pacification of the Brazilian family”, and with the generous act of the authorities. Such representations coexisted, and disputed the scenario, from 1978, with the ones built by the Brazilian Amnesty Committees spread in the country, which began to defend “a wider, more general and unrestricted amnesty”, proposing the radical dismantling of dictatorship. The analysis of the book Liberdade para os brasileiros, by Roberto Ribeiro Martins, leads us to this conception. Comparing these two different ways of signifying amnesty, it is possible to notice situations in which amnesty is associated to the oblivion of the past and others which take the fight for amnesty as a valuable opportunity to bring the past back. In this scenario, the article will analyze the coexistence and the dispute between the conceptions of amnesty/oblivion and amnesty/ memory, showing how the amnesty case is linked to more general polemics – and still actual ones – regarding the way in which the Brazilian society dealt/deals with the wounds left by dictatorship.

Key words: amnesty, memory, oblivion, dictatorship.

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Published

2021-06-11

Issue

Vol. 13 No. 2 (2009): May/August

Section

Dossiê: Narrativas de militância e narrativas de exílio

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