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28  1 Tes­ ti­ mo­ nies and the Am­ nesty Law­ Brazil’s first cycle of cul­ tural mem­ ory took place in con- ­ junc­ tion with the 1979 Am­ nesty Law. At the time, for­ mer guer­ ril­ las began pub­ lish­ ing their tes­ ti­ mo­ nies in the form of books, some of which be­ came best sell­ ers and won pre­ stig­ ious ­ prizes. Be­ cause many au­ thors were ben­ e­ fi­ ci­ ar­ ies of the law who pub­ lished their ac­ counts after re­ turn­ ing from exile or being re­ leased from ­ prison, their works came to be seen as the “cul­ tural fruit of the 1979 am­ nesty,” as one ob­ server has put it, or as hav­ ing “emerged under the sign of the am­ nesty,” in the words of an­ other.1 Thus the two phe­ nom­ ena, one in­ sti­ tu­ tional and the other cul­ tural, be­ came in­ ex­ tri­ cably ­ linked in the pop­ u­ lar imag­ i­ na­ tion. No sin­ gle work is more ­ closely iden­ tified with the am­ nesty than Fer­ nando­ Gabeira’s me­ moir, O que é isso, com­ pan­ heiro? (What’s Going On Here, Com­ rade?, here­ after also re­ ferred to as Com­ pan­ heiro), pub­ lished a few weeks after the piece of leg­ is­ la­ tion went into ef­ fect.2 His­ to­ rians, so­ ci­ ol­ o­ gists, and lit­ er­ ary schol­ ars have stud­ ied it more ex­ haus­ tively than any other tes­ ti­ mo­ nial work from the pe­ riod, tak­ ing a va­ riety of ap­ proaches. Among the most val­ u­ able for the study of mem­ ory pol­ i­ tics are those that use ­ Gabeira’s book as a ba­ rom­ e­ ter of the po­ lit­ i­ cal and cul­ tural cli­ mate dur­ ing the pe­ riod of po­ lit­ i­ cal open­ ing, or aber­ tura, of the early 1980s or that con­ sider its place ­ within a wider body of tes­ ti­ mo­ nial works, in­ clud­ ing those by re­ gime in­ sid­ ers.3 Yet no study that I am aware of pro­ poses to an­ a­ lyze the re­ cip­ ro­ cal inter­ plays ­ between guer­ rilla tes­ ti­ mo­ ni­ als and the Am­ nesty Law in a system­ atic way. Such an anal­ y­ sis is the ob­ jec­ tive of this chap­ ter. The first guer­ rilla ac­ count to be pub­ lished after the law was en­ acted, O que é isso, com­ pan­ heiro? rep­ re­ sents one ­ survivor’s mem­ ory of the armed strug­ gle Te s t i m o n i e s a n d t h e A m n e s t y L a w 29 and as such ­ defies the mil­ i­ tary ­ regime’s at­ tempt to im­ pose a kind of in­ sti­ tu­ tion­ al­ ized for­ get­ ting by grant­ ing am­ nesty to state se­ cur­ ity ­ agents. Yet Ga­ beira re­ counts his ex­ pe­ ri­ ences, in­ clud­ ing tor­ ture, with­ out ever ques­ tion­ ing the im­ pu­ nity­ granted to those who tor­ mented him and his com­ rades. He there­ fore mod­ els what I have ­ called rec­ on­ cil­ i­ a­ tion by mem­ ory. Com­ pan­ heiro be­ came an in­ stant hit and ­ helped turn its au­ thor into the “super­ star of the am­ nesty.”4 Book and am­ nesty be­ came ­ linked. Var­ i­ ous in­ di­ vid­ u­ als and ­ groups, in­ clud­ ing Ga­ beira him­ self, lev­ er­ aged the con­ nec­ tion ac­ cord­ ing to their var­ i­ ous agen­ das and ­ through their ef­ forts ­ helped pro­ mote book and au­ thor, help­ ing con­ sol­ i­ date the mean­ ing of the am­ nesty as rec­ on­ cil­ i­ a­ tion and a vic­ tory for so­ ci­ ety ­ rather than as im­ pu­ nity and par­ tial de­ feat. Two other books pub­ lished ­ around the same time by sur­ vi­ vors of the armed strug­ gle fur­ ther il­ lus­ trate the re­ la­ tion­ ship ­ between guer­ rilla tes­ ti­ mo­ nies and the Am­ nesty Law. Al­ fredo ­ Sirkis’s Os ­ carbonários (The Car­ bo­ nari), which also ­ evokes the mem­ ory of the armed strug­ gle with­ out...

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