Brazil: Never Again?

Brazil guards its public image zealously. Its highly educated and trained diplomats are famed in international circles for their urbanity and geniality, and have been very successful in promoting Brazil as a sleeping giant now rousing itself to fulfil its long-overdue destiny as a regional and global player. It is one of the largest economies in the world, with steady growth and recently improved income distribution. Politically it managed to make a bloodless transition to democratic rule in 1985, after twenty years of military rule, pushed forward by an active and vocal civil society. The two-term governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-10) consolidated this parliamentary democracy, earning the fulsome praise of President Obama on his visit to Brazil in March 2011.

In this future-looking narrative, the imprints of Brazil's anos de chumbo ('years of lead', 1968-74) are obscured. However, these two volumes on the human-rights abuses committed during that period are a reminder of a dual legacy. The negative effects of years of unconstrained police brutality still resonate through Brazilian society and the state institutions of coercion. Yet this very violence became the impulse for Brazil's inadvertent contribution to the development of both the contemporary international human-rights regime and the transnational civil-society networks that have supported and shaped this regime over the last four decades.

Lina Penna Sattamini is a middle-class Brazilian who was suddenly dragged into the nightmarish world of secret detention centres, torture and official denial when her son Marcos P. S. Arruda was arrested by the intelligence service of the military regime in 1970. Her son had trained first as a priest, then as a geologist. Like thousands of his contemporaries he quit and joined Popular Action, a revolutionary social group that placed young educated activists in the factories to work alongside, learn from, and help organize manual workers who were bearing the brunt of the military regime's wage-squeezing economic policies.

A Mother's Cry differs from the many testimonies that have appeared in Latin America in two key respects. There are, broadly, two types of 'testimonio' literature. The kind that has tended to be published in English, circulate among solidarity groups and get put on reading lists of subaltern texts is the selective life history of working-class, often rural, often ill-educated people, frequently women. Their accounts of systemic poverty, exclusion and routine state violence are mediated and shaped by the educated middle-class Westerners, journalists or activists who interview them and edit and translate the final product. Lina's account, however, is similar to that told by articulate, liberal, professionals, such as Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman, who are profoundly shocked to find themselves the victims of state repression.¹ One of the notable aspects of the authoritarian regimes that installed themselves in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina was their targeting of young lower-middle-class and middle-class students, many of whom, like Marcos, had become politically engaged through involvement with student groups, the wings of the Catholic church influenced by liberation theology, trade unions, or revolutionary leftist groups on the fringes of the mainstream parties.

This account is also notable for its epistolary structure and multiple voices. Interspersed with explanatory narrative, it consists largely of the letters that flew backwards and forwards between Lina, working as an interpreter in Washington DC at the US State Department at the time of her son's detention, and Marcos's grandmother and siblings. They had remained in Rio de Janeiro and battled for months first to track down his place of detention, then to see him, and finally to have him released and clear his name. The final chapter is written by Marcos himself, and gives a gruelling first-person perspective on the...