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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 rebuilding the house of memories, ∞Ωπ∂–∞Ω∫∑ In October 1973, a few months after the death of Alexandre Vannucchi Leme, security o≈cials detained, tortured, and eventually murdered another important student activist, the president of une Honestino Guimar ães.∞ Guimarães had a long history of student movement activism and imprisonment. Since 1966 the police had arrested him on at least three separate occasions, even invading the University of Brasilia in August 1968 in search of him.≤ Back then Guimarães, a young geology student, had attracted o≈cials’ attention as a notable force of student leadership in the capital city. Guimarães headed the Federação dos Estudantes Universit ários de Brasília (feub, Federation of University Students of Brasilia) and was becoming nationally influential as well. His prominence was con- firmed in early 1969, when he was elected one of the nine vice presidents of une under President Jean Marc von der Weid. By June 1969 the U.S. consulate in São Paulo noted Guimarães’s presence there and reported that he was central in organizing students to protest the visit of Nelson Rockefeller .≥ According to a statement Guimarães wrote shortly before his arrest in 1973, he was tried in absentia five times and sentenced to a total of twenty-five years’ imprisonment, with all but one prosecution resulting from his participation in ‘‘the student struggles of 1968.’’∂ By the time Guimarães served his final, fatal incarceration, however, his connection with the aboveground student movement had been nearly severed. Twentysix years old and out of school for five years, he had long since gone underground and joined the apml, an organization of the clandestine left that believed in (but did not yet practice) armed struggle. Thus when the security forces apprehended him in 1973 and even when he died in custody 216 chapter five sometime later, students did not mobilize as they had in the cases of Edson Luis de Lima Souto and Alexandre Vannucchi Leme. There is no reason to expect that university students in 1973 would have even been aware of his arrest, and definitely no way they could have known about his death at the time. For Guimarães was one of the many political prisoners who was forcibly disappeared by the state security forces. No written records describe or admit to the circumstances of his death, and it is only from the eyewitness reports of fellow political prisoners that his demise was later established. His disappearance thus produced no immediate protest funerals or demonstrations. Yet just a few short years after Guimarães’s final imprisonment and death his figure became a central commemorative focus for students, joining and then quickly surpassing those of Edson Luis and Leme. If in 1968 the death of Edson Luis initiated a long, dialectical cycle of protest and repression and Leme’s death in 1973 worked as a ‘‘memory knot’’ to temporarily jolt students and others into protest, in the late seventies and early eighties invocations of Guimarães’s disappearance served to connect students to both of these earlier moments and to authenticate a newly reorganizing student movement. For as student activists in this later period sought to rebuild the student movement and rea≈rm its importance, they drew heavily on the language of a transgenerational collective student memory of opposition to the dictatorship and the resulting repression: one of militancy and martyrdom. They turned to Guimarães as a uniquely potent symbol for each. Speaking often of students’ ‘‘memories of struggle ’’ and invoking a shared responsibility to remember the history and traditions of the student movement, they frequently referred to the student activism of the post-1964 period as a collectively remembered heritage, one that demanded specific responses in the present. As they did so they stressed those aspects of the past that most suited their current political struggles and anticipated future. In the context of the late 1970s and early 1980s celebrations of Guimarães as a staunch defender of democracy obscured his e√orts at clandestine organizing for revolution. And notwithstanding the disintegrating legitimacy and organizational collapse une had undergone when Guimarães assumed the presidency in 1969, references to him symbolized the student union’s perseverance as an aboveground organization with indisputable moral authority. Moreover, despite the fact that the heyday of the former une building on Praia de Flamengo Street lay in the years prior to 1964, the headquarters soon came to repre- [3.138.118...

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