Bolsonaro's stunt failed to distract from the twin narratives of torture and victimhood that dominated public attention during these days of remembrance. Malhaes had grabbed the headlines temporarily, but muted accounts from testimonies of other torturers heard before the state and federal truth commissions also circulated in a slowly drawn out process of putting faces to those still kicking who did the dirty work of the generals and the other high placed elites not in uniform. A band of youngsters engaged in what Brazilians call the social action movements have been conducting escraches -- where they track down the whereabouts of a surviving torturer and subject him to public humiliation.
On March 31, or "revolution day" as styled by the golpistas, 150 activists of Youth Rise Up papered the residence in Brasilia of Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, a known and unrepentant retired colonel who commanded an infamous torture center in Sao Paulo, with denunciations and posters of the faces of the tortured and disappeared. But it was a pamphlet produced from one corner of the Left featuring a reprinted ad placed by the Phillips Electronics Company in a Brazilian newspaper in 1969 that infuses the theme of torture with a prior psychological predisposition within the Brazilian historical memory, a predisposition linked to the country's prolonged legacy of slavery. This state of mind is still familiar in the all but quotidian reports of contemporary police and prison practices. The print ad shows a photo of a curled bull whip next to the company's latest model TV. The copy reads, "In the torture chamber, the Phillips 550 can't be broken." That, of course, did not apply to people.
"To oppose the authorities, to advocate social change or even political reform was to place yourself beyond the law." These words used by Tony Judt to describe life in Nazi dominated Europe during World War Two echo over the world Brazilians suffered in the worst days of their dictatorship. Nothing in modern history, of course, matches what the Nazis inflicted. And in fact the Brazilian generals did not turn the screws tightly in the first few years they governed. Moreover, as it often annoyingly pointed out to Brazilians, the dead and disappeared in the tens of thousands at the hands of military regimes in Argentina and Chile, inaugurated a decade after 1964, far outnumbered the body count in Brazil where the total of the disappeared is given as fewer than five hundred, a fact that brings solace to few Brazilians.
By 1968, the rule of law was totally suspended in Brazil, habeas corpus a receding memory, and brutality doled out in increasingly harsh doses at any sign of dissent. The heavy weight of repression and censorship in Brazil entirely suppressed the public sphere of open discussion, much less independent political action, and in this atmosphere a clandestine resistance arose which for a time made the rulers sleep less easily, especially after such dramatic actions as the kidnapping of the U.S. ambassador Charles Elbrick in September 1969. But the resistance in Brazil, albeit widespread, was never a match for the regime's security forces, all the less so since conditions for educating and mobilizing an activist popular base to challenge the regime from below were utterly eliminated.
In the interim between the departure of the generals and full restitution of representative constitutional government, and today, much has changed in Brazil, most dramatically the emergence of a genuine middle class, not so distinct one supposes from the consumers of an enlarged internal market that Joao Goulart and his allies sought to lay the groundwork for in 1964. And yet the stark existence of two separate societies at Brazil's economic extremes -- the obscenely rich on one end, the equally obscenely impoverished on the other -- remains scandalously frozen in time.
Today the union rank and file and the social action movements are filled with the sons and daughters of this new middle social stratum, who, whatever other levels of education they have benefited from, are fully wired to the Internet and the social media. Given that this demographic barely existed in the time of the dictatorship, it is not surprising that the majority of the militants who fought the regime rose among the decent minded youth of the privileged classes for whom Brazil's intransigent backwardness was historically, ideologically and morally repugnant. It was to this class that most of those tortured and disappeared for political reasons during the dictatorship belonged.
Overall the militants were highly educated. When individuals from this milieu were moved to action, many banded around tightly knit cells brought into existence by the tactical limitations of the struggle, while others joined larger clandestine Marxist oriented parties that had embraced the necessity for armed resistance. Because Brazil's social order was so skewed, no institutional space existed that would have brought the Brazilian masses into the arena of resistance. The urban elites in modern Brazil from whom the militants were drawn have known the poor most intimately in their own homes as domestics and nannies, or as porters in their apartment and office buildings, the serving class being primarily Afro-Brazilian. Otherwise, in 1964 Jim Crow Brazilian-style was the order of the day.
Did the poor feel resentment? Most assuredly they did, I am told by Patrick Hughes, an Irish missionary working in the slums of Sao Paulo from 1963 till 1972, when the generals finally expelled him from Brazil. In Hughes' experience "the peasants (most had migrated from the countryside) totally supported the military action. Who were these rich kids that thought they could destroy the beautiful buildings they lived in for free. A bunch of communists they were told, though none of them knew want a communist might be."
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