The Brazilian military dictatorship officially ended in March 1985, yet events that unfolded during its 21 years continued hovering over the country's politics and society for over three decades afterward. The rise of Jair Bolsonaro, an apologist of the military dictatorship, to Brazil's presidential office in 2019 motivated scholars to investigate how discourses characteristic of military rule returned to mainstream public debates in Brazil in the past few years. In his most recent book, A Present Past: The Brazilian Military Dictatorship and the 1964 Coup, Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta discusses the process of this return, showing how temporal distance from the dictatorship did not result in a distancing from the antidemocratic discourses that characterized that era.
The author claims that after 1985 the Brazilian state's policy of deliberate amnesia, or the promotion of the institutionalized forgetting of the dictatorship, kept the population ignorant about the violations committed by the...
