The discourse of "national reconciliation" and transitional justice in Brazil: continuities and ruptures of an image on the Brazilian democratization

Abstract

The research has two main goals: to reconstruct the development of transitional justice in Brazil until today and identify some of the main reasons of its implementation limits in the country. Our main hypotheses are as follows: the limits of the experience of transitional justice in Brazil are associated with a discourse on democratization that stands out "national reconciliation" as its main concept. In view of this discourse, which is appropriated by political elites engaged in formulation or lockout of policies for transitional justice, once that national reconciliation would have led to democratization, there is no room for a sense of retributive justice applied to former public or private officials who committed crimes against humanity in defense of the military regime. In this sense, the research has two objects: the aforementioned speech that has been created around the Brazilian democratization as a "political pact reconciled" and developments and limits of transitional justice in Brazil. These objects will be investigated in three stages: 1) the discussion in Congress on the creation of the Amnesty Law in the late 1970s, 2) the constitutional process would have "approved" this law as well as legislation and an assessment of the work of Special Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances and the Amnesty Commission, 3) and finally the current developments of transitional justice in Brazil, especially the recent judgment of the Supreme Court in ADPF 153 and the creation of the National Commission of Truth. It will also be important to recover, albeit secondary, speeches posing as dissent against the discourse of "national reconciliation".