EMILE MYBURGH: Beware the silence on Brazil's military dictatorship

Horrors committed under the military regime must be talked about, so that they can be avoided in future
02 APRIL 2024 - 05:00
by EMILE MYBURGH

On April 1, Brazil quietly celebrated the 60th anniversary of the beginning of one of its darkest chapters: the military coup against president João Goulart’s government, which resulted in a military dictatorship that lasted until 1985.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva curiously asked, presumably in a spirit of letting bygones be bygones, that Brazilians not make a big deal of this dubious milestone. I cannot agree with him. The horrors committed during the military regime must be talked about, so that they can be avoided in future and so that Brazil can heal.

Ostensibly, the coup was to fight communism, the eternal right-wing bogeyman in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. During the ensuing years hundreds of Brazilian students, teachers, academics and artists, all supposed communists or opponents of the dictatorship, were tortured and killed. The coup and military regime were widely supported by the US and middle and upper Brazilian classes and institutions such as the Catholic Church and anti-communist forces.

In 1968 the military regime doubled down on resistance and issued Institutional Act 5 (known as AI5), which resulted in extensive censorship, dissolution of Congress, restrictions on freedom of the press, and human rights abuses. These included arbitrary detention without trial or bail, torture — including by inserting cockroaches in bodily orifices and electric shocks — disappearances and murders.

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https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2024-04-02-emile-myburgh-beware-the-silence-on-brazils-military-dictatorship/