The human cost of impunity
Brazil’s failure to prosecute military crimes harbours a future threat. Review: Searching for Memory, Jacob Blanc, by Gavin O'Toole
Searching for Memory: Aluízio Palmar and the Shadow of Dictatorship in Brazil, Jacob Blanc, 2025, University of North Carolina Press
If the importance of transitional justice in seeking the truth about crimes committed by military regimes and holding them accountable was ever in question, Jair Bolsonaro put any doubts to rest.
Brazil’s far-right former president opened deep wounds by not only glorifying torturers as heroes but adopting policies that set back every hesitant step that had hitherto been made towards providing justice for their evil acts.
Long before he took office Bolsonaro, a former soldier who openly pined for a return of military rule was spitting revisionist bile that left no doubt about where he stood.
His infamous comment “The dictatorship’s mistake was to torture and not kill” seems darkly apt for a man who now faces prosecution on coup charges of his very own.
Once in power as president, one of his first acts was to reinstate annual commemorations of the 1964 coup.
Bolsonaro then meddled with the work of Brazil’s Amnesty Commission, taking steps to erode its autonomy and compromise its impartiality, cancelled a project for a memorial, cut the funding of projects aiming to offer victims of the dictatorship psychological support, and tinkered with standards for granting amnesties and reparations.
These steps came after a long and fractious debate about accountability that had until then arguably coalesced only in partial measures taken by authorities to atone for the military’s brutality in comparison with neighbouring South American states.
While some transitional justice initiatives in Brazil have been mostly successful, such as reparations and limited projects related to memory and truth, others have not or have faced obstacles, such as institutional reforms and accountability.
The Amnesty Commission was established in 2001 to implement reparations for victims of Brazil’s dictatorship and became a focus of efforts to promote memory policies, such as the “Amnesty Caravans” project.
The commission made some progress towards healing a wounded society but after 2016—when Dilma Rousseff was leveraged out of power in what her Workers’ Party described as an “institutional coup”—the government’s political meddling increased considerably.
A National Truth Commission was also established in 2012 to investigate serious human rights violations, but experts regard its final report published after two years as a lacklustre compromise with the military, which retains considerable power in Brazil.
Most importantly, the truth commission was entirely investigative: it could not prosecute cases of murder, torture, disappearances, sexual violence and political repression.
That is because criminal accountability of the security personnel who committed grave human rights violations has always been prevented by the “Amnesty Law” approved in 1979 under the dictatorship, which prevents cases ever reaching the courts even for alleged crimes against humanity.
There are potentially a lot of them: in 2014 the National Truth Commission named 377 people involved in human rights violations and recommended that 196 of them be prosecuted.
This piece of legislation, steered into existence by an authoritarian regime, has been widely denounced as a charter for impunity and the main obstacle to social healing, but also as both unconstitutional and in breach of Brazil’s wider obligations under the American Convention of Human Rights.
While there have been glimmers of hope that a precedent will eventually smash the legal impasse—such as the recent case against Antônio Waneir Pinheiro Lima, a retired army sergeant accused of rape and torture—the continuation in force of the amnesty law sets Brazil apart from its neighbours, including Argentina and Peru, that have made efforts to prosecute some of those responsible for similar crimes, including by voiding their own amnesty laws.
Nevertheless, demands for progress in Brazil are growing, and were given great impetus by the Oscar awarded to the movie I’m Still Here.
In the meantime, ageing victims of Brazil’s authoritarian violence and families of the disappeared continue to suffer after long lifetimes struggling to be heard—and tyrants such as Bolsonaro continue to legitimise and empower those who have escaped justice.
One “unimaginably perverse” example of the human consequences of this came in December 2019 when Aluízio Palmar—a former guerrilla in Paraná—was sued for $10 million by his torturer, a retired army lieutenant Mário Espedito Ostrovski, who accused him of defamation over a Facebook item posted in 2013.
After his capture in 1969, Palmar had suffered brutal torture at the hands of Ostrovski before his eventual release and long exile. The former militant had then lived in Chile and Argentina before returning to Brazil, ironically in the context of the then new Amnesty Law.
Haunted by the memory of what had happened and driven by his personal search for the bodies of fellow militants killed by the dictatorship, in the late 1990s Palmar became a full-time human rights activist.
In Searching for Memory, Jacob Blanc traces his life and work, which can be set against this vacuum of impunity left by an incomplete regime of transitional justice that was brought into such painful relief by Bolsonaro’s toxic stance towards past abuses.
Palmar’s activism was tantamount to a lifelong mode of “autobiographising” in which he spent his days bearing witness to the violence he and other political prisoners had suffered at the hands of Ostrovski and his ilk.
Blanc writes: “Sharing memories of torture and imprisonment served as a counternarrative wedge into the dominant culture of impunity.”
The author argues that although this book is primarily the chronicle of a militant’s war and uneasy peace, it is also a story about stories—how the protagonist transformed his life into a public narrative and the meanings of memory in the shadow of dictatorship.
He develops the concept of the “memory script” that delves into what a person’s narration of memory suggests about how they understand their place in history, which may be valuable for understanding the process of sharing memories.
Palmar’s tale is in many ways on the fringes of Brazil’s militant history, with his exile and isolation not featuring in more well-known narratives of revolutionaries based in Rio or São Paulo, and much of his later life was spent in the border town of Foz do Iguaçu.
It is a complex and troubled story that ultimately concludes with the Ostrovski lawsuit—which the former officer eventually dropped in the face of a solidarity campaign in support of Palmar.
Inevitably, Blanc asks why it took Ostrovski six years to sue his former victim over an incident that had taken place in 2013—and answers this by bringing us back to Bolsonaro and the matter of impunity.
The author writes that Bolsonaro’s election in 2018 made the long-standing culture of impunity even more brazen, calling to mind what has been called the “unleashing effect” by which an erosion of social norms empowers people to reveal what they really believe.
Blanc writes: “The lawsuit against Aluízio was symptomatic of a double injustice at play. Not only was a survivor of torture being preyed on once again by his former abuser, but the lack of accountability over the previous forty years was being compounded to such a degree that a torturer could claim that his rights were being abused.
“Under Bolsonaro, torturers like Ostrovski could seek to pervert the legal system to not only silence victims and critics but also to attempt to redefine whose rights actually matter.”
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