The opening paragraph of “Searching for memory: Aluízio Palmar and the shadow of dictatorship in Brazil” brings the startling news that in 2019 Aluízio Palmar was sued by the retired army officer who had once tortured him.
Sean Sheehan
Aluízio was an armed militant opposed to Brazil’s dictatorship in the 1960s when he was captured and subjected for two years to torture by Lieutenant Ostrovski. After exile in Chile and Argentina, Aluízio returned to Brazil and by the 1990s he had become a human rights activist. His search for the bodies of militants killed under the dictatorship made him a public figure.
Emboldened by the election of the far-right Bolsonaro government in 2019, an old Facebook page posted by Aluízio about the abuse of power by Ostrovski was used to sue him for defamation.
The story of Aluízio Palmar’s life is written by someone, Jacob Blanc, who first met him when the lawsuit became public news. Virtual interviews were conducted during the Covid epidemic as Blanc researched the historical legacy of military rule in a country which had no human rights trials. An Amnesty Law was passed during the years of the dictatorship and it prevents court cases ever taking place, even though hundreds of people have been identified as deserving of facing charges.
Blanc’s biography begins with Aluízio’s childhood and his years of student activism. After the military coup of 1964, he and other students formed a clandestine group called MR-8. After his two years in prison, he was one of a group of sixty-nine political prisoners released in exchange for the kidnapped ambassador of Switzerland. Two chapters are devoted to his years in exile, his militancy forcing him to go underground, until returning to Brazil and initiating the search for six militants disappeared by the military regime in 1974.
The biography concludes with a discussion of the 2019 lawsuit: The lawsuit against Aluízio, writes Blanc, “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”.
Bolsanaro probably doesn’t regret saying how “the dictatorship’s mistake was to torture and not kill” but he is now facing charges for his attempted coup after being defeated in the 2022 presidential election.
In the face of US pressure to drop the case, Brazil’s Supreme Court is insisting that the course of justice be allowed to run. Aluízio Palmar, now in his eighties, is not the only one following events with great interest.
“Searching for memory: Aluízio Palmar and the shadow of dictatorship in Brazil” by Jacob Blanc, is published by The University of North Carolina Press.
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