Impunity in Post-authoritarian Brazil : The Supreme Court’s Recent Verdict on the Amnesty Law

Kurzfassung/Abstract

While numerous countries in post-authoritarian South America have annulled Amnesty Laws issued under authoritarian rule and punished officials involved in repressive organs, Brazil continues to favour impunity. This attitude has recently been confirmed by the Brazilian Supreme Court’s decision to maintain the 1979 Amnesty Law granting de-facto impunity to violators of human rights during the military regime. The article considers this verdict within its historical context, and raises two questions which have previously attracted little attention: First, why has post-authoritarian Brazil processed the experience of the military regime so differently from its neighbouring countries, and what role did the Amnesty Law play in that difference? Second, what does this disinterest in punishment mean? This article concludes that one promising theory highlighted by political scientists – the low degree of participation in civil society in Brazil - cannot fully explain why the vast majority of Brazilians are not interested in punishment, as numerous citizens mobilized during the amnesty movement. It seems to imply that the heterogeneous anti-authoritarian alliance vanished once the Amnesty Law had been achieved. Another key finding is that the disinterest in punishment cannot be interpreted as moral support for the military regime or a sanctioning of its human rights violations, as the amnesty debate in Brazil is more complex.