Politics of Impunity: torture, the armed forces and the failure of transitional justice in Brazil

Abstract

The recent brutal assassination of Brazilian indigenous activist Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips in the Amazon Rainforest by illegal loggers and miners in collusion with the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, illustrates a systematic culture of impunity in Brazil. In legitimising structural violence against the subaltern, including indigenous peoples and defenders of their cause, impunity is at the centre of a vast amount of literature that examines the ties of the military dictatorship’s legacy with quotidian violence in contemporary Brazil. One of the recent publications in this literature is Furtado’s Politics of Impunity: torture, the armed forces, and the failure of transitional justice in Brazil . This book inserts a different perspective into the transitional justice literature by exploring the outcomes and measures of the National Truth Commission (NTC) that has, from 2010 to 2014, belatedly investigated cases of atrocities committed during the Brazilian Military regime (1964–1985). Politics of Impunity focuses on the political process unleashed by revisiting and restoring a past of mass atrocities. It does so by shedding light on the NTC’s consequences in Brazil’s political history, marked by spiralling violence inflamed by the ascendancy of the far-right during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.