The prophecy of violence without appearing trauma: transitional justice, memory and the Brazilian exception

This article has in its scope three main objectives: to present the mechanisms of transitional justice, to reconstruct the history of the regime, the legality of exception and the expedients of violence used during the last dictatorship (1964-1985) lived by the country and to critically reflect the spurious transitional process that Brazil underwent, a fact that had several negative consequences, which will be duly highlighted and criticized throughout this essay. To accomplish these goals, the paper was divided into four different parts: first, it presents the main characteristics of transitional justice; secondly, it promotes the reconstruction and exposition of three critical phases of transitional justice, based on the genealogy outlined by Ruti Teitel; in a third movement, using the thread left by Teitel, especially regarding the difficult relationship between truth, memory and justice, a reconstruction of the last dictatorial period lived in Brazil is made, in order to demonstrate how there was in the country the perfect fulfillment of the prophecy of violence without apparent trauma, that is, the occurrence of a negotiated transition, which aimed to promote the forgetting of crimes, violence and oppression of the illegal regime; lastly, it is also promoted a critique of the legality of exception used by the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship to implement and justify its extreme violence and elimination of dissent, further demonstrating how the adoption of transitional justice mechanisms could have contributed positively to the Brazilian transitional process and on the elimination of whats remains of the dictatorship, which continues to produce highly deleterious effects on the Brazilian social fabric.