He never ceases to apologize for the military dictatorship. And tries to impose his vision in Brazil. In early August, President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been in power since 1 January, has changed four of the seven members of the Special Committee on Political Deaths and Disappearances, which since 1995 has been tasked with identifying junta victims and compensating them.
Among the entrants, military and members of his formation, the Social Liberal Party (PSL). The new chairman of the commission has no particular experience in the field of the search for missing persons.
For lawyer Rosa Cardoso, who was part of the commission until 2016, the new members "do not believe themselves in the idea of a transitional justice", which recognizes the relatives of victims the right to know the truth. "It is as if the Holocaust Museum passed under the management of the German far right", dares on his side Paulo Pimenta, deputy of the Workers' Party (PT), who has just been replaced within the commission by a member of the PSL.
434 dead and missing, a deceptive figure
The Brazilian military dictatorship lasted 21 years, from 1964 to 1985. In the region, it was the authoritarian regime that lasted the longest, but it was also the one that made the least casualties: 434 dead and missing, according to the work of the National Commission of Truth, against more than 3,200 under the Chilean dictatorship (again according to various truth commissions) and more than 30,000 during the Argentine military regime.
But this figure of 434 dead and missing is misleading. The National Truth Commission's final report estimates that the policies of successive military governments have also resulted in the death of at least 8,500 Indians. The repression is fierce, especially during the "lead years", between December 1968 - when the Constitution and most individual freedoms are suspended and Congress is dissolved - and 1975. It is estimated that at least 20,000 Brazilians were victims torture, in the hands of secret police agents.
It will then be necessary to wait until 2011 for the National Truth Commission to be created - more than 25 years after the end of the military regime - by President Dilma Rousseff, herself an ex-left-wing guerrilla, tortured and imprisoned by the government. repressive apparatus of the regime.
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A memory far from being appeased
Jair Bolsonaro, former captain of the army, has always presented a very different reading of this period. The 1964 coup d'état was for him a "democratic revolution" against the communist threat. Against "what the left wants today," he added on August 8th, when he paid tribute to Colonel Ustra, chief of the secret police of Sao Paulo from 1970 to 1974, the only cadre of the regime to have been recognized as torturer by the Brazilian justice - and "national hero" in the eyes of the president in office.
Colonel Ustra, "terror of Dilma Rousseff", in the words of Jair Bolsonaro at the time when he dedicated to him his vote in favor of the impeachment of the president in 2016, was not sentenced by the civil justice, because of the amnesty law passed in 1979. A law that allowed the return of political exiles but also exonerated the torturers of all responsibility until today. The crimes of the Brazilian dictatorship went unpunished.
"No one wants to be put in prison," says filmmaker Lucia Murat, a former guerrilla jailed for three years and tortured by the military regime. "Many are dead, or very old, but we can not hide the truth, we need to know what really happened to those missing, who was murdered, who were tortured should be held responsible."
For the director, whose filmography is closely linked to the history of this period, Brazil has not managed to do this work of memory. It is evidenced by the absence, almost 35 years after the end of the dictatorship, of a center of memory as exists in neighboring countries that share a similar history. "I think that's why such things are possible today," she says.
Jair Bolsonaro and the army
For Ivan Proença, former captain of the army who became a professor of literature, "this government is already rewriting History". A story he knows well: on April 1, 1964, the day the military coup overthrows President Joao Goulart, Captain Proença disobeys orders to save hundreds of students besieged by the putschists in the Faculty of Law. right, in the center of Rio. For him, the decisions and remarks of Jair Bolsonaro relating to this period serve "the interests of the current government composed of generals, last heirs of the radical right of the armed forces.All support dictatorship, torture, and Colonel Ustra."
A third of the ministers who make up the government of Jair Bolsonaro are indeed military. The vice-president is a general. How to explain such proximity of the president with the army? Joined the Military Academy at the age of 18, Jair Bolsonaro then rose to the rank of captain, but ended fifteen years later by being excluded, accused of planning to detonate bombs in barracks . "He has been tried for preparing terrorist acts, and today all his attempts to rewrite history are aimed at legitimizing him with the pro-dictatorial side of the army," said lawyer Rosa Cardoso.
Jair Bolsonaro gives pledges to the army by personal revenge? The military, like a minority of civil society, also nostalgic of the authoritarian period, are in any case a significant electoral base. Last March, the president called to commemorate the date of the military coup on April 1, sparking an uproar. But according to a poll published at the time, 36% of Brazilians felt that this date should be celebrated.