Memory and Method in the Emerging Historiography of Latin America's Authoritarian Era

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Memory and Method in the Emerging Historiography of Latin America's Authoritarian EraCalse-Se by Caio Tlio; The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism toThree Continents by John Dinges; Del estrado a la pantalla: las imgenes del juicio a los excomandantes en Argentina by Claudia Feld; O ba do guerrilheiro: memrias da lArmada unoBrasil by Ottoni Jnior Fernandes; As iluses armadas: a ditadura envergonhada by ElioGaspari; As iluses armadas: a ditadura escancarada by ...Review by: Kenneth P. SerbinLatin American Politics and Society, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 185-198Published by: Distributed by Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Center for Latin American Studiesat the University of MiamiStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4490482 .Accessed: 01/11/2011 13:18

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Critical DebatesMemoryand Method in theEmergingHistoriographyof Latin America'sAuthoritarianEra

Kenneth P SerbinCosta, Caio Thlio. Cale-se. Sao Paulo: A Girafa, 2003. Photographs, bib-liography, index, 350 pages.Dinges, John. The Condor Years:How Pinochet and His Allies BroughtTerrorism to Three Continents. New York: New Press, 2004. Bibli-ography, index, 322 pp.; hardcover $17.95.Feld, Claudia. Del estrado a la pantalla: las imagenes del juicio a los excomandantes en Argentina. Madrid:Siglo Veintiunode Espahia.Memo-rias de la Represi6n series, vol. 2. New York:Social Science Research

Council, 2002. Illustrations,bibliography, appendix, 174 pages.Fernandes Junior, Ottoni. O bafi do guerrilbeiro.: mem6rias da lutaarmada urbana no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2004. Pho-tographs, glossary, 300 pages.Gaspari, Elio. As ilusoes armadas: a ditadura envergonbada. Sao Paulo:Companhia das Letras, 2002. Photographs, appendix, timeline, bib-liography, index, 417 pages.- . As ilusoes armadas: a ditadura escancarada. Sdo Paulo: Com-panhia das Letras, 2002. Photographs, appendix, timeline, bibliog-raphy, index, 507 pages._. O sacerdote e ofeiticeiro: a ditadura derrotada. Sdo Paulo: Com-panhia das Letras, 2003. Photographs, appendix, timeline, bibliog-raphy, index, 538 pages.- sacerdote e o feiticeiro: a ditadura encurralada. Sao Paulo:Companhia das Letras, 2004. Photographs, appendix, timeline, bib-liography, index, 525 pages.Huggins, Martha,Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip G. Zimbardo. Vio-lence Workers:Police Torturersand MurderersReconstructBrazilianAtrocities.Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress, 2002. Photographs,bibliography, index, 293 pages; hardcover $55, paperback $21.95.Jelin, Elizabeth. Los trabajos de la memoria. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno deEspafia. Memorias de la Represi6n series, vol. 1. New York: SocialScience Research Council, 2002. Map, bibliography, 156 pages;hardcover $10.95.

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186 LATIN MERICANOLITICSND SOCIETY 48:3

How are we to remember the era of authoritarianism that took holdin LatinAmerica, beginning with Alfredo Stroessner'sdictatorship inParaguay in 1954 and ending with Augusto Pinochet's exit from powerin Chile in 1990?How should historians write about this period? Memoryand historical events are interlocking yet distinct phenomena. Percep-tions of the past shift constantly, but not the past itself. The job of thehistorian is to plumb the past ever more effectively in order to informmemory accurately. This process is ongoing and imperfect; but it is a cru-cial element in the construction of social memory because it helps to cor-rect misperceptions and to build new layers of understanding.This essay is a call to action for historians. I am concerned that therecent history of authoritarianism in LatinAmerica, and in Brazil specif-ically, will be left largely unexplored by members of our profession andtherefore left unquestioned, or at best explored in too narrow a manner.Study of the Latin American authoritarian period has been almost exclu-sively the domain of social scientists, particularly political scientists.(Concern about lack of historian involvement is also expressed in Stern2001). But the passage of time has clearly made it "history."HistoriansThomas Skidmore (1967) and Robert Levine (1970) wrote their initialbooks about the era of Getulio Vargas in Brazil less than two decadesafter his death. Sixteen years have passed since Pinochet's departure,two decades since the end of the Brazilian military regime, threedecades from the height of the repression in Brazil and Argentina, andfour decades from the Brazilian coup of 1964, which inauguratedbureaucratic authoritarianism in South America. In recent years, manyscholars from the social sciences and anthropology have demonstratedrenewed interest in the period; they are beating historians to the punch.THE CULTIVATIONOF MEMORYTrends in history and social science suggest that traditional historicalmethodologies will receive little attention in the process of understand-ing the period. Instead of the old paradigms of dependency and ColdWar polarization (Fagen 1995), gender studies, race and ethnicity, andthe "new cultural history" have become the new canon of the historicalprofession, and will undoubtedly have a profound influence on the wayLatin American authoritarianism is interpreted (see Stern 2001). Themost influential and perhaps most broadly appealing approach amongsocial scientists is the study of social memory. It is significant thatwhereas historians of other regions have thoroughly studied their sub-jects before focusing on the question of memory, in the case of LatinAmerica memory has come first. The Social Science Research Council(SSRC)recently conducted an excellent program to train a new genera-tion of Latin American (and also some North American) scholars in the


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SERBIN:AUTHORITARIANISM 187

methodologies of investigating social memory. Historians, however,have been largely absent from the debate that has emerged on this phe-nomenon. The SSRCproject was almost exclusively concerned withmemory. Papers delivered at recent congresses of the Latin AmericanStudies Association reflect a similar trend.The practitioners of the memory approach take the past as a given.One of the most prominent examples of this intentionally nonhistoricalapproach describes its methodology in the following way:

It is not an interpretation f whathappenedin the past,northe col-lectionof elements(documents, estimonies,"data")hatmighthelpin the societal process of constructinghistoricalmemories.Ratherthan renderinga narrativeof the past, we analyze the process ofsocietalrememberingand forgetting), ooking at the various levelsand layers n which this takes place. (Jelinand Kaufman2002, 32)One of the authors of this statement, Elizabeth Jelin, elaborates onthe methodology of studying social memory in a theoretical master-piece, Los trabajos de la memoria, the lead volume in the SSRC"Memo-rias de la Represion" series. Employing sociology, history, anthropology,political science, cultural criticism, psychology, and psychoanalysis,

Jelin aims to open new questions and create new dialogues about theproblem of memory in the political and public spaces of postdictatorialLatinAmerican society. She seeks not the "truth,"but a deconstructionof "certainties"(p. 7). "The dictatorial past is . . . a central part of thepresent. The social and political conflict over how to process the recentrepressive past remains, and it often intensifies," she affirms (p. 4). It isnot possible, however, to find a collective memory shared by all mem-bers of the populace. Memory is pluralistic. "Memory is selective; totalmemory is impossible" (p. 29). Yet memory is shaped and stimulated bya "cultureof memory" that has emerged in the West as discourse aboutthe Holocaust has become globalized (pp. 10-11). (Indeed, Jelin herselfsometimes focuses too much on the European milieu at the expense ofproviding poignant examples from LatinAmerica; see, for example, pp.75-78.) In this context, political actors-in Latin America, the right,political parties, and "moral entrepreneurs," such as human rightsactivists (p. 48)-struggle to impose their version of the past.The construction of memory further involves the collection of testi-monies about the past. This entails the traumatic examination of thememories of the numerous victims of authoritarian regimes, a processthat requires the participation of the interviewer, who helps to recon-struct memory. Jelin also explores the relationship between gender andmemory. In Latin America, women tended to symbolize the personalpain and suffering of the repression, whereas men represented therepression itself.


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Jelin recognizes the importance of history for the study of socialmemory. Her discussion here is more detailed and complex than theaforementioned statement, in which history is seen as unnecessary."Debate and reflection are the most extensive and intensive in the dis-cipline of history itself, especially among those who recognize that theresponsibility of historians is not simply the 'reconstruction' of what'really' happened, but incorporate complexity into their task" (p. 63).The appreciation of nuance is, indeed, the dominant camp in the disci-pline today. Extreme positivists, Jelin observes, reject memory as adatum, whereas extreme subjectivists identify memory with history.Citing Dominick LaCapra 2001), Jelin proposes a synthesis in which the"objective reconstruction" of the past takes into account the affective,empathy, and values (p. 67). This methodology is especially importantin the recovery of traumatic memories, where "thetemporality of socialphenomena is not linear or chronological" (p. 68). Jelin concludes thatultimately, history and memory are interrelated in various ways. Memoryis a "crucial source" for the historian. It helps to determine the histo-rian's questions about the past. For its part, history allows for the criti-cal probing of memory, and "this helps in the task of narrating andtransmittingmemories that are critically established and proved" (p. 75).

A fine example of an inspection of social memory is the secondvolume of the SSRCseries, Claudia Feld's lively, liberally illustrated Delestrado a la pantalla. Feld beautifully narrates the trial of Argentina'smilitary dictators; the decision to televise only snippets of the proceed-ings, and without sound; the loss of the videotapes; and their rediscov-ery and rebroadcast with sound in 1998 as an irruption of mass socialmemory. Analyzing social memory, Feld explains the significance ofthese episodes for Argentina's understanding of its past. But her workcould also be classified as history, an example of how the study of LatinAmerica's authoritarian era can employ historical methodology and beinterdisciplinary. Practically the only lamentable aspect of the book isthe lack of a military perspective on the events described.

HISTORICALAPPROACHESStudies of social memory and other social science techniques are nec-essary for constructing a canvass of the period; but they need to be bal-anced with deeper and more nuanced research into the period itself.The politics of memory is important, but so is understanding the poli-tics and other trends of the actual historical period. Such understandingis a key to clarifying the politics of the present, whether about memoryor other aspects of contemporary Latin American life. Historians canmake a unique contribution in constructing interpretations of LatinAmerican authoritarianism and its aftermath.


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What are the potential roles of historians in this enterprise? Tradi-tional political, diplomatic, and institutional histories can make an impor-tant contribution to understanding the period and how it is perceived insocial memory. Despite postmodern skepticism about the usefulness oftraditional documentary evidence, documents (and other forms of evi-dence) can significantly alter perceptions of the period. Political liberal-ization produced a series of documentary openings and made it safer forpeople to speak about the past. This historical opening led to new ques-tions and interpretations about the authoritarian period. Many othermaterials, both official and unofficial, have yet to be unearthed.Ultimately, we need a pluralistic and interdisciplinary set ofapproaches to writing the narrative of the period, including attempts atnew genres of historical writing, particularly the fusion of historical andjournalistic narrative.A typology of the Brazilian case, for example, illus-trates a wide variety of approaches already extant in the literature andsupports the argument for continued pluralism. Written primarily bypolitical scientists, macropolitical interpretations formed the dominantgenre of the 1970s and 1980s. These were followed by political casestudies, including works on the political transformation of the CatholicChurch in the context of authoritarianism. Social scientists once againled the way. Economists and sociologists examined the political econ-omy of the military regime. After the relaxation of press censorship, theamnesty of 1979, and the return of exiles, the Brazilian left produced aplethora of testimonial writings on their experiences in the resistance.This trend has continued into the present. A prime example isOttoni Fernandes Junior's O bati do guerrilbeiro, which explores thelives of militants of Agdo Libertadora Nacional (ALN, National Liberat-ing Action), the leading group in the armed fight against the Brazilianmilitary regime. Thirty years after his torture and imprisonment, Fer-nandes Junior writes with the vividness of the historical moment. Sig-nificantly, he reveals the tensions and debates within the guerrilla move-ment concerning the use of violence. From his account, we learn howdeep doubts ran over the effectiveness of violence as a political tool.Academic writers have also analyzed the left in detail. Lagging farbehind leftist writers in quantity and quality of work is the set of testi-monial writings by supporters of the regime. Works by the right aremore apologetic; some scholars have worked to correct this imbalance.Biographies of key figures, such as generals, are still seriously lacking.A number of works cover the importance of students in politicsthroughout the regime. The social history of the regime is a new andwide open field.The most prominent example of historical revision based on newdocumentary evidence comes with the publication of the first fourbooks in Brazilian journalist Elio Gaspari's five-volume series on the role


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of General Ernesto Geisel and his adviser, General Golbery do Couto eSilva, in the construction of the dictatorship in the 1960s and its gradualdismantling in the second half of the 1970s. Gaspari has made threemajor contributions. First, although he covers much ground alreadystudied by numerous scholars and journalists, in revisiting incidents anddebates through an exhaustive review of the literature and reconsidera-tion of data, he corrects misinterpretations about the period. For exam-ple, he deemphasizes the importance of conspiracy in the overthrow ofPresident JodioGoulart in 1964 by patiently describing how most of thearmy leadership adhered to the coup only at the last minute. One mustbe a specialist in the period to understand truly what Gaspari hasachieved. He implicitly rejects certain interpretations by simply omittingmention of their authors. The uninitiated reader will not perceive theseomissions.

Second, using Golbery's private papers, Gaspari forges a highlydetailed narrative of elite politics that gives a clearer picture of the gen-erals' project for Brazil, or lack thereof. We learn the opinions anddoubts of President Geisel and his closest advisers at practically everymajor step in the march of the dictatorship. Gaspari, for example, pro-vides the definitive proof of Geisel's acceptance of torture as a neces-sary evil in the fight against subversion, and he makes it clear thatduring the Geisel administration the torturerswere being brought undercontrol for primarily political purposes.Third, Gaspari taps his experience and contacts from decades ofreporting on the upper echelons of the military regime and other sec-tors of Brazil's ruling classes. His journalistic style produces a clear,often mordant narrative. Few write so critically about the elite. Eventhough his volumes reflect a certain admiration for Geisel and Gol-bery-he had frequent contact with the latter-Gaspari ultimately por-trays them as men who did not hold democracy as a value.It was Gaspari's access to the elite that brought him to Golbery'spapers and to what ultimately is a serious flaw, not so much in thebooks themselves but in the way Brazilian society and the state treat thecountry's historical patrimony. Gaspari does not discuss the very privateuse of these eminently public documents. Did he reserve them for him-self? Or was he enjoined by their owners to keep them private until acertain moment or occurrence? Answers to these key questions are notforthcoming. The social position of the journalist-scholar and his pos-session of the documentation thus become determinant factors in theconstruction of the social memory of Brazil's dictatorship. The elitewrites of the elite for the elite.

The overall methodological significance of the Gaspari volumespoints to the need to focus on people and personalities in the forma-tion of history. Gaspari gives little currency to so-called historical forces


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or social structures. For him the dictatorship was little more than a grandmess, a Brazilian bagunga, an unsophisticated dictatorship whose infa-mous doctrine of national security became inoperative because of thepolitical meanness of the military and its allies. Contingency plays amuch more central role in his view of history. He has perhaps gone toofar in rejecting the structural, and other studies have pointed out thehigh degree of professionalism and organization in the Brazilian armedforces. Brazil actually served as a model for other LatinAmerican dicta-torships. Yet Gaspari's focus on people is an extremely valuable exam-ple of how individual decisions play a part in history.John Dinges's Condor Yearsprovides yet another example of howrevisiting a set of incidents leads to a clearer understanding of theperiod and affects contemporary struggles over memory. Dinges was inChile during the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in September1973 and wrote a book on the assassination of former Allende foreignminister Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC in 1976 (Dinges andLandau 1980). The Condor Yearsresumes the research on the assassina-tion and brings to light new facets of the period's politics on both theleft and the right. Dinges accomplishes his goals through the introduc-tion of new evidence from testimonies from or interviews with morethan two hundred people, along with the new documentation releasedby the U.S. government during the Clinton administration, other declas-sified government documents, the papers of the Paraguayan intelligencepolice, and secret correspondence from DINA (Direcci6n de Inteligen-cia Nacional), the Chilean national intelligence agency.In what he describes as "underground history" (p. 9), Dinges pro-vides a political and operational history of Operation Condor, the eight-nation league (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia,Peru, and Ecuador) formed to allow cross-border pursuit of suspectedsubversives. Dinges underscores U.S. knowledge of Condor's formation,including the trips by its Chilean founders to meet with the Central Intel-ligence Agency in Washington. Although Condor accounted for a rela-tively small number of abuses, Dinges shows how its lawless charactercontributed to a situation in which the U.S. government simply lookedthe other way as regimes tortured, murdered, and disappeared thou-sands of people in the 1970s.Dinges skillfully portrays the primary motive behind Condor with adetailed discussion of the Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria (JCR,Revolutionary Coordinating Junta). Rarely seen in the literature on theperiod, the JCRrepresented a conglomeration of insurgents from severalcountries who plotted to destabilize Latin America's authoritarianregimes. Condor quickly defused JCR.Nevertheless, it served as a pow-erful justification for the Condor countries to continue repressive prac-tices against the nonviolent opposition, to consolidate the power of the


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repressive forces within regimes (especially in Chile), and to extend thevery life of those regimes.Another fine journalistic-historical account is Caio Ttilio Costa'sCale-se,which blends memory, historical documentation from the polit-ical police archives, and the discovery of new photographic andrecorded musical evidence. Costa ably describes the planning and per-formance of a protest concert held in the wake of the death by tortureof University of Sdo Paulo student and ALNmilitant Alexandre VannucchiLeme. That series of events proved to be a turning point in the historyof the Brazilian opposition (see also Serbin 2001, chap. 10).

SCHOLARLYPITFALLSViolence Workers s another example of writing that combines concernsabout both memory and hard fact. It illustrates both the strengths andpitfalls of scholarly reliance on memory. Huggins et al. argue two keypoints about torturers and killers in Brazil during and after the militaryregime. First, these men were made, not born. The authors emphasizediverse modes of masculinity as a way of describing the attitudes andbehavior of different "violence workers." They focus on three kinds. Thepersonalistic police masculinity reflects the culture of the beat cop whowants to weed criminals out of society. At the opposite end of the spec-trum is the institutional functionary, a dispassionate, rational individualwhose masculinity extends from the needs of the security apparatus. Inthe middle stand violence workers of blended masculinities, men whoshift their loyalties and justifications depending on circumstances. Theauthors illustrate how these masculinities "functioned to obscure andlegitimize official violence by structuring images of the state's relation-ship to it."They caution, "these men do not always fit neatly into spe-cific masculinity compartments. Most violence workers are more multi-dimensional than any analytical categories can communicate" (p. 89).The authors thus take the opposite stance from Gaspari; in their view,the regime was highly structured and not at all a bagunca.The second point they make is therefore surprising. The authorsassert that culture, politics, and the past are irrelevant in the making ofviolence workers. The foimation of small, specialized units governed bya state bureaucracy permits the transformation of ordinary individualsinto torturers. Violence Workershas an ahistorical and noncultural feelabout it, as if the torturers were floating in a timeless, societyless void,the products of a spontaneous generation of torture.The attempt to discover universal causes of violence is laudable, butsuffers for lack of historical specificity. Frei Tito de Alencar Lima, avictim of brutal torture by the infamous police investigator S~rgio Paran-hos Fleury, receives scant mention. Equally important cases, such as the


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death of Eduardo Leite, who was tortured for almost three months, andthe death of four soldiers in the barracks of BarraMansa receive no ref-erence whatsoever. One could be shocked to read that Brazil had an"assembly line of repression" (pp. 4, 180) but would not learn thenumber of victims of that torture, or that Chile and Argentina had farworse experiences. (This is not to say that the writers do not sympathizewith the plight of the victims.) In their interviews, the violence workersclearly express values about life, their jobs, torture, and killing, but theauthors do not tell us where those values come from. Questions aboutwho set up the system, how, and when receive little attention. Greatercross-national and diachronic contextualization would have been help-ful. We are left to conclude, as in the case of psychologist Zimbardo'sfamous 1971 Stanford prison experiment, in which college studentsassumed the role of abusive guards, that any human being on any givenday can become a torturer,given the right circumstances.In line with Gaspari's careful study of the authoritarian era, theauthors correctly help put to rest the notion that violence workersneeded the doctrine of national security to justify their actions. In thisanalysis, torturers and killers merely saw themselves as professionals, notideologues. Yet the authors are too extreme in their embrace of bureau-cratic explanations of violence. Although they recognize the importanceof the military regime in bureaucratizing, expanding, and legitimatingviolence, throughout most of the book authoritarianism is unimportant.In spite of this approach, Violence Workersreveals a wealth of dataand a methodological richness that are extremely useful for studying thehistory of Brazilian and Latin American authoritarianism. The authors'goal is to "reconstruct and write social memory about state violence" (p.18). They explore a history shunned-perhaps feared-by most schol-ars: the learning of torture and its effects on its perpetrators. ViolenceWorkersprovides anonymous but powerful life stories of the men whocarried out atrocities. The interview sample does not include the mostinfamous of the torturers, known to the public because of the denunci-ations by human rights organizations. Instead, the book describes themen who worked every day in the trenches of the repressive system. Aparticularly poignant passage describes the so-called "hell week" of mil-itarized police trainees, who must undergo complete degradation beforethey can graduate (pp. 155-56).One of the most gripping stories is that of Jorge, who recounts how,during his childhood, his own family were victims of a police raid in1979, toward the end of the repressive period of the military regime.The police officers raped his mother and carried off his father to Rio deJaneiro's worst torture facility, the Destacamento de Operagoes de Infor-magoes and Centro de Operag6esde Defesa Interna (DOI-CODI, Detach-ment for Intelligence Operations and Internal Defense Operations


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Center). Jorge was taken to the Fundagdo Estadual do Bem-Estar doMenor (FEBEM,State Youth Foundation), a reformatory system knownfor its regular abuses of children. There Jorge was punished with beat-ings and torture. At age 16 he ran away to take up life on the streets,only to return to FEBEM n order to gain entrance to the army. Not longthereafter he joined the same DOI-CODI unit where his father had beentortured. He worked his way up through the ranks to the position of hitman. In the study, he becomes the only person to confess openly tocommitting torture and murder, claiming to have taken part in thedeaths of 160 people in nonpolitical cases in just two years.How one gets at this history is a central concern of Violence Work-ers. The authors depict in great detail an economy of memory "whosevaluable currency was secrets" (p. 45). Engaging in this potentially riskyenterprise, the scholar must be able to network and negotiate effectivelyand to avoid manipulation by interviewees. The scholar must also beaware of subjects' construction of memory based on personal, political,and circumstantial factors, including those presented by the interviewprocess itself. In the end, memory becomes a "jointlyconstructed" proj-ect of interviewer and interviewee (p. 62). Excavating atrocities is natu-rally a difficult, complex, and traumatic experience for Latin Americansocieties. "Forgetting as well as remembering has both personal andpolitical dimensions" (p. 17). Learning about the past can be equally dif-ficult for the individual researcher: "As an archaeologist of memory, theinterviewer must become an onlooker witness to accounts that evokesurprise, disbelief, and revulsion and that encourage silences. Theresearcher must deal with these realities while faithfully and accuratelyrecording all that is said for later retelling" (p. 49).The scholarly danger in all this is whether the interviewees can bebelieved. How does one know whether a character such as Jorge is justbragging about the number of people he has killed? The authors of Vio-lence Workersoffer no corroborating evidence. In addition, Jorge makesthe fantastic claim of having participated in flights over the Amazonduring which live prisoners were dropped into the rainforest. Most of theDOI-CODI's violence had stopped by 1976, when President ErnestoGeisel fired the commander of the Second Army in SdioPaulo for failingto stop torture by his subordinates, years before Jorge purportedlyentered the DOI-CODI. (That firing is recounted in detail by Gaspari.)Unfortunately for the reader, the authors do not analyze their intervie-wees' statements more carefully, which casts doubt on the entirety of theinterviews. They cite neither primary nor secondary sources to supportthe interviewees' statements and contextualize the data. They could haveat least speculated about the possibility of interviewee grandstanding.The underlying lesson here is that memory needs to be cross-checked with actual evidence. Memories and perceptions of a period


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can be distorted, even downright wrong. The work of the historian isinvaluable in this process.A PLURALITYF METHODSThe historian Steve J. Stern suggests how our interpretation of theperiod can incorporate the advances of the new cultural history tounderstand the authoritarian era. He focuses on three main areas. Firstis collective memory. (I would add that we must strive to find the con-nections between the historical moment and current perceptions with-out sacrificing one concern for the other.) The second area includesgroups that most scholars consider the "antagonists"of the period. Thispoint speaks to the notion of tolerance in the study of the period. It isnecessary to write about military regimes without falling into theManichaean dichotomy of so much of the earlier scholarship. Stern sug-gests that historians will need to study the many groups that have notattracted scholarly attention but were every bit as much a part of theera's history as those groups and individuals studied by liberal and left-oriented historians. These forgotten people are the silent, the fence sit-ters, the conservatives, the repressors. For Stern, they are "the Other,"which must be examined and understood if we are truly to write the his-tory of the period.Understanding this period, moreover, is going to require toleranceand openness to dialogue among historians of different political andmethodological persuasions. Stern's third area is the analysis of "'youthculture' and generational politics as historical problems in their ownright." During the authoritarian period, youth culture became heavilyconsumer-oriented, at a time when so many young people could notpartake of the consumer paradise presented to them in the massmedia. The legacy of the authoritarian era, which began with the ide-alism of revolutionary youth, is a culture of competition, drugs, andpolitical alienation (Stern 2001, 55). As the Brazilian Catholic intellec-tual Alceu Amoroso Lima stated in 1969, the military leadership "anes-thetized" the political participation of the populace (cited in Serbin2001, 129).The research agenda should be broadened to include such topics asthe development of the human rights movement, the evolution of theideology and practice of both violence and nonviolence (nonviolence,of course, being a middle-ground position between the extreme left andright), biographies of key political and ecclesiastical leaders, and analy-sis of what authoritarian regimes achieved (or did not achieve) in termsof infrastructural and social improvements for their countries. We alsoneed political, diplomatic, and institutional histories and other worksbased on new primary data.


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A plurality of approaches and methods should prevail. The theoret-ical sophistication of the new cultural history and memory studiesnotwithstanding, much traditional spadework remains to be done. Thismeans finding and studying new primary materials, interviewing keyactors, and contributing to the methodological and theoretical debatesabout the study of the period and memory. Whenever possible, histori-ans also need to become activists for the opening of archival materials.In the Brazilian case, for instance, both the government and the churchhave yet to unlock a wealth of material.We need highly readable interpretive narratives. Bit by bit, we needto piece together global narratives. Long out of vogue in the historicalprofession and largely absent from Latin American studies, interpretivenarrativehelps define a particular period by portraying the convergenceof individuals, incidents, and trends. Lack of vivid narrative has becomean important item of discussion in the profession. The oppositionbetween concern with structures in the "new history" (of which the newcultural history of Latin America is an offspring) and the focus on eventsin traditional history is giving way to a search for their interrelation. Itis certainly possible, as Peter Burke argues, to integrate narrative andanalysis (Burke 2001a, 2001b, 18).

In recent years, some historians have returned to narrative. "Prac-tices of Historical Narrative"was the theme of the 115th annual Ameri-can Historical Association meeting in 2001. Some have experimentedwith new forms, including the use of literary models. Jonathan Spence'swork provides several examples of successful use of this technique(Spence 1978, 1984). The best journalistic authors have long adoptedsuch an approach. This theme was debated, for example, on the paneltitled "Journalists,Scholars, and Historical Writing"at the 114th AnnualMeeting of the AHA in 2000. We can learn much from the stylisticapproaches of writers such asJohn Hersey (1960) and David Halberstam(1986), who brought history and reportage alive through the portrayalof people, and the journalistic historian Taylor Branch (1988), who hassynthesized the history of the United States during the 1960s by focus-ing on the life of Martin Luther King.One of the tragedies of North American intellectual life is the paucityof interaction between journalists and historians. Journalists clearly havemuch to learn from us. From them, we can learn how to sharpenresearch skills and to produce more effective prose. It is also in the inter-est of our profession to make our work known to journalists. Scholars ofLatinAmerica can build an especially fruitfulrelationship with journalistsin the region, who generally are more experienced and more comfort-able in dealing with academics than U.S. journalists are. We should notoverlook the many fine examples of journalistic narratives that are partof the great literary tradition in Latin America. In the Brazilian case, for


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example, Ruy Castro(1992) has constructed compelling biographies thatare also highly informative social histories. Gaspari has shown how jour-nalistic-historicalmelding can be done for LatinAmerica. His model com-bines the journalist'semphasis on personalities and simple narrativewiththe footnote-laden rigor of the most careful historian.Narratives should take into account pedagogical concerns as well asthe need to appeal to a general public. Too often, our audience is onlyour fellow scholars. We should seek strength in the intersection of tech-niques, fields, and genres, as opposed to the isolation that can easilydevelop when scholars become too attached to their theoretical andmethodological stakes.

Let us conclude with an intriguing question: given the importantand dramatic developments of the authoritarian era in Brazil and LatinAmerica, why have historians been reluctant to study it? It is my hopethat this question will soon become irrelevant.

NOTESAn earlier version of this article was presented under the title "DocumentsMake a Difference: Sources, Historical Methodology, and Collective Memory in

the Narrative of Brazil's Authoritarian Era" on the panel "Archives, Repression,and Writing the History of Authoritarianism in Chile and Brazil" at the 116thAnnual Meeting of the American Historical Association (joint session with theConference on Latin American History), San Francisco, California,January 3-6,2002. The author wishes to thank Robert Holden and Victoria Langland for theircomments on that paper. An updated version was presented at the InternationalSymposium "40 anos do golpe de 1964: novos didlogos, novas perspectivas,"Universidade Federal de Sdo Carlos, Brazil, June 14, 2004. The author thanksBarbaraWeinstein for her comments on that version.

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Pennsylvania State University Press. 1-24.Castro, Ruy. 1992. O anjo pornogrdfico.: a vida de Nelson Rodrigues. Sao Paulo:Companhia das Letras.Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. 1980. Assassination on Embassy Row. New York:Pantheon Books.Fagen, Richard. 1995. Latin America and the Cold War: Oh for the Good OldDays? LASAForum 26 (Fall): 5-11.


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Halberstam, David. 1986. TheReckoning. New York: Morrow.Hersey, John. 1960. Hiroshima. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Jelin, Elizabeth, and Susana G. Kaufman. 2002. Layers of Memories: TwentyYears After in Argentina. In Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular

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