The Quest for Memory and Truth at the Local Level: University Truth Commissions in Brazil

Abstract

Abstract: Alongside and in the wake of Brazil's National Truth Commission (2012–2014), local and institutional truth commissions flourished. This article examines one form of those local truth commissions: university truth commission reports. Situating them in the context of both their creation and Brazil's longer history with military rule, it analyzes the ways in which such commissions engage with, reinforce, and challenge national narratives of the military dictatorship of 1964–1985 and the ways in which they contribute new understandings to the military past. In the process, such commissions complicate the collective memory and narratives of military rule while both revealing the limitations of specialized truth commissions yet pointing to the ways in which such commissions can expand understandings of human rights both definitionally and temporally.