As fronteiras da violência política: movimentos sociais, militares e as representações sobre a ditadura militar (1970-1988)

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the social construction of representations about the military dictatorship in Brazil. In order to do so, it analyzes how social movements and the military led a dispute over the ways of narrating, classifying and categorizing the violence of the dictatorial State throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It begins with a critical reading of the historiographical and legal approaches usually adopted to analyze the matter, understanding that, among other limitations, they have had little ability to fully explain the process of construction of the meanings of the native categories mobilized by the actors. In lieu of these perspectives, this work utilizes theoretical references from the sociology of social movements, from the sociology of violence and from ethnographies dedicated to understanding political mobilization in contexts marked by violence. Empirically, the research is based on written documents produced both by social movements and military repressive institutions. The investigation starts in the turn of the 1960’s, when part of the opposition began to mobilize a new vocabulary to frame the regime’s violence. By denouncing torture, murders and enforced disappearances as human rights violations, these actors began to gain increasing public legitimacy for their complaints. During this process, categories such as political prisoners and political dead and disappeared emerged. Contrastingly, they were opposed by the categories formulated by the military, such as subversives and terrorists. The hypothesis to be pursued is that the result of these symbolic conflicts was the establishment of a particular way of referring to the State-led violence that turned against oppositions throughout the dictatorial regime: the political violence grammar. This grammar assigns a specific and distinctive nature to this form of violence. Thus, it provides the means for this State-led violence to be recognized as illegitimate and, therefore, worthy of reparation. The analysis ends in 1988, when the new Constitution consolidated the symbolic repudiation of political violence.