Against state terror: lessons on memory, counterterrorism and resistance from the Global South

Abstract

Critical theory avows that “where there is power there is always resistance”. However, the practical implications and consequences of particular modes of resistance remain, within World Politics, under-theorised. In critical terrorism studies (CTS), this critical imperative to resist has recently emerged in the proposal to remember state terrorism. With this move, CTS aims to disturb the legitimacy of forms of violence/terror that emerge from the state. In this article, I argue that such an agenda of “resistance through memory” has already been put forth in the Global South (specifically, Latin America). Drawing on this historical experience, I elucidate some problems with the critical imperative to resist. More specifically, I show how in Brazil the Global South counter-memorial narratives of state terror share a common ground with the Global North counterterrorism discourses. I do so by analysing three underlying tropes of Brazilian remembrance that replicate Global North representations of terrorists: bestialism, pathology and dehumanisation.

Keywords:

• resistance
• truth and reconciliation
• Brazil
• terrorism and political violence
• critical terrorism studies
• politics of memory

Introduction: romanticising resistance

Resistance is, arguably, one of the major tenets of critical scholarship. Since Foucault, it has become something of a common place to constantly remember that “where there is power, there is always resistance” (Fontana and Bretani 2003, 280). Resistance, this somehow vague and ill-defined concept, plays a fundamental role in countering the violent effects of both western modes of knowledge and western forms of domination/exploitation. Hence, critical academics constantly remind us of the ongoing imperative to resist: wherever and whenever “power relations” impose “modes of violence”, we shall foster “micro-political modes of resistance”. Ironically, one could say that resistance has become, to a certain extent, the uncritically accepted imperative of critical theory, as such. In critical terrorism studies (CTS), this imperative to resist emerged with a particular problem: International Politics’ obliviousness towards state terrorism.

CTS has recently brought attention to how the concept of state terror has been constantly and systematic neglected by mainstream research on terrorism, especially post-September 11. For CTS scholars, this lack of acknowledgement about a particular form of terror that emanates from sovereign states is deeply problematic. It contributes, as it were, to the unquestioned perpetration of state violence. This is to say that, by constructing terrorism as a prerogative of individuals, mainstream scholars render one mode of illegitimate state violence, state terror, conceptually impossible. In other words, by forgetting about state terrorism, academics and practitioners create the conditions for state terror to blatantly happen, over and over again, without even being noticed. Thus, for CTS, this forgetting must be resisted: we need to “bring the state back into terrorism studies” (Blakeley 2007).

Such an invitation to resistance appears to come naturally: remembering is commonly understood as the logical way of resisting oblivion. Interestingly, with the post-September 11 war on terror, the political importance of practices of remembrance – the need to counter repressive regimes of oblivion – became increasingly evident to critical scholars. Shortly before Blakeley called for a re-appropriation of the concept of “terror”, other academics had criticised the politics of memory behind counterterrorism discourses. This criticism was based on how the war on terror was justified by the memorialisation of September 11 as a “national trauma” that required proper response. A response that, in fact, turned out as a concealed series of violent actions – torture, death and social exclusion – that remained, as it were, forgotten by an official narrative stressing the just nature of such violence. In order to counter this active oblivion carried out by counterterrorism discourses, critical scholars proposed to resist the official, national memorialisation of traumatic events via a “practice of counter memory” (Zehfuss 2007, 21).

However, in the Global South, counter-memorial practices of resistance that reclaimed and re-signified the concept of terrorism have already been taking place, long before September 11. In Latin America, for instance, the traumatic effects of the Cold War counter-insurgent “dirty” warfare against communism and terrorism have been vividly present in the political scene for decades. There, a profound tradition of publicly remembering torture, assassinations and forced disappearances carried out by state agents in the authoritarian past was developed as the means to resist the recurrence of illegitimate state violence. Such tradition has created a strong sense among (some) Latin Americans that “there is no terrorism, apart from state terrorism” (CNN Chile 2014).

This realisation results in two unsettling conclusions for critical theory. First, the perceived novelty of Blakeley’s call to remember state terror, in fact, becomes a rather sad reminder of the limited geopolitical horizons of International Politics scholarship, even in its critical facet. It simply overlooks a huge mass of individuals, scholars and practitioners who have never forgotten the terrorising aspects of illegitimate state violence. Second, such (mis)perceived novelty conceals the fact that, perhaps, a few lessons can be learnt from the Global South, in particular, from Latin America’s long history of counter-memorial resistance against state terror – lessons that might actually bring into question an uncritically accepted imperative to resist.

Hence, in this article, I suggest that when looking at the historical experience of counter-memorial resistance in Latin America, most specifically in Brazil, at least one lesson can be learned: resistance might reproduce, to its own extent, the very violence it intends to prevent. In order to make this argument, I proceed in a twofold move: first, I describe how counter-memory has historically emerged as a mode of resistance against the oblivion of state terror in Brazil, much similar to the “new” resistance proposed by CTS; second, I analyse how this mode of “remembrance as resistance” against state terror has actually replicated some of the discursive representations CTS scholars have identified as the very conditions for the occurrence and recurrence of illegitimate state violence. In other words, I intend to show some unsettling parallels between the Global North’s counterterrorist violence and the Global South’s counter-memorial resistance.

In the first section, I demonstrate how memory, trauma and terror are inter-connected. I expose the ways in which, after the war on terror, critical theory began to equate resistance with remembrance against a politics of forgetting. In the following section, I briefly expose how CTS’s call to remember the concept of state terror results, in fact, from a geopolitically restricted understanding of terrorism. Countering this restricted understanding, I demonstrate how in Brazil – as an expression of a general trend in the Global South – the concept of state terrorism has never actually been forgotten, remaining as a constant reminder of illegitimate political violence that must be prevented. In the final section, I exemplify how certain recurrent themes among the vast, diverse and multiple (Brazilian) discourses on state terror are similar to some discursive representations of terrorists expressed in the (Global North) war on terror. This last, final move – of evidencing how resistance sometimes reproduces what it, in fact, purports to resist – draws attention to the pitfalls of romanticising resistance and failing to comprehend its own, intrinsic form of violence.

Counter-memory against counterterrorism

There is a strong intersection between questions of terror, memory and trauma. What unites these common concerns of International Politics is one basic problem: modes of violence that emanate from the sovereign state and affect the lives of individuals. Concerning studies on terrorism and political violence, 11 September 2001 is, as it were, a paramount example of how such an intersection surfaced in the contemporary political scene.

On the day two airplanes were flown into the twin towers, US President George W. Bush performed a speech describing the shocking events as “evil, despicable acts of terror” that required a global “war against terrorism” as a proper response. In doing so, Bush stressed: “None of us will ever forget this day” (Bush, quoted in Zehfuss 2003, 515). Such an imperative to remember was part of the required justification for a series of future violations of human rights perpetrated in the name of the deceased killed during the terrorist attack. In this regard, Bush’s stress on the impossibility of forgetting September 11 had a particular discursive function:

He needs you to remember. Remember, will you, that everything our governments are doing in the so-called war against terrorism (or, alternatively of course, against evil) is a response to the events of September 11. Killing civilians in Afghanistan, arguably violating the human rights of those detained by US forces, curbing our civil liberties, this is all justified because of the events of September 11. (Zehfuss 2003, 514)

Yet, this discursive justification for a future, “necessary” perpetration of violence by the state encountered forms of resistance. Individuals subjected to this re-appropriation of their own memory for the war on terror were not mere bystanders, completely passive. As Edkins describes it, while the Bush administration claimed the September 11 casualties as virtuous sacrifices for the wagging of war against “evil”, a group of New York actors organised a demonstration against such memorialisation discourse. Throughout the streets, “dressed in black with white dust-masks over their mouths, they stood in silence in a semi-circle. Around their necks hung placards reading ‘Our grief is not a cry for war’” (Edkins 2006, 112). This demonstration, as a particular instance of resistance, illustrates how individuals opposed the sovereign’s appropriation of their own trauma, reclaiming the signification of their own experience. This non-official form of remembrance/resistance suggested that individual trauma “was not something that could be adequately encapsulated in the phrase ‘a terrorist attack on America’” (Edkins 2004, 262). It is precisely along this vein, a perspective that sees the possibility of resisting the state’s discursive justification for violence, that Zehfuss suggested to “forget September 11” as an “obstacle to debate” (2003, 526).

What both Edkins, Zehfuss and other scholars within International Politics¹ suggest is the possibility of resisting practices of state violence and repression – in both its physical form (e.g. the war in Afghanistan and torture in Guantanamo), and its metaphysical form (the appropriation of individual trauma for the justification of violence) – through alternative modes of remembering. Hence, resistance could be channelled via modes of memorialisation that challenge the assumed, mainstream representations that pervade counterterrorism discourses. This resistance through remembering amounts to a “practice of counter memory” (Zehfuss 2007, 21): an exercise that destabilises the security and coherence of official narratives; an active mode of resistance that stresses different understandings of the past; and a form of resistance that nurtures alternative, pluralist understandings that work to mitigate the “homogenous and non-pluralistic conception of nationhood” (Norval 1998, 256). In relation to the war on terror, the consequences of this “resistance through memory” are easily understood: by resisting such a conception of nationhood, critical scholarship disputes “the discursive foundation” employed by official remembrance in order “to construct the enemy terrorist” (Jackson 2005, 76). It disturbs hierarchies such as barbarian terrorists/civilised west (Baker-Beall 2013), and helps to disestablish the depiction of terrorists as “evil”, “inhuman”, “faceless” enemies that can only be met with violence (Jackson 2005, 74). In other words, this critically oriented literature invests remembrance with political power. It affirms that memory, as a form of resistance, is capable of preventing, or at least undermining, the recurrence of violence.

The emergence of CTS as a field of study was somehow concomitant to critical theory’s perception of this political power of memory. The need to establish CTS arose out of critical scholar’s concern with the problematic consequences of counterterrorism’s power–knowledge nexus. CTS suggests that by treating the war on terror through a counter-insurgency lens, the mainstream “terrorism industry” (Herman and O’Sullivan 1989, 253–254) created the conditions for the perpetration of violence in the global war against “new terrorism” (Tucker 2001). Hence, CTS scholars, in accordance with the literature on memory, deem it necessary to resist this justification of state violence produced by an ideologically inclined set of specialists – specialists whose vastly influential knowledge on terror is “highly contestable and largely unsupported by empirical research” (Jackson 2007, 245).

So, the emergence of CTS aimed at countering “‘problem-solving’ terrorism studies” (Burke 2008, 42). It proposed to do so by, among other means, stressing the social construction of terrorism as a category for the classification of political violence (Jackson 2007). Instead of treating terrorism as a given phenomenon, CTS looks at the ways in which the label “terror” conceals the construction of a normative hierarchy in which terrorism is opposed to a good, contained and justifiable form of violence, as a (just) war conducted by freedom fighters (Dexter 2012). As such, CTS stressed a point largely overlooked by traditional research: how treating terrorism as an “unconventional form of illegitimate violence […] reifies a tired and unstable inside/outside dichotomy that legitimizes the state’s continued monopoly on violence” (Jarvis 2009, 15).

And, it is in relation to this state-centric orientation (Jackson 2007, 245) that CTS raises a particularly interesting claim: the need to re-introduce the concept of state terror in studies on terrorism and political violence (Blakeley 2007). This agenda seeks to bring back the knowledge produced in the late 1980s on the relationship between sovereign states and illegitimate modes of violence, more specifically the connection between northern democracies and gross violations of human rights perpetrated by southern authoritarian regimes – a body of literature that, unfortunately, had been utterly rejected by the mainstream terrorism industry after September 11. This rejection was based on the representation of a new, unprecedented threat of international terrorism. Faced with a “new” form of terror, mainstream researchers and state officials choose to forget the knowledge about “old” terrorism, alleging it no longer provides a reliable basis for their decision making.

Although the reasons for reassessing the concept of state terrorism vary within CTS, there is an overarching concern with the possibility of resisting the effects of the war on terror. Blakeley justifies this need to understand the state as a possible terrorist actor arguing that “the use of repression by the US was particularly intense during the Cold War, and we are seeing a resurgence of its use in the ‘war on terror’” (Blakeley 2007, 228). Jackson, Murphy, and Poynting (2010, 1) contrast the silence of academics on state terror with the daunting question of proportionality; there is too much focus on “the few thousand deaths and injuries caused by ‘terrorism from below’” and too little on “the hundreds of thousands of people killed, kidnapped, ‘disappeared’, injured, tortured, raped, abused, intimidated, and threatened by state agents”. Along similar lines, Jarvis and Lister (2014, 50) affirm that state terrorism research serves three critical functions: (1) the identification of illegitimate state violence, (2) the exposure of processes by which such illegitimate violence is legitimised or concealed and (3) the unveiling of consequences and beneficiaries of state terror.

Nevertheless, despite the stated obliviousness to state terror, Jackson (2008) argues that the notion is, as a concept, still very much “present”. Within mainstream research on terrorism, the conceptual contours of state terror remain as a “ghost” haunting the field. It negatively defines, by exclusion, what is to be understood as “terror” (non-state illegitimate political violence). Now, re-appropriating Jackson’s play with words, I insist it is precisely this spectral condition of state terror that further elucidates the intersection between memory, trauma and political violence.

State terrorism does not end when violations of human rights cease. When a sovereign state tortures, disfigures, exiles and disappears the very individuals it was bound to protect (Edkins 2003), it creates a trauma that echoes through time. Interestingly, this traumatic betrayal by a sovereign that terrorises its own population (Jackson, Murphy, and Poynting 2010) in order to maintain political order has a double phantasmagorical function in the aftermath of a conflict. The silence of survivors, disenfranchised by official narratives that appropriate their individual memories for the waging of war (Edkins 2004), coexists with the silence of a discipline that refuses to acknowledge the state as a source of terrorism (Jackson 2008). Both silences only result in a spiral of violence; by not contesting national narratives of the past, we allow the state to claim death as a political sacrifice in the name of a just war; and by rejecting the notion of state terrorism, we allow violence perpetrated by the state to remain unquestioned.

When it comes to the remembrance of state terror, the silence of survivors and the silence of academics feed into each other in a joint and vicious forgetting. This forgetting of the state as a source of illegitimate violence only serves to render instances of state repression and arbitrariness, such as those enabled by the war on terror, more easily justifiable. It effectively makes preposterous the possibility that the state would perpetrate terrorism in the name of national security. Accordingly, both memory studies and CTS insist that by forgetting state terror – through silencing survivors of trauma and solely defining terrorists as non-state actors – we create the very conditions for state violence to return as a ghost, haunting the present and future of global politics.

Nonetheless, and once again, where there is power, there is a need for resistance. These two different, and yet connected, phantasmagorical silences invite two similar and inherently related modes of resistance. Critical terrorism studies proposes “to reclaim the term ‘terrorism’ and use it as an analytical tool, rather than a political tool” (Blakeley 2007, 233), while the politics of memory literature suggests we should “reclaim memories of trauma and rewrite them as a form of resistance” (Edkins 2003, 18). The common goal of these two strategies, referring back to their common concern, is to undermine the very legitimacy of state violence. The former questions practices of counter-insurgency/counterterrorism warfare as mere expressions of terrorism themselves and affirms that the sovereign state is indeed capable of perpetrating illegitimate violence. The latter mitigates official narratives of past violent events through an archaeology of inconsistencies that destabilises coherent discourses. It affirms, against the denial of state officials, that the state has indeed perpetrated illegitimate violence in the past. Here, the intertwining between these two literatures shows its full empirical relevance: practices of memorialising state terror – memorials, acts of commemoration and truth commissions, for instance – carry out both modes of resistance.

Now, in order to assess these twofold forms of resistance, I turn to an analysis of the Latin American, specifically, Brazilian experience. As it were, the continent possesses a rich history of resisting/remembering state terror. Thus, I intend to delve into this historical experience in order to better understand what these proposed equations of resistance and memory actually entail.

The Global South discourse on terror

Before exposing the Latin American, Brazilian historical remembrance of terror, it is important to elucidate one distinction: the differences between the Global North and the Global South discourses on terror. Such a distinction refers back to the history of “international terrorism” as a politically employed concept. The resort to narratives of “international terror” is not exclusively a post-September 11 phenomenon. Discourses of a “new form of terrorism” that create an “unprecedented danger” of “global reach” (Jackson 2008) and demand “appropriate action” (Jackson 2005) had previously and remarkably been employed worldwide, at least, since the 1930s (Ditrych 2013). In a short, but compelling historical analysis of the discursive construction of terrorism, Ditrych (2013) shows the existence of two competing discourses during the 1970s, which he terms the First World and Third World discourses on terror. This distinction, however problematic,² illustrates some theoretical and practical issues at stake in Latin American representations of terrorism.

Ditrych’s exposé follows as such: whereas in the Global North terrorism was discursively created as an exclusively non-state (barbarous) action that sought to disturb the international order, in the Global South terrorism was represented as the illegitimate terrorising of people by a repressive state that sought to impose an imperialist order. Both discourses, while diametrically opposed, operated within similar knowledge-practices, presenting a series of explanations for the root causes, effects and ways of countering terror, in both its facets: the subversive terrorist in the Global North and the sovereign terrorist in the Global South.

However, despite presenting a solid, if brief, “genealogical” study of the discursive construction of terror, Ditrych’s two-folded typology conceals one point, in particular. If, on the one hand, it interestingly points to the conceptualisation of terrorism as a state prerogative by Global South scholars, in the pre-September 11 scenario, on the other hand, it presents a rather simple, binary picture of the Cold War’s discursive struggles. In the Global South, especially in the Southern Cone of Latin America, there was never a single, overarching narrative on terrorism. From the 1960s onwards, the call for revolutionary violence against an oppressive capitalist regime coexisted with the justification of violations of humans rights in the war against “terrorism and subversion” (O Livro Negro Do Terrorismo no Brasil, n.d.).

To adopt such a geopolitical classification is, hence, highly misleading. At the same time that in Brazil, Carlos Marighella – the leader of Ação Libertadora Nacional (National Liberation Action, ALN) – re-signified the label “terrorist” as an honourable compliment in a just resistance against a terrorist state (Marighella 1982), members of the Argentine military junta and the Brazilian armed forces, “accepting” the Global North narrative, defined terrorism as an “attempt to change or destroy a people’s moral criteria and way of life” (Viola, quoted in Frontalini and Caiati 1984, 75). They represented the subversive terrorist as a “disturbed mind […] that tarnishes the national culture” (O Livro Negro Do Terrorismo no Brasil, n.d., xxix) – an individual who is simply “incompatible with Western Christian civilization” (Videla, quoted in Frontalini and Caiati 1984, 24). It was not the primacy of one discourse, but precisely the clash between two disparate constructions of terror, one could argue, that led to the continent’s dirty wars.

Also contrary to what Ditrych implies, representations of state terror persisted in the post-September 11 war on terror. The “effective suppression of statements about state (systemic) terrorism” (Ditrych 2013, 230) that followed the “epistemological crisis of counter-terrorism” (Jackson 2015, this issue) was mainly a Global North phenomena. In the southern cone, the Global South discourse not only lingered, but was strengthened. In Brazil, for instance, from 1995, the discourse on state terror became progressively institutionalised by official mechanisms of memorialisation and transitional justice. In academia, that has also been the case: the number of works written on the concept of “state terror” by Latin American scholars is simply gargantuan. In fact, the understanding that sovereign states are indeed capable of terrorising their subjected populations is so strong that in Latin America, subversive (individual) terrorism is sometimes described as “non-governmental terrorism” (Feldmann 2005, 3).

The persistence of the Global South discourse on terror in Brazil, as it were, depended on the articulation of remembrance as a particular mode of resistance against the violent civic-military Regime (1964–1985). This sophisticated articulation became more prominent precisely at the same time another form of resistance, the revolutionary armed struggle, succumbed.

The idea that “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (Foucault 2003, 15) can be taken almost literary in Brazilian remembrance of the Cold War. By 1975, when the project of the Brazilian Revolution was violently, illegitimately and disproportionately massacred by the state, survivors and human rights activists waged a “war of memory” (Martins Filho 2009) against the Regime’s official narrative. This war/politics of memory, led by the feminist movement for amnesty, aimed at disputing the atmosphere of “transitional oblivion” on the recent violent past. In a nutshell, this “war” entailed unveiling the cases of torture, disappearances and assassination that were still denied/concealed by the military Junta.³ It aimed at preventing Brazilian society, and the world at large, from forgetting the gross violations of human rights perpetrated by state agents.

It is in this period that the notion of resistance through memory became stronger. In the preface of his best-seller tragicomic memoir, Fernando Gabeira⁴ emphasises: “stories do not simply detach themselves from the storyteller: storytelling is resistance” (Rosa, quoted in Gabeira 1981). This understanding was also mirrored by the unofficial report of São Paulo’s Archdiocese, Brasil: Nunca Mais (Brazil: Never Again).⁵ The report reinforced the need to “remember what happened in the past” (Arquidiocese de São Paulo 1985) against the state policy of denial. As such, both Gabeira’s memoir and Brazil: Never Again promoted the memory of state repression as a form of ensuring that state terror does not recur. In the Archbishop of São Paulo’s words, we should all remember violence “so it’s not forgotten, so it never happens again” (as of 29 March 2013, the Brazilian National Archive has quoted these words on its website: http://www.memoriasreveladas.arquivonacional.gov.br). Along this line, both articulations of memory as a mode of resistance called upon a counter-memorial struggle that disputed the conservative representation of repression as a just war, the Armed Forces’ denial of state terror and the official silence on violations of human rights.

This counter-memorial struggle was, fortunately, progressively institutionalised. From 1995, consecutive democratic governments questioned the “silence” on the dictatorial past, working to reinforce the right to memory and truth in the country. Through time, the thematic of memory as resistance was transposed from unofficial memorialisation into official remembrance. This equation is clearly stated at the Memorial da Resistência (Resistance Memorial), one of the very few sites of memory in Brazil, based in São Paulo. Created in 2008, occupying the former cells of the political police, the disturbingly dark, but beautifully structured memorial has printed on one of its corner walls: “to remember is to resist”. Recently, in 2012, the role of memory in resisting the dictatorship’s violence’s was once again reinforced via the creation of a truth commission: “only by giving voice to those who, even today, remain silent it will be possible to construct the ‘silenced history’ of the [authoritarian] period” (Núcleo Memória 2012, 10).

But the Brazilian resistance through memory, however commendable for the purpose of providing “survivors a voice” (Edkins 2003, 18) and posing “a threat to this sovereign forgetting” (Auchter 2013, 310), must be critically assessed. This form of resistance through memorialisation has expressed the Global South discourse on terrorism in a multiplicity of disparate, sparse and, at times, contradictory ways that, their differences apart, possess one overarching commonality. These disparate instances of memorialising the past have discursively created one enemy: the “military-terrorists” (Penna Filho 2009, 49). This particular notion of “military-terrorist”, constructed upon depiction of perpetrators, illustrates a “methodological” convergence between Global South and Global North discourses on terror. As such, it unveils a point where resistance starts to look surprisingly and disappointingly similar to what is meant to be resisted.

Bestialism, perversion and cure

As mentioned before, there is no single representation of state terror in Latin America, especially in Brazil. When analysing private and public instances of memorialisation, one encounters a series of scattered narratives that do not compose a coherent story about the past. Yet, to state that there is no single representation of terror does not mean to say that there are no overarching themes shared by different, contradictory memories. Such commonalities among disparate discourses do exist, and they can be seen at work, mostly, in representations of perpetrators. In Brazil, these shared themes transcend the most varied boundaries: they are present in pre- and post-transitional scenarios; they can be seen in public and private remembrance; they surface in the discourses of academics and practitioners; and they are operationalised in both textual and visual medias. Interestingly, as expressions of a counter-memorial effort against state terror, these overarching themes present startling parallels with Global North counterterrorism discourses.

The first theme of Brazilian remembrance of state terror is bestialism. There is a common practice among different discourses of rendering perpetrators in bestial, animalistic ways. The theme of bestialism predates the 1964 coup. Historically, at least since 1961, leftist militants referred to certain sectors of the military as “gorillas”. During the authoritarian regime (1964–1985), and after the democratic transition, this depiction was preserved first by clandestine organisations and later on by human rights activists.

The word gorilla summons an animalistic notion that has been exhaustively applied in Global North discourses on terror. This bestial trope works in order to associate the figure of terrorists – the military-terrorists, in the Global South – with irrationality, brutality and, consequentially, inhumanity (Jackson 2005). This association activates an interesting discursive function that brings political consequences. As inhumane, bestial beings, the former military-terrorists would lack the resort to dialogue, only acting in order to “satisfy his most sordid instincts” (CNV 2014, 308). This inherent flaw, thus, can be used to easily explain why the military overthrew Goulart’s democratic government – gorillas do not reason – and why the regime instituted a paramount apparatus of repression – gorillas are violent primates, possessing a natural proclivity towards brutality.

To represent the military-terrorists as primates suggests that the perpetrators are one evolutionary step behind us (Sacchetta, Del Roio, and Carvalho 2012, 34), “not belonging to the human genre” (Coelho and Rotta 2012, 170). This primal, bestial inhumanity explains why the military-terrorists were incapable of following “the basic principles of human morality” (Cardoso 2013), and why state terror “escapes human reason” (Tavares 1999, 219). This reproduces, to a certain extent, the idea in the Global North that terror poses a “challenge to the conscience of each human being” (Baker-Beall 2013, 9).

Finally, the bestial theme serves another function: it circumscribes the possible outcomes of transitional justice processes. In another parallel with the Global North, the brutality, inhumanity and amorality of perpetrators suggest that “engaging in any kind of dialogue” with military-terrorists “would seem somehow nonsensical or even treasonous” (Jackson 2005, 22). This discursive strategy confines the outcome of memorialisation: “it is not about auscultating the feelings of the genocide or torturer in order to know whether he sincerely regrets his heinous acts” (Silva Filho 2011, 298), it is about “investigation, prosecution, punishment” (CNV 2014, 956). The legal – or, in absence of that, the moral – condemnation of the military-terrorists is rendered as the only way to “normatively strengthen the values of human rights in Brazil” (Schneider 2011). As a consequence, the amorality of perpetrators is translated as the amorality of arguments for the maintenance of the 1979 amnesty law (Silva Filho 2011, 289). Here, the political function of representing terrorists as beasts discloses itself: in the Global North, its serves the purpose of suggesting that terrorists must be treated as animals (Jackson 2005, 75); in the Global South, it invites a simple, neat resolution: we already know what to do with gorillas; they need to stay behind bars (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Abaixo a Impunidade! [Against Impunity!], cartoon by Carlos Latuff. Accessed October 15, 2014. http://www.deviantarrt.com/art/Abaixo-a-Impunidade-150251507. Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

While the depiction of military-terrorists as animalistic monsters possesses powerful political consequences, it is not exempt from problems. As any discursive structure, the bestial thematic creates the very conditions of its own unsettling. The monstrosity of state terror somehow exceeds the barbarism of less evolved, animalistic beings. The darkness of terror comes precisely from what one cannot find in nature: gorillas are violent and prone to remorseless killing, but the military-terrorist shows signs of “cruelty” (Arquidiocese de São Paulo 1985, 218–219; CIDH 2010, 57); he is capable of perpetrating “things that not even animals do” (Coelho and Rotta 2012, 170). Through the history of Brazilian remembrance, perpetrators are rendered, at the same time, somehow more and somehow less than animals. Their inhumanity, ironically, departs but also derives from their human nature.

Notwithstanding that – as humanity must be excused from crimes against itself – there must be other causes for the past behaviour of perpetrators, their inhumanity must be somehow persevered, or later re-introduced. In some accounts, this function is carried out by keeping the irrationality of the military-terrorist, the individual, while associating it with a form of perversion that works on two different levels. With this move, the inhumanity of the perpetrator derives not from his animalistic nature, which also implies the absence of perversions, but from his abnormality.

So, the second theme, the pathological nature of perpetrators, both derives and departs from the bestial theme. In this theme, the idea of an animalistic irrationality attributed to the perpetrators is swapped for the idea of “sadism” (CNV 2014, 403). Here, the fundamental idea required to vouch for the cruelty of state terror is pleasure: the military-terrorist is a “psychopath” (Coelho and Rotta 2012, 170) who is capable of turning the practice of torture into a pleasant endeavour (Arquidiocese de São Paulo 1985, 13). The perpetrator’s cruelty thus derives from the fact that as a “Maestro of human disfiguration and destruction” (Cardoso 2013), he rejoices at a state of terror, smiling in the face of agony, pain and humiliation (Ishaq, Franco, and Souza 2012, 291). The pathological theme rewrites amorality, turning it into a cultural disease: those who tortured, assassinated and disappeared political dissidents were fostering a state of madness (Sacchetta, Del Roio, and Carvalho 2012, 120). It functions in a similar way to the Global North’s “prototypical image of the ‘insane terrorist’ figure, an image which intertwines radical reactionary ideological positions, madness, and acts of extremely repulsive violence” (Baele 2014, 14).

Nevertheless, in the Global South, the trope of insanity, at times, leads to a backlash. The psychopathological portrait of military-terrorists bears an unsettling proximity to some perpetrator’s own justification for state terror: veterans of repression also explain the past period of political violence in the same tone, insanity. When not in denial for their past misdeeds, perpetrators usually justify acts of torture, assassination and disappearance as mere excesses of a few insane, rogue officers. In their own discourse, those anomalies are hierarchically opposed to the moral, professional soldiers who only make good use of violence. As such, the pathological theme gives too much ground for the emergence of the patriotic soldier who proudly states: “I don’t use… violence outside the standard of my conscience as a human being” (Huggins 2000, 76). Thus, as an unintended consequence, the discursive creation of these anomalous, sadistic individuals, instead of suggesting that terror “invariably get severely punished” (Baele 2014, 14), creates the very conditions for the exculpation of the Military Junta. In other words, focusing on the pathological military-terrorist (the individual) ends up concealing the terrorist state (institution). For the Global South discourse, this poses a serious problem, forcing the discursive repertoire to take one step further.

This unwanted side effect is overcome by the third, and most sophisticated, theme: the performed dehumanisation. In this particular trope, the years of state repression are depicted as a great “hunt”. And, as in any hunt, state repression presupposes two partaking sides: the “preys”, the leftist clandestine revolutionaries, and the repression apparatus, the “predatory” states (Gaspari 2002b, 453; McSherry 2005). Now, while this thematic still keeps the figures of monstrosity and bestiality intact, those are not intrinsic features of the perpetrator’s nature, but rather characteristics acquired through the performance of terror. The complete dehumanisation of dissidence, as it were, is treated as the condition of possibility for such a “hunt”. State repression becomes a “sophisticated method of incriminating the victim”, an orchestrated performance that aims at “destroying” and “undoing” the opposition (Tavares 1999, 219). This process of undoing “dehumanizes those who are tortured, treating them as less than humans, and frequently forcing them to perform less-than-humans actions” (Coelho and Rotta 2012, 87). In this thematic, the “dehumanization that precedes death” enables death itself, by creating “the complete lack of interest for those who die” (Garapon, quoted in Santos et al. 2010, 49).

However, in accounts based on this theme, terror possesses a double dehumanising effect. In this interesting semiological twist, “torture dehumanizes and brutalizes not only those who are tortured, but also those who torture” (Coelho and Rotta 2012, 87). Torture, here, is deemed a dangerous method, a “Pandora’s box” whose effects are uncontrollable (Barreto, Gabeira, and Serran 1997). As a treacherous strategy, it possesses a transformational nature capable of excising humanity from the torturer: “whoever practices torture […] becomes bestialized” (Arquidiocese de São Paulo 1985, 13). Interestingly, with this nuanced logic, the perpetrator becomes more closely related to his victims: by “fostering terror”, state agents ended up, themselves, “terrorized” (Tavares 1999, 263); by enacting a “betrayal of the social contract” (Coelho and Rotta 2012, 87) and turning the forces of the state against its own citizens, state terror not only annihilated the opposition, but also “annihilated the torturers” (Tavares 1999, 264). This progressive “annihilation of those who annihilate” creates the figure of the self-victimised military-terrorists, a humane soldier merely tempted by the “demoniac charm of torture” (Oliveira 2011, 4).

Here, the dehumanisation theme presents a novelty, an idea that makes it both sophisticated and unsettling. It brings up the uncomfortable notion that the perpetrator too was a victim of the authoritarian state. Even worse: it creates a form of trauma that is particular to the military-terrorist – a trauma that was self-imposed on perpetrators by their role in the repressive apparatus. The dehumanisation theme affirms that the resort to immoral, cruel and bestialising means of counter-insurgency warfare had nefarious effects on officers. This violence made the world incomprehensible to them (Tavares 1999, 264). The performance of terror made the military, in all their humanity, start “dreaming of everything upside down” (Barreto, Gabeira, and Serran 1997, 1 h 19 min 30 s).

The dehumanisation theme is conditioned by one particular discursive strategy: the need to understand the military-terrorist as “a robotic agent of the […] national security doctrine” (Cardoso 2013). In order to make sense of inhumanity as a performed action, this thematic has to paradoxically extract one essentially human capacity from perpetrators: reason. Now, this capacity is not absolutely whipped out, as it would be the case in the previous themes. To do so would, ultimately, entail a complete dehumanisation of the perpetrators, falling back on the bestial figure of gorillas. So, this thematic must reach an interesting balance: the capacity of reason must be kept, while mitigated to an acceptable level. The perpetrator, thus, is rendered capable of reasoning, but this capacity stops as soon as he is faced with orders from above. The military-terrorists were just following orders.

What this discursive move does, first, is to establish the causes of state terrorism at the institutional level. The military-terrorist becomes the outcome of an environment of fear, in which he was trained. Logically, the Armed Forces, alongside the military traditions, are the ones to blame for breeding soldiers “in fear and through fear” (Tavares 1999, 263). Hence, as a consequence of this institutionalisation of guilt, the perpetrators’ persona completely vanishes; they become faceless officers, “the men” (Gabeira 1981), a group of robotic, irrational agents of the national security doctrine – a doctrine they do not fully understand and yet blindly follow.

This figure of the faceless military-terrorist, a human “without the faculty of reason” (Santos et al. 2010, 19), serves a political purpose in this discursive structure. By somehow correcting the unintended side effects of the pathological theme, this understanding counters the perpetrator’s version of state terror as the mere by-product of “excesses” of a few rogue officers – excesses of which the Military Junta had little knowledge (D’Araujo, Soares, and Castro 1994; Huggins 2000). Thus, what the dehumanisation theme does, in a sense, is to enable the common Southern American notion of systemic state terror. By institutionalising guilt, this thematic opens space for affirming that torture, assassination and disappearances were part of a systematic, overarching official policy during the 1970s: they were the norm and not the exception; a norm that emerged from a directive that could only be carried out by faceless, mediocre, order-abiding men.

In the dehumanisation theme, the notion of perversion is not completely eradicated, but rather transferred to a different level. The perpetrator, here, is not perverse per se, he is the victim of a “perverse bureaucracy” (Santos et al. 2010, 19). Not being inherently perverse, the military-terrorists are thus rendered susceptible to forgiveness, “for they know not what they do” (Arquidiocese de São Paulo 1985, 19). The terrorist state, on the other hand, is deemed as a monstrous political “anomaly” (Gaspari 2002a, 34) that continues to haunt the present in the form of an “anomalous” militarised police force (CNV 2014, 971).

Here, in another interesting twist, the dehumanisation theme intersects with the pathological theme. The transposition of perversion from the individual – the sadistic veteran of repression – to the state – the monstrous apparatus of repression – renders terror as an institutional pathology. In this thematic, it is the state, and not the perpetrator, that suffers from a case of split personality disorder. The authoritarian terrorist state, “obsessed” with the protection of national security (Fonteles, n.d.b), acts according to the fable of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Coelho and Rotta 2012, 36). As a “legit monster”, the repressive apparatus “dismantled Brazilian republican institutions […] and introduced into the legal system the disrespect to popular will, the crimes of torture and political persecution” (Coelho and Rotta 2012, 36). As a “bad doctor”, the discourse goes on, this institution dominated by “folly” (Fonteles, n.d.a), was incapable of effecting “the dictatorial prescription of suppressing the dissidence’s militancy” (Coelho and Rotta 2012, 36). With this thematic, the facilities used by the political police obtain a more prominent role. The figures of the “house of death”, “tenebrous” centres of torture, disappearance and extermination (CEMDP 2007, 57) become the source from which the perverse state terrorised Brazilian society, transforming “tenderness” and “ideological naiveté” into “darkness and shadows” (CEMDP 2007, 301).

Finally, as was the case with the bestial theme, both the pathological and the dehumanisation themes invite logical conclusions that re-signify the meaning of resistance through memory. The description of state terror as a pathological perversion – be it in the forms of the sadistic veteran of repression or of the perverse apparatus of repression – leads to the representation of resistance as a medical response. Similar to Global North representations of military operations as a mean to cure societies infected with terrorism (Jackson 2005, 74), in Brazil, remembering becomes a “healing process” (Folha de Pernambuco 2013) through which society can sanitise the “wounds” that were “left by the regime in the Brazilian soul” (Santos et al. 2010, 75; Coelho and Rotta 2012, 87). In a sense, policies that provide space for individual grieving, such as official commemoration/pardoning ceremonies and institutionalised remembrance, become prophylactic steps. They are rendered necessary conditions of a process that aims to leave behind the barbarous, primal state of generalised terror into a “mature” discussion on human rights (SDH/PR 2010, 19). In this medicalised narrative, truth-seeking is justified in surgical terms: “we need to excise the enduring metastasis of the dictatorship” (Dias 2014). In other instantiations of this memory-prophylaxis, resistance, as remembering the truth about terror, is even invested with a religious tone: “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (Arquidiocese de São Paulo 1985, 19). From this medicalised, hallowed narrative of resistance, only one conclusion can be drawn: whoever disagrees with official remembrance or the outcomes of transitional justice either does not want to be cured or does not want to be saved.

Conclusion

The experience of counter-memorial struggles against the oblivion of state terrorism in Brazil is startling, from a critically oriented perspective. It is so, because it subverts romanticised expectations of what resistance means. When we look closely at the long history of resistance through memory in Brazil (from the 1975 amnesty movements to the 2014 Truth Commission’s report), what we see is not only the rightful mourning of survivors and the just assessment of the past; we do not only see memory being used in order to undermine the legitimacy of state terror, by exposing torture, assassination and disappearances as means of counterterrorism/counter-insurgency warfare. Rather, when we look closely at the Brazilian case we see that resistance, as such, is a practice embedded in its own mode of violence.

When effectively re-appropriating the notion of “terrorism” and turning it against the state, the Brazilian, Global South discourses on terror produce impressive parallels with the Global North, post-September 11 discourses. Both depoliticise dissent and create obstacles to debate by discursively producing their images of “terrorists”. The depiction of perpetrators as gorillas in the Global South and the representation of terrorists as beasts in the Global North have similar discursive functions: both render the terrorist enemy (the military-terrorist, in the Global South, and the “Islamic” terrorist, in the Global North) as “barbarians who choose to live on the hunted margins of human kind” therefore rejecting the “values that separate us from animals” (Bush and Baker, quoted in Jackson 2005, 73). If in the counterterrorism discourse, the individual, subversive terrorist is represented as “mad or diabolical” (Jackson 2005, 62), in the counter-memorial resistance, the military-terrorist becomes either a depraved sadist who rejoices in torture or a mindless, mediocre human who is charmed by its demoniac appeal.

Finally, both Global North counterterrorism and the Global South counter-memorial discourses invite one mode of response in common: cure. Terror is, in these two narratives, treated as pathological, a form of cancer that needs to be excised. In the global war on terror, this cancer is pre-emptively treated through surgical military action; in the remembrance of state terror, the cancer – already long spread through the social body – must be excised through a serious process of transitional justice.

In a sense, the similarities between the tropes of the Global North and the Global South depictions of terror are deeply frustrating. When, in Brazil, the term “terrorism” is reclaimed through the reclaiming of “memories of trauma”, we see the reproduction of the very discursive practices “resistance” is expected to prevent: the depoliticisation that comes with the discursive creation of an antagonist enemy. This is not to say that state terror and remembrance are one and the same thing, they are intrinsically different. It is, nonetheless, to suggest that, by structuring itself around the themes of bestialism, pathology and dehumanisation, counter-memory looks frighteningly similar to counterterrorism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Maja Zehfuss, Andreja Zevnik, Silvana Seabra, Emmy Eklundh and Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet who have always inspired me and supported my research, at all levels and by all means. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of this paper, very enlightening feedback and most invaluable comments. I take full responsibility for any remaining mistakes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES Foundation, an agency under the Ministry of Education of Brazil) [grant number 2673-13-4].

Notes on contributors

Henrique Tavares Furtado

Henrique Tavares Furtado is a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester. His current research explores how terror and political violence are remembered, in post-conflict societies, for the sake of national reconciliation. Most specifically, he deals with the Brazilian case (in particular, the Brazilian National Truth Commission, CNV).

Notes

1. See, for instance, two edited volumes: Bell (2006) and Resende and Budryte (2013).

2. In order to avoid the underlying hierarchical tone of Ditrych’s typology, “First World” will be hereafter mentioned as “Global North” and “Third World” will be hereafter mentioned as “Global South”.

3. State terror was witnessed at different levels in the Southern Cone of Latin America. In Argentina, the most gruesome case, the state has officially recognised 8960 forced disappearances (CONADEP 2006), while human right organisations claim a figure of 30,000 (Crenzel 2008, 175). In Chile, the state acknowledge the deaths of 2920 individuals, 2111 victims of the political police (Aylwin 2007) and an estimated figure of 100,000 tortured (Camacho 2008, 96). In Brazil, the National Truth Commission (CNV) has recognised the death and disappearance of 434 individuals, and an estimated number of 20,000 cases of torture (CNV 2014, 350). However, due to the very nature of political repression, none of those figures can actually be taken as exhaustive.

4. Former member of the Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (Revolutionary Movement 8th of October, MR-8).

5. Brasil: Nunca Mais was named after the report of the Argentine Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (National Commission on the Disappearing of Persons, CONADEP). The CONADEP was instituted by the post-Malvinas/Falklands War democratic administration of Raul Afonsín, being coordinated by the famous writer Ernesto Sábato. In 1984, the CONADEP published the Nunca Más (Never Again) report on the Argentina’s phase of state terror. Nunca Más is considered, regionally and globally, as a landmark for transitional justice and the international right to memory and truth.