How Brazil’s Amnesty Legacy Shaped Democratic Memory (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The amnesty law was a law that we have in 79 in Brazil that basically forgave all the torturers and killers and people that did very despicable things to civilians in Brazil. If we have things like that, and if we make people believe that attempting against democracy or attempting against human rights is something that's okay, then we have a memory problem. And we had that in Brazil for decades, for centuries, I would say. The history, our history is based on many beautiful things, but also it's based on like Brazil was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery. So we live with many contradictions in that country. So I really believe that Bolsonaro wouldn't have been elected if it wasn't because of the amnesty law. As right now, we are finally getting even with our memory when we sent Bolsonaro to jail and we sent military. For the first time in Brazil, we sent people that, military people that attempted against democracy to jail. So I truly believe that the new generations of Brazilians are going to grow up with a different sense of understanding of our history and of our memory.