Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters have shown nostalgia for the dictatorship. Do they even know what they are asking for?

Maria Amélia Teles remembers her encounter with the late Army Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, on December 28, 1972. She had been arrested, alongside with her husband, her pregnant sister, and a few other militants from the Communist Party of Brazil. While watching the political police beat her husband and a friend, Ms. Teles turned to the man who was orchestrating the whole ordeal. “He slapped me with the back of his hand, shouting: ‘Fuck off, you communist,’ and ordered the three of us to be taken to a torture chamber,” she remembers.

Ms. Teles watched her friend tortured to death, but that wasn’t even the worst part of her nearly two-month period under Ustra’s custody. One day, she was attached to the infamous “Dragon’s Chair,” a sort of electric chair which the torturers used to jolt shocks into a prisoner’s genitals, anus, chest, mouth, and ears. She was naked and bleeding when Col. Ustra brought her young children, four and five years old, to the torture room. “My husband suffered from tuberculosis – after a torture session, he turned green. My daughter asked me why her father was green, and I was blue. I couldn’t even hold them in my arms, as I was tied down. That I won’t forget.”

In 2008, Col. Ustra became the first former military man officially recognized by the Brazilian justice system as a “torturer,” after a lawsuit by Ms. Teles and her family. During 2013 hearings of the National Truth Committee that investigated crimes committed by agents of the state throughout the military regime, Col. Ustra said that he followed orders and was fighting for democracy against terrorism. He died in October 2015, without ever paying for his atrocious crimes. For Jair Bolsonaro, the frontrunner in...