Why Brazil has never punished its dictators

A stone’s throw away from São Paulo’s famous Luz train station is the Resistance Memorial, a must-see for anyone visiting Brazil’s largest city. The museum is set up inside a historic building which, between 1940 and 1983, served as headquarters for the São Paulo State Department of Political and Social Order (Deops-SP), a particularly violent political police force that achieved infamy during Brazil’s military dictatorship — being a notorious torture center for the regime’s opponents.

One of the Memorial’s permanent exhibitions consists of prison cells, preserved and restored from the dictatorship’s heyday, annotated with informative panels. Former political prisoners who visit the museum are encouraged to leave written messages on the cells’ walls.

“They kidnapped my baby,” reads one, “Murderous dictatorship,” reads another. Many scrawls are accompanied with names and dates, in an attempt to try and piece together the brutal history of the most violent face of Brazil’s military rule.

The last message, written in blue marker pen, reads: “I was here in 1973 and I came back in May 2023.” The author is Nilmário Miranda, who spent three years as a political prisoner in the Deops-SP building. During his incarceration, he was subjected to numerous torture sessions that left him deaf in one ear. This year, he was appointed as special advisor to the Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances and the Amnesty Commission, both operating under the Human Rights Ministry.

The commissions were reactivated in 2023 after being scrapped during the previous government of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former military man who holds much nostalgia for the dictatorship period and frequently glorifies the memory of known military torturers.

Since their resumption, the commissions began to review reparations and acknowledgments to people harmed by the State and who had their requests denied in recent years.

This month, the federal government’s press department published a retraction of a social media post made in 2021, during the Bolsonaro administration, which lionized the late Sebastião Curió Rodrigues de Moura — a notorious military lieutenant who ordered the torture and execution...