This essay is featured in our Summer 2026 issue. Subscribe to get a copy.

On January 5, 2025, then president Joe Biden addressed reporters and reaffirmed his commitment to a peaceful transfer of power amid the wait for election results, nearly four years to the day after the infamous attempted coup of January 6. “I think what [Trump] did was a genuine threat to democracy,” Biden said, “and I’m hopeful that we’re beyond it.” We were not. Days later, in his inaugural address, Trump made false claims of election fraud, just as he had done in 2020.

The United States is several years into a disastrous surge in right-wing authoritarianism. Just days ago, ICE murdered a father in front of his three-year-old daughter in Maine and left his posthumously handcuffed body in the street for five hours. The latest mass deportation surge only adds another layer to the structural reality of constant, unaccountable police violence: according to Campaign Zero, there were only six calendar days in the entirety of 2025 in which law enforcement did not kill someone.

One looks abroad with equal parts curiosity and envy at other countries that have managed to fend off their own right-wing insurgencies, including South Korea, where the former president narrowly escaped a death sentence for his role in instigating an attempted coup thwarted only by a brave mass protest, and Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s recent electoral defeat cemented a setback for the international right-wing coalition that had rallied to his defense. These are worth learning from for a host of reasons, perhaps chief among which is that a network of actors are working in concert across these different national boundaries to support right-wing governments by fomenting xenophobic panic and violence. But among the examples from abroad that thinkers here should pay attention to, one stands out in particular: Brazil.

There are plenty of parallels between our situation and that of our neighbors to the south. Former President Jair Bolsonaro’s antipathy toward communists, open effort to amass personal wealth, and tendency to flaunt norms of “political correctness” in public speech helped earn him a description as “the Trump of the tropics.” More jarringly, the January 8, 2023, riots that stormed Brazil’s Supreme Court and Congress in a failed attempt to incite a military coup took place almost exactly two years after the January 6 attempt to prevent the transition of power in the White House. But what ought to inspire attention to the Brazilian case are not the similarities to events here but the differences. Most centrally, Bolsonaro has begun a twenty-seven-year prison sentence for his role in January 8, while the instigator of January 6 sits in the Oval Office.  

Why did Brazil’s democratic institutions hold firm while those in the United States so quickly wilted? One explanation hinges on particular institutional actors. Perhaps Merrick Garland, the former U.S. attorney general, singularly altered the course of history by slow-walking the prosecution against Trump and other conspirators. Another takes a wider angle, alleging that President Biden and the wider Democratic Party’s reluctance to go on offense against the Republicans opened the door for Trump’s later return. On this view, the public memory of January 6 ought to have served not merely as proof of the antidemocratic aims of the right but as a point of orientation for both a legal and a propaganda battle around the legitimacy of the Republican Party and its standard-bearers. What must change, then, is not the discrete decisions of this or that institutional actor but the entire orientation of a political party from “folders” to “fighters.”

In a new book, Disputed Pasts: Forgetting and Remembering the Dictatorship in Brazil, political scientists Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako test out this view in the Brazilian context. Bolsonaro’s conviction, they argue, owes much to the decades-long contest over how—or whether—to remember Brazil’s violent military dictatorship. As the authors point out, public memory not only bolstered the country’s “long return to democracy”; it also powered Bolsonaro’s attempt to halt it. In the United States, too, fights over narratives of the past—the right way, for example, to remember slavery and the genocide of indigenous people—have been waged by both the left and right. Should we in the United States try a Brazilian strategy?

Comparing Brazil with any of its American sister states is a fraught exercise, in part because Brazil’s political history is, in important respects, exceptional. Most obviously, the country has its own language, in contrast to the Spanish, English, and French dialects that predominate in much of the rest of the Americas. In the early nineteenth century, Brazil also stood in the Americas as the only monarchy, the only colony to become home and host to its metropole, and the very last country to abolish slavery. But Buarque and Szwako nevertheless insist that the story of Brazil’s 1964 coup and resultant military dictatorship fit right into a deeply American story of right-wing seizures of power and state repression. And ultimately, it is that coup and its aftermath that holds the key to understanding why January 8 played out so differently than January 6.

In 1961 the country elected left populist president João Goulart. Despite being outside of the fold of Brazilian communism (as were many in his era’s version of the Brazilian Labour Party), he was deposed by military coup in 1964 with the active support of the United States. A military dictatorship followed, marked by fierce anticommunism enforced with secret police, torture centers, and disappearances. If the big rocks of this story sound familiar, you’re hearing the tune Buarque and Szwako are singing: one could squarely sit the fate of Brazil’s Goulart next to, say, that of Chile’s Allende. This is not by mere happenstance. In the second half of the twentieth century, governments throughout the Americas pursued a coordinated strategy of state terrorism against the left, from “Operation Condor,” the explicit formal cooperation of multiple South American states’ secret police, to targeted support for new coups and longstanding dictatorships by the United States.

In Brazil, disappearances forced a political contest over public memory. In the mid ’70s, the peak of the dictatorship’s state violence, families of the disappeared took action by lobbying elected officials in the one legal opposition party to force congressional inquiry into the fates of their missing relatives. A combination of threats and parliamentary maneuvers put down this little insurrection. At the time, the military dictatorship predictably preferred to forget the disappeared leftists entirely, keeping records of the dead masked under code names and burying their victims in paupers’ graves. And perhaps most importantly, in 1979 it passed a law granting amnesty to itself and the military for political crimes committed from then back to 1961.

By the late ’70s and early 1980s, cracks in the regime’s power were beginning to show. Prominent opposition leaders who openly challenged the dictatorship won elections in the economically and culturally important states, including Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps most famously, organized metalworkers defied the ban on strikes and state repression in numbers stretching to the hundreds of thousands, led by a host of organizers including one Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—the country’s current president.

In 1985, the dictatorship gave way to civilian control and popular elections. The families’ movement and its allies took opportunity of the newly liberalized environment to investigate and disseminate evidence of the dictatorship’s crimes, finding mass graves and exposing collaborators who had aided the previous regime. In the 1990s and 2000s, as global human rights advocacy took on what the authors call an “anti-impunity inflexion” in response to the atrocities of the mid to late century, the movement pushed even further, going beyond the earlier search for answers toward larger demands for punishment and damages. In Brazil, this became known as the “memory, truth, and justice movement,” which by the 2000s was openly calling for criminal penalties for military personnel who were found guilty in the proliferating investigations. That is: truth without reconciliation.

Disputed Pasts rejects a simple casting of the role of memory in which the left demands remembering the abuses and crimes of the past while the right downplays or forgets them. One can certainly see parallels here in the U.S. case. The present administration has attempted to challenge how museums and national parks portray the many darker moments of U.S. history. On Monday, Marco Rubio, U.S. secretary of state and acting national security advisor, penned an op-ed advocating the dismantling of the International Criminal Court and openly calling for state officials to have impunity with respect to international law—convenient timing, as the military’s random drone killing campaign that began in the Caribbean has not only continued but expanded to the Pacific. Laid next to the attempt to sanitize the legacy of the recently deceased senator Lindsay Graham, a clear picture emerges: if the right promises impunity even in death, the left’s role must be to rebel against memory distortions of all kinds—including and especially the posthumous reputational amnesty granted to friends of authoritarian regimes.

That lesson is perhaps put best by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, a writer and son of a Brazilian congressman who was tortured to death by secret police during the regime. In a 2015 interview quoted from in Disputed Pasts, Paiva argued that “not having a Nuremberg trial in Brazil in the 1980s contaminated the process of democratization and our current democracy.” By the same logic, to reverse the trajectory toward authoritarianism in the United States, we must make every effort to count, tally, and record the crimes of the current administration. After all, our day will soon come, as it did for the Brazilian left and the many recovering from the sting of state repression in the aftermath of Operation Condor and its many cousins. And on that day: no amnesty.

Disputed Paths complicates the narrative about memory in both directions. For the left in Brazil, the authors note, forgetting was important, too. Forgetting the past also meant forgetting the divisions that emerged within left organizations themselves and in the coalitional struggle to beat back the dictatorship and its cultural vestiges: splits between more revolutionary and more reformist sections of the opposition, or the inevitable party schisms that occurred over the decades. Electorally speaking, the anti-dictatorship block that had been effectively forced into coalition under one opposition party became large and fractious: twenty candidates ran for President in 1989, allowing Fernando Collor, a young candidate with ties to the previous military dictatorship’s political party, to assume the presidency (he resigned two years later over corruption charges). Moreover, one of the most pitched battles between the dictatorship and its pro-democratic foes was over blanket amnesty for all political prisoners who had not been simply murdered outright—that is, for the state to forget the charges it had brought against them and refrain from investigation or reprisal if they returned to public life in Brazil.

And for the right, remembering the past dredged up by the left could mean something other than exposing its adherents to risky litigation. As right-wing politicians bristled under the victories of figures like Lula, the specter of past repression allowed them to hark back to a time in which they were ascendant. The social memory of the dictatorship, first spread by the activists in the families’ movement and by arms of the state they had won to their cause, gave the right opportunities both to project the strength that drew in would-be supporters while also vice signaling the potential moral qualms out of relevance. Bolsonaro in particular was adept at this, openly celebrating as a “hero of Brazil” Major Sebastião Curió, one of the known officials responsible for the early 1970s Araguaia massacre of leftists, and a man who discussed his support for torture publicly and ridiculed the movement aiming to locate the bodies of dead loved ones. It is this very adeptness that helped Bolsonaro stitch together the coalition of the military, economic elites, and evangelical leaders that carried him to the presidency in 2018. As the authors put it, “The political rise of Bolsonaro and bolsonarismo” was “in part, a response to the very politics of remembering.”

In the midst of the counterattack, what could the memory, truth, and justice movement manage to accomplish? Despite its newfound hurdles, it indeed broke new ground: in December 2009, thirty years after the crimes began, it finally won the establishment of a National Truth Commission to devote state resources to uncovering the dictatorship’s atrocities. This was followed by a wave of hundreds of local truth commissions that forced activists into an uneasy working relationship with the state. Two years later, the country elected as its president Dilma Rousseff, a former socialist militant who had been tortured under the dictatorship (and, unsurprisingly, a vocal supporter of aspects of the memory, truth, and justice movement).

But it ran into a roadblock on the question of reconciliation. The title “National Truth Commission” notably omitted references to reconciliation, reparations, or justice. In 2008, the Brazilian Bar Association took a case before the country’s Supreme Court to challenge the political immunity the military had been granted by the 1979 Amnesty law. Despite the ground won by the memory aspect of the movement to make clear the gravity of the dictatorship’s crimes, the Court ruled in favor of upholding the military’s immunity: truth with reconciliation won the day. Eight years later, Rousseff was impeached and removed from office, and three years after that, Bolsonaro rode the wave of the pro-military countermovement into the same office.   

Memory politics is rocky political terrain. But to conclude from this fact that either the Brazilian left or its U.S. counterparts should avoid it altogether because of the resistance it breeds is too hasty. Buarque and Szwako make a masterful case that the push to remind Brazilians about the harshness of the dictatorship helped foment the backlash that Bolsonaro rode to the top of Brazilian politics. But backlash is inevitable when any kind of social progress is made. And the particular tactics used by prodemocracy forces in one generation will shape what practical options are available for the right wing to make good on its desire for revenge in the next one. 

From there, the question is not about the shape of authoritarian resurgence but the robustness of the institutions and political culture that rise up to meet it. And as the authors point out, the institutionalization of human rights became “one of the main threads of continuity across post-1988 governments” in part because of the march of the memory, truth, and justice movement through the institutions of the Brazilian state and across the myriad parties and ideological tendencies that effectively contend for power within it. The memory, truth, and justice movement made the headway on the memory and truth aspects of their political vision—that is, to their challenge over political culture. While the countermovement contested them bitterly, they were able to establish the period of dictatorship as a shameful era of Brazilian history that the state and civil society needed to prevent from recurring at all costs. It is hard to imagine a critical mass of the functionaries of that state being committed to enforcing the letter of the law against would-be usurpers—like Bolsonaro—without the moral consensus around the stakes of flouting it. And the understanding of those stakes, across the political spectrum, was clearly informed by the memory of the military dictatorship’s abuses—and thus by tireless work of movements that kept their memory alive. Anyone who doubts this need only compare the results of January 6 in the United States—where, I believe, it is also a violation of the letter of the law to try to overthrow the government—to those of January 8 in Brazil.

Disputed Pasts’s account of the misuses of remembering and forgetting is worth heeding. But the warning we should take from their situation is the one about the dangers of being stopped short on the road toward memory, truth, and justice—not a lesson about the dangers of traveling that road at all. We will need a fierce movement for truth to document state crimes, and we will need an equally fierce movement for justice to prevent those inevitably nostalgic for the days of violence from bringing them back—more efforts like Minnesota prosecutors’ push to obtain evidence the federal government was withholding about its murders of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, a determination that likely owes its force to the wealth of organizing that supported Minnesota’s historic resistance to its federal invasion.

That is to say that the simple lesson offered by Paiva still holds. Our time will come, and when it does: no amnesty.

Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.