Archive in Brazil’s dictatorship history: an example of the commandment aspect

After reading about the archaeologies of the archives and visiting the New York City Municipal Archives, I realized how important those institutions and places are, but also how the commandment aspect, cited by Derrida’s “Archive Fever”, plays a crucial role.

It made me think about the history and archive infrastructure in my own country, Brazil. As Manoff says “… the archives anchors exploration of national identity and provide the evidence for establishing the meaning of the past.” (“Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines”, p.16) During the years of 1964 and 1985 a dictatorship took place in Brazil. Nowadays, after 27 years of democracy, some social, political and historical aspects are still not clear and well discussed.

This situation is definitely related to the way this moment of history was archived, thus remembered: many files from the dictatorship are still missing nowadays, as government and military institutions didn’t give all of them to the Public Archives, even after a “Truth Commission” (Comissão da Verdade) was established in 2011 to further investigate all human violations that happened during those years. Also, many files related to the Brazilian dictatorship are “missing” (were probably destroyed), leaving “gaps” that helped executioners to remain free after their judgments, because there was not enough proof.

As Derrida points out, the methods in which information is transmitted and communicated determines what becomes knowledge and what is forgotten. Controlling of archival is a political power. Hence, it controls our memory. Is it possible to see this in Brazil, where there’s still people that don’t really acknowledge the existence of a dictatorship that killed thousands of people in the past.

In addition to the archival processing in Brazil, some street names still keep executioner names, whereas many people who were killed never had their bodies found and remain “disappeared”. As a reaction to that, some NGOs and social organizations are trying to put new names in new streets of the city with those who were killed.

If the archive is a registration of history from a particular perspective, it is also important to pay attention to other types or “archiving processes” such as the example above. In Brazil, I’m more and more convinced that those “non-official” forms of archives are essential to establish the meaning of the past, hoping that they will enhance the notion of archive as a choice’s procedure and enable a deeper discussion of those choices.