What Makes a State Apology Authoritative? Lessons from Post-Authoritarian Brazil

Abstract

On 5 December 1995, one of Brazil’s leading daily newspapers, the Folha de S. Paulo reported, in an inconspicuous six-line paragraph in the bottom left corner of its front cover, a declaration from the Brazilian President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The detailed coverage of this event only appeared on page 12: ‘In a closed ceremony in his Cabinet, without any speeches, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso yesterday sanctioned the law which recognises the death of 136 disappeared persons.’2 The word ‘apology’ is not even used. Almost covertly, the Brazilian government issued a law by which the state, for the first time, acknowledged the assassination of political opponents by the military regime that had ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. This timid gesture may have been purely for the record, but nonetheless the Brazilian state had formally ‘apologised’. The so-called Law of the Disappeared constituted democratic Brazil’s first step in addressing past human rights crimes after a decade of silence.