Canning House and Instituto Cervantes are co-presenting this series of talks that looks at military dictatorships in 20th Century Latin America and their legacies to present day. Each talk will focus on a different country.
2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the military coup in Brazil, a coup that established a 21-year dictatorship. The Brazilian dictatorship of 1964-85 was influential in South America, becoming consolidated relatively early in the cycle of authoritarianism in the region, and assisting and cooperating with other military regimes in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The 50th anniversary of the coup saw the publication of a number of books on the dictatorship, as well as the release of the report of the National Truth Commission. This work portrayed the legacies of the dictatorship in very different ways. This presentation compares and contrasts the views of the dictatorship expressed in these works and in popular culture, pointing to the implications of the various views for today’s Brazil. It covers issues such as the role of the United States in the coup and dictatorship, the statist legacy of the authoritarian regime, and the link between the dictatorship and contemporary police violence.
With Anthony W. Pereira - Professor and Director of the Brazil Institute at King’s College London. He obtained his B.A. from Sussex University in 1982 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1986 and 1991 respectively. He has held positions at the New School, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Tulane University, the University of East Anglia and (as a visitor) the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil. His most recent book is Ditadura e Repressão (Paz e Terra, 2010).