Undoing Brazil’s dictatorial past

This chapter examines the post-authoritarian Brazil's complex historical circumstances, and describes episodes of historical retraction in which past wrongs have been dishonoured and attempts made to reverse or mitigate their effects by undoing the dictatorial past. It considers the centrality of counterfactual reasoning underpinning reparation politics' dealings with the past. Important as Brazil's interest in becoming a full member the global community might have been, a domestic shift in the political sphere played a pivotal role in tipping the country towards its overdue reconciliation process and belated engagement with the memory of the dictatorship. The chapter offers critical perspective of undoing, portrayed as a deliberate act of self-improvement that lays bare the intentionality of the process of inventing a new official history by revisiting an unwanted past in order to reshape, review and redraft a society's perspective of regrettable occurrences thus constructing a new vision of the future