Transitional Justice, The Role of the Judiciary and Rupture of Democracy in Brazil in 2016

In comparison to the other countries in Latin America that suffered under civilian-military national security dictatorships in the second half of the 20th century, Brazil presented two peculiarities that had an enormous influence on the characteristics of the democratic regime that began in 1988: its amnesty law was enacted while the authoritarian regime was still in power, and throughout the period of the dictatorship, it promoted a broad and intensive process of judicialization of the political repression. I believe these aspects will influence and interact in a notable way with the new coup d’état process that began in Brazil in 2016. In the first section I analyze the ambiguity of the process of amnesty and re- democratization in Brazil. In the second section, I focus on the role of the judiciary, both in the judicialization of repression during the dictatorship and in the process of amnesty. In the third section, I provide a brief characterization of the institutional rupture that occurred in Brazil in 2016, and in conclusion, I identify the relationships between the processes mentioned