ABSTRACT
This conversation took place in October 2009 in São Paulo during an international conference to consider a truth commission for Brazil. Several current and former government ministers spoke eloquently in favor of the idea. Brazil is not a country that has entirely buried its past: there have been several official commissions of inquiry since the end of the dictatorship in 1985, with substantial volumes published about the several hundred disappeared or killed. Significant reparations have been paid to family members, and to those who suffered economic loss due to the dictatorship. In 2009, the 1979 amnesty law was being challenged in the Supreme Court, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights was soon to decide a key case on the right to the truth in Brazil. Perhaps most interestingly, the government had just begun a prominent media campaign to highlight cases of those disappeared thirty-five years earlier, asking, “Do you know where these people are?”
