Latin America’s Far-Right Populists Are Rewriting The History Of Military Dictatorships

-OpEd-

SAO PAULO — I bring you news from the digital front. Those who weren’t paying attention may not have noticed, but in the last couple of weeks the legacy of Latin American dictatorships has been planted once and for all as the banner of the populist far right. The issue has become transnational.

On March 24, National Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, Argentine President Javier Milei decided to make an unprecedented provocation, publishing an official video with a defense of the military and heavy accusations against those who fought against the dictatorship. The video renames the date the National Day for Truth and “Complete” Justice.

First, some context: Milei has no connection to the dictatorship. He is an ultra-liberal libertarian, and governs in the style of the new digital populists: on the basis of A/B tests. Like former U.S. President Donald Trump, in a calculated way, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, out of personal foolishness, Milei knows that causing debate, attacking and being attacked is the No. 1 strategy for times mediated by the algorithms of the few platforms that actually mediate public affairs.

He named Victoria Villarruel as his vice-president — the daughter of a military man involved in the harsh repression of the dictatorship — a clear affront to common sense in a country where the military who tortured and killed were punished. In Argentina, more than 1,100 people have been convicted of crimes against humanity.

Now he’s betting on rewriting the history of the dictatorship because it gets clicks.

Today more than ever, never again

The video is edited in the same propaganda manner used by Brasil Paralelo, a Brazilian production company that produces historically revisionist and conservatively biased propaganda documentaries, with dramatic music to cause commotion.

It features the testimony of the daughter of a military officer who was killed in front of her by an armed left-wing group — which she calls a “terrorist” group. Her sister, who was 3 years old at the time, was also killed. This shocking story is used to introduce a familiar argument: that the military were actually in the middle of a war, that there were “casualties on both sides,” that only half the story has been told and that the guerrilla victims had no access to justice.

It’s what we call “two-sidedness” — the equating of different versions to say that they have the same weight (like giving the same space to those who argue that vaccines against COVID-19 don’t work, for example). One of the striking phrases in the video, heard from the mouth of a former left-wing militant, is: “This is war, both sides have become monsters.”

“Being left-wing is really about wanting a better Brazil.”

For the sake of fairness, I would point out that the military crimes, both in Argentina and in Brazil, were carried out by the state, financed by the population’s taxes, with an apparatus a zillion times superior to that of left-wing guerrillas, and that those accused of terrorism were punished at the time, both by imprisonment and by much more inhumane means.

In response, the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo called for demonstrations on the same day, under the slogan “Today more than ever, never again,” attracting tens of thousands to Buenos Aires.

Starting from Bolsonaro, now we are here

Causing an uproar was exactly what Milei wanted. But he also went a step further, demonstrating that defending the dictatorship is no longer a taboo subject, that it’s also popular among young people, that it stirs hearts and can even unite the right on the continent.

Despite Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva‘s determination not to “dwell on the past,” it seems that the Argentine right is actually learning from Bolsonaro.

Here, the Military Club decided to hold a lunch to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the coup — which took place on April 1, 1964 — with speeches by Gen. Maynard Santa Rosa praising the military that destroyed our democracy in those days — a delirious preview of which was published on the Military Club’s website.

The same website, in fact, published a note entitled “Order of the night,” signed by reserve Col. José Gobbo Ferreira, stating that “the counter-revolution of 1964 was so important for the history of our country that it is out of the question to let its anniversary pass unnoticed.”

The text, which is extremely popular in military WhatsApp groups, reaffirms what many Bolsonaro supporters think: “the people who command the Brazilian Army today do not own the Force,” it says, adding that “the Force is currently undergoing a transition towards Bolivarianism.”

Bolivarianism, dear readers, is just another incarnation of the ghost of communism.

A revolution is necessary

There was more. Just last week, the president of the Superior Military Court (STM), Air Brigadier Lt. Francisco Joseli Parente Camelo, achieved a rare feat by reaching the Trending Topics of Musk’s X/Twitter all because of a phrase he said during an interview with Bandnews TV: “This idea of communism doesn’t exist in Brazil, communism is over.”

Joseli later explained that the Berlin Wall fell and that Lula is not a communist. “Being left-wing is really about wanting a better Brazil, one that shows more solidarity, that is closer, that thinks of the poorest,” he said.

The edited video was widely shared on Bolsonaro’s supporters networks and attracted a huge number of virulent comments accusing the STM of being left-wing, communist, melancia — like a watermelon (green outside, red inside).

Rewriting the history of dictatorships is just one more cherry on this multi-layered cake.

The statements caused such a scandal among Bolsonaro supporters, that the fact that Joseli made a point of calling the 1964 coup a “revolution” and vehemently defending its legacy went unnoticed.

“So that’s the term, revolution, and it was something necessary. For me it was necessary at that time because indiscipline was beginning to infiltrate our barracks, and also communism. It was a different time, we had a bipolar system, so at that moment I see 1964 as a revolution, and a necessary one.”

If our military leaders continue to cling to the ghost of communism past, it’s clear that the imagined ghost of communism present will continue to be incensed by the right-wing cultural industry.

Dictatorship is the icing on the cake

It is notorious that one of the characteristics of populist movements and their so-called culture wars is precisely to rewrite history, taking up and reinforcing old-fashioned, religious, patriarchal values, and anything else that serves the ideological vision that “it was better before.” In this way, they revive the glory of the Crusades, the benefits of colonization and even relativize the evils of slavery. Rewriting the history of dictatorships is just one more cherry on this multi-layered cake.

So I bring the reader some bad news from the digital front. The culture war is still raging, even though the country is now experiencing democratic normality, and these spaces are less visible than they were two years ago.

And in the list of “polarizing” topics such as abortion and drugs, the legacy of dictatorships is also coming to the forefront. For the far right, disputing the past is increasingly an excellent strategy to guarantee its electoral future.