In 2011, researcher Vladimir Sacchetta found a remarkable photograph while working in São Paulo’s public archives. Taken in November 1970, it was of Brazil’s current President, Dilma Rousseff. It showed a 22-year-old Dilma, as she is known in Brazil, in front of a military court, being interrogated about her role in the armed struggle against Brazil’s military dictatorship as a member of the left-wing guerrilla group, var Palmares. Dilma’s hair is cropped; her posture is relaxed, but her expression is one of defiance, anger, with a hint of boredom, unbowed after weeks of torture and over a year in prison. Filling out the sense of the image are the figures in the background: two unidentified military officials, shrinking back in their chairs, their hands shielding their faces against the flash of the camera bulb. ‘Do you know why I like the photo?’ Dilma later said. ‘Because it is the truth. It is what happened.’ Perhaps less to the President’s liking was the use made of an image that seemed to portray a different kind of truth: a mug-shot taken on her arrest, after she had been picked up by the military police on charges of subversion and terrorism. Wearing a checked shirt and thick, black-rimmed glasses, Dilma stares intransigently back at the camera, holding her charge number, 3023. The photo was widely circulated by the opposition in the run-up to the 2010 presidential election, in a smear campaign that failed to gain real traction.

Four decades after the most violent phase of the dictatorship, Brazil is still far from pinning down its significance. One by one neighbouring countries—Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, even Paraguay—have challenged amnesty laws, held truth commissions and brought forward criminal prosecutions, while Brazil hangs on to its 100 per cent record: not a single former military officer has been convicted in a criminal case, despite the thousands of instances of torture, killing and disappearance that occurred between 1964 and 1985. If anything, the reverse has happened, with government lawyers sent to defend the broadest possible interpretation of the 1979 Amnesty Law in the Supreme Court, and the Ministry of Defence representing Brazil when it was taken before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for the disappearance of over 60 leftist guerrillas in the early 1970s. What makes Brazil’s position so exceptional is that the Partido dos Trabalhadores (pt)—a party which was formed in opposition to the dictatorship and many of whose members were imprisoned and tortured during the military era—has been in power for a decade; its militants are now in their 60s and are powerful figures. In contrast, their former tormentors—the known torturers—are mostly obscure, retired army functionaries, well into old age.

This May signalled a potential turning point, when President Dilma, now herself in her mid-60s, inaugurated the country’s first National Truth Commission. In a moving ceremony in Brasilia’s Palácio do Planalto attended by former presidents José Sarney, Fernando Collor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, bald from his recent treatment for throat cancer, Dilma choked back tears as she spoke of victims’ families: ‘Above all, those who lost friends and relatives and continue to suffer as if they die each day, over and over again, deserve the factual truth.’ Even to get to this stage had involved overcoming entrenched opposition from the military, who managed to extract concessions toning down aspects of the bill that installed the Commission. Seven commissioners selected by Dilma—lawyers (including Rosa Maria Cardoso da Costa, who represented Dilma in the dictatorship years), prosecutors and scholars, led initially by Judge Gilson Dipp—have now spent six months of the two years they have been allotted, beginning their task of hearing testimony from the tortured and the torturers, and revisiting the 150-plus cases of disappearance and the more than 300 deaths that occurred under the dictatorship. As the commissioners sift through the evidence, could this finally be the moment of reckoning?

In 1964, the Brazilian military became the region’s Cold War pioneers when they ousted the democratically elected President João Goulart. Chile would only follow suit in 1973, with Argentina’s dirty war kicking off three years later. In what was the original ‘war on terror’, they played on the fears of a Communist takeover—that Brazil, given its size and population, would, as Nixon put it, become not so much another Cuba as another China. The strategy they developed, including close associations with the us security services, counter-insurgency methods and even specific torture techniques, became a template for the South American military regimes that came into power in the 1970s. By the time it was given institutional shape in 1975 through the region’s violent intelligence consortium, Operation Condor, the Brazilian generals were already searching for a way out.

Journalist and historian Elio Gaspari, whose four-volume history of the dictatorship years remains a key source,footnote¹ has divided the Brazilian regime by era: from 1964 to 1967, President Castelo Branco presided over a ‘temporary dictatorship’—an interim arrangement aimed at bracing Brazil against the perceived Communist threat; from 1967 to 1968, Marshal Costa e Silva flirted with a kind of ‘constitutional dictatorship’, before Brazil descended into what Gaspari calls the ‘blatant dictatorship’ of 1968–74 under General Garrastazu Médici, who took office in 1969. From 1974, President Geisel led the regime on a long, methodical journey out of the morass. Although the timescale the Commission has been given is long—bookended by two constitutions, 1946 and 1988, in theory it covers over four decades—the main focus has been Gaspari’s ‘blatant dictatorship’ years, when torture became routine and people started to disappear in numbers.

After the early years of authoritarian rule, the regime’s bluff was called during the course of 1968. In São Paulo, a wave of coordinated strikes threatened to paralyse Brazil’s industrial hub; at the same time a series of bomb blasts and bank heists announced the emergence of an armed insurgency. In Rio de Janeiro, a mass public protest at the killing of a student, known as the Passeata dos 100 mil (the march of the 100,000; in fact, probably closer to 50,000), filled the streets. Among the demonstrators marching through the square known as Cinelândia were the future stars of Música Popular Brasileira, Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, all in their 20s, along with poet and composer Vinicius de Moraes and modernist writer Clarice Lispector. The protesters openly defied the regime, holding banners aloft with ‘Abaixo a Ditadura. O Povo no poder’—‘Down with the dictatorship. Power to the people’.

In December, the regime responded with a draconian decree—the Ato Institucional 5 (ai-5). President Costa e Silva closed down Congress and state parliaments indefinitely, banned protests and tightened censorship over the press, music, theatre and literature. Crucial to what would unfold over the next five years, the decree also suspended the right to habeas corpus ‘in cases of political crimes, those against national security, economic and social order’—a category so broad as to cover almost any form of dissent. The ai-5 was a ‘coup within a coup’; divisions within the military were papered over as the hardliners captured the spirit of the 1964 ‘revolution’. In the purge that followed left-leaning politicians, civil-service functionaries, union leaders and university lecturers were summarily dismissed. Thousands fled into exile—many to Chile, Mexico, France and the uk.