Comissão nacional da verdade: um acontecimento entre o passado e o futuro do Brasil

Abstract

The following research approaches the Comissao Nacional da Verdade (CNV), a historical, political and social happening that fulfills the necessary requirements to figure media circuits as a journalistic happening. CNV is a current happening, impregnated with past, carrying expectancy of future, inserted in a constituted problematic field (QUÉRÉ), known as the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil. It existed because Brazil has suffered a civil-military Coup d' État in 1964, this huge event stands out in Brazilian political history for the prints left on lives’ trajectories, individual and collective ones. CNV takes place nearly three decades after the end of the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil and evolves wrapped in a dispute over the “final word" on the historical truth and official memory that the Brazilian Society must have from the dictatorial period. Since its establishment, in 2012, CNV has rummaged the recent and unresolved past of the country; it messed things up and exposed the existent power relationships in the Brazilian political scenario. Brazil was the last among Latin American countries that have gone through dictatorial regimes, to create a truth commission. That says a lot about the process involved in transitional justice in the country. Thus the coverage and the setting of the event Comissao Nacional da Verdade may say journalism's commitment to contribute to the strengthening and consolidation of Brazilian democracy and therefore with a full transitional justice. The main goal of this dissertation is to understand what the meanings produced and silenced by journalistic discourse about the event Comissao Nacional da Verdade and Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, after more than 50 years of the Coup d' État that overthrew President Joao Goulart. In this sense, to study the Comissao Nacional da Verdade and the theoretical perspectives on the event, it was decided to use as theoretical framework the French Discourse Analysis (DA), with emphasis on the concept of silencing (ORLANDI, 2007). This way, it was formed a corpus of texts published in the newspapers: Folha de Sao Paulo, O Estado de Sao Paulo, and O Globo comprising the establishment, the final report, and other periods of greater visibility of the CNV. The events portray a society and it is possible to state that in analyzing the social and journalistic event addressed as Comissao Nacional da Verdade, besides highlighting its significance for the Brazilian democratic process, it was feasible to identify the main directions that were contested, revisited, circulated, highlighted, silenced, and/or erased on the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship in the journalistic discourse of the newspapers studied. Amongst the meanings identified, it is highlighted the dispute over the interpretation of the Amnesty Law of 1979, and whether there was need or not of its review.