Memory and Method in the Emerging Historiography of Latin America's Authoritarian Era Calse-Se by Caio Tlio; The Condor

Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents by John Dinges; Del estrado a la pantalla: las imgenes del juicio a los ex comandantes en Argentina by Claudia Feld; O ba do guerrilheiro: memrias da lArmada uno Brasil by Ottoni Jnior Fernandes; As iluses armadas: a ditadura envergonhada by Elio Gaspari; As iluses armadas: a ditadura escancarada by ... Review by: Kenneth P. Serbin Latin American Politics and Society, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 185-198 Published by: Distributed by Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4490482 . Accessed: 01/11/2011 13:18
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Critical Debates
Memory and Method in the

EmergingHistoriography LatinAmerica's AuthoritarianEra of

Kenneth P Serbin
Costa, Caio Thlio. Cale-se. Sao Paulo: A Girafa, 2003. Photographs, bibliography, index, 350 pages. Dinges, John. The Condor Years:How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents. New York: New Press, 2004. Bibliography, index, 322 pp.; hardcover $17.95. Feld, Claudia. Del estrado a la pantalla: las imagenes del juicio a los ex comandantes en Argentina. Madrid:Siglo Veintiuno de Espahia.Memorias de la Represi6n series, vol. 2. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2002. Illustrations,bibliography, appendix, 174 pages. Fernandes Junior, Ottoni. O bafi do guerrilbeiro.: mem6rias da luta armada urbana no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2004. Photographs, glossary, 300 pages. Gaspari, Elio. As ilusoes armadas: a ditadura envergonbada. Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002. Photographs, appendix, timeline, bibliography, index, 417 pages. . As ilusoes armadas: a ditadura escancarada. Sdo Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002. Photographs, appendix, timeline, bibliography, index, 507 pages. _. O sacerdote e ofeiticeiro: a ditadura derrotada. Sdo Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003. Photographs, appendix, timeline, bibliography, index, 538 pages. . sacerdote e o feiticeiro: a ditadura encurralada. Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004. Photographs, appendix, timeline, bibliography, index, 525 pages. Huggins, Martha, Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip G. Zimbardo. Violence Workers: Police Torturersand Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2002. Photographs, bibliography, index, 293 pages; hardcover $55, paperback $21.95. Jelin, Elizabeth. Los trabajos de la memoria. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de Espafia. Memorias de la Represi6n series, vol. 1. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2002. Map, bibliography, 156 pages; hardcover $10.95.

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How LatinAmerica, beginning with Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship in in

Paraguay in 1954 and ending with Augusto Pinochet's exit from power in Chile in 1990?How should historians write about this period? Memory and historical events are interlocking yet distinct phenomena. Perceptions of the past shift constantly, but not the past itself. The job of the historian is to plumb the past ever more effectively in order to inform memory accurately. This process is ongoing and imperfect; but it is a crucial element in the construction of social memory because it helps to correct misperceptions and to build new layers of understanding. This essay is a call to action for historians. I am concerned that the recent history of authoritarianism in Latin America, and in Brazil specifically, will be left largely unexplored by members of our profession and therefore left unquestioned, or at best explored in too narrow a manner. Study of the Latin American authoritarian period has been almost exclusively the domain of social scientists, particularly political scientists. (Concern about lack of historian involvement is also expressed in Stern 2001). But the passage of time has clearly made it "history."Historians Thomas Skidmore (1967) and Robert Levine (1970) wrote their initial books about the era of Getulio Vargas in Brazil less than two decades after his death. Sixteen years have passed since Pinochet's departure, two decades since the end of the Brazilian military regime, three decades from the height of the repression in Brazil and Argentina, and four decades from the Brazilian coup of 1964, which inaugurated bureaucratic authoritarianism in South America. In recent years, many scholars from the social sciences and anthropology have demonstrated renewed interest in the period; they are beating historians to the punch.

are we to remember the era of authoritarianism that took hold

THE CULTIVATION MEMORY OF

Trends in history and social science suggest that traditional historical methodologies will receive little attention in the process of understanding the period. Instead of the old paradigms of dependency and Cold War polarization (Fagen 1995), gender studies, race and ethnicity, and the "new cultural history" have become the new canon of the historical profession, and will undoubtedly have a profound influence on the way Latin American authoritarianism is interpreted (see Stern 2001). The most influential and perhaps most broadly appealing approach among social scientists is the study of social memory. It is significant that whereas historians of other regions have thoroughly studied their subjects before focusing on the question of memory, in the case of Latin America memory has come first. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC)recently conducted an excellent program to train a new generation of Latin American (and also some North American) scholars in the

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methodologies of investigating social memory. Historians, however, have been largely absent from the debate that has emerged on this phenomenon. The SSRC project was almost exclusively concerned with memory. Papers delivered at recent congresses of the Latin American Studies Association reflect a similar trend. The practitioners of the memory approach take the past as a given. One of the most prominent examples of this intentionally nonhistorical approach describes its methodology in the following way: It is not an interpretation what happened in the past, nor the colof lection of elements(documents,testimonies,"data") mighthelp that in the societal process of constructinghistoricalmemories. Rather than renderinga narrativeof the past, we analyze the process of societal remembering (and forgetting),looking at the various levels and layersin which this takes place. (Jelinand Kaufman2002, 32) One of the authors of this statement, Elizabeth Jelin, elaborates on the methodology of studying social memory in a theoretical masterpiece, Los trabajos de la memoria, the lead volume in the SSRC"Memorias de la Represion" series. Employing sociology, history, anthropology, political science, cultural criticism, psychology, and psychoanalysis, Jelin aims to open new questions and create new dialogues about the problem of memory in the political and public spaces of postdictatorial Latin American society. She seeks not the "truth,"but a deconstruction of "certainties" (p. 7). "The dictatorial past is . . . a central part of the present. The social and political conflict over how to process the recent repressive past remains, and it often intensifies," she affirms (p. 4). It is not possible, however, to find a collective memory shared by all members of the populace. Memory is pluralistic. "Memory is selective; total memory is impossible" (p. 29). Yet memory is shaped and stimulated by a "culture of memory" that has emerged in the West as discourse about the Holocaust has become globalized (pp. 10-11). (Indeed, Jelin herself sometimes focuses too much on the European milieu at the expense of providing poignant examples from LatinAmerica; see, for example, pp. 75-78.) In this context, political actors-in Latin America, the right, political parties, and "moral entrepreneurs," such as human rights activists (p. 48)-struggle to impose their version of the past. The construction of memory further involves the collection of testimonies about the past. This entails the traumatic examination of the memories of the numerous victims of authoritarian regimes, a process that requires the participation of the interviewer, who helps to reconstruct memory. Jelin also explores the relationship between gender and memory. In Latin America, women tended to symbolize the personal pain and suffering of the repression, whereas men represented the repression itself.

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Jelin recognizes the importance of history for the study of social memory. Her discussion here is more detailed and complex than the aforementioned statement, in which history is seen as unnecessary. "Debate and reflection are the most extensive and intensive in the discipline of history itself, especially among those who recognize that the responsibility of historians is not simply the 'reconstruction' of what 'really' happened, but incorporate complexity into their task" (p. 63). The appreciation of nuance is, indeed, the dominant camp in the discipline today. Extreme positivists, Jelin observes, reject memory as a datum, whereas extreme subjectivists identify memory with history. Citing Dominick LaCapra(2001), Jelin proposes a synthesis in which the "objective reconstruction" of the past takes into account the affective, empathy, and values (p. 67). This methodology is especially important in the recovery of traumatic memories, where "the temporality of social phenomena is not linear or chronological" (p. 68). Jelin concludes that ultimately, history and memory are interrelated in various ways. Memory is a "crucial source" for the historian. It helps to determine the historian's questions about the past. For its part, history allows for the critical probing of memory, and "this helps in the task of narrating and transmitting memories that are critically established and proved" (p. 75). A fine example of an inspection of social memory is the second volume of the SSRCseries, Claudia Feld's lively, liberally illustrated Del estrado a la pantalla. Feld beautifully narrates the trial of Argentina's military dictators; the decision to televise only snippets of the proceedings, and without sound; the loss of the videotapes; and their rediscovery and rebroadcast with sound in 1998 as an irruption of mass social memory. Analyzing social memory, Feld explains the significance of these episodes for Argentina's understanding of its past. But her work could also be classified as history, an example of how the study of Latin America's authoritarian era can employ historical methodology and be interdisciplinary. Practically the only lamentable aspect of the book is the lack of a military perspective on the events described.

HISTORICALAPPROACHES
Studies of social memory and other social science techniques are necessary for constructing a canvass of the period; but they need to be balanced with deeper and more nuanced research into the period itself. The politics of memory is important, but so is understanding the politics and other trends of the actual historical period. Such understanding is a key to clarifying the politics of the present, whether about memory or other aspects of contemporary Latin American life. Historians can make a unique contribution in constructing interpretations of Latin American authoritarianism and its aftermath.

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What are the potential roles of historians in this enterprise? Traditional political, diplomatic, and institutional histories can make an important contribution to understanding the period and how it is perceived in social memory. Despite postmodern skepticism about the usefulness of traditional documentary evidence, documents (and other forms of evidence) can significantly alter perceptions of the period. Political liberalization produced a series of documentary openings and made it safer for people to speak about the past. This historical opening led to new questions and interpretations about the authoritarian period. Many other materials, both official and unofficial, have yet to be unearthed. Ultimately, we need a pluralistic and interdisciplinary set of approaches to writing the narrative of the period, including attempts at new genres of historical writing, particularly the fusion of historical and journalistic narrative. A typology of the Brazilian case, for example, illustrates a wide variety of approaches already extant in the literature and supports the argument for continued pluralism. Written primarily by political scientists, macropolitical interpretations formed the dominant genre of the 1970s and 1980s. These were followed by political case studies, including works on the political transformation of the Catholic Church in the context of authoritarianism. Social scientists once again led the way. Economists and sociologists examined the political economy of the military regime. After the relaxation of press censorship, the amnesty of 1979, and the return of exiles, the Brazilian left produced a plethora of testimonial writings on their experiences in the resistance. This trend has continued into the present. A prime example is Ottoni Fernandes Junior's O bati do guerrilbeiro, which explores the lives of militants of Agdo Libertadora Nacional (ALN, National Liberating Action), the leading group in the armed fight against the Brazilian military regime. Thirty years after his torture and imprisonment, Fernandes Junior writes with the vividness of the historical moment. Significantly, he reveals the tensions and debates within the guerrilla movement concerning the use of violence. From his account, we learn how deep doubts ran over the effectiveness of violence as a political tool. Academic writers have also analyzed the left in detail. Lagging far behind leftist writers in quantity and quality of work is the set of testimonial writings by supporters of the regime. Works by the right are more apologetic; some scholars have worked to correct this imbalance. Biographies of key figures, such as generals, are still seriously lacking. A number of works cover the importance of students in politics throughout the regime. The social history of the regime is a new and wide open field. The most prominent example of historical revision based on new documentary evidence comes with the publication of the first four books in Brazilian journalist Elio Gaspari's five-volume series on the role

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of General Ernesto Geisel and his adviser, General Golbery do Couto e Silva, in the construction of the dictatorship in the 1960s and its gradual dismantling in the second half of the 1970s. Gaspari has made three major contributions. First, although he covers much ground already studied by numerous scholars and journalists, in revisiting incidents and debates through an exhaustive review of the literature and reconsideration of data, he corrects misinterpretations about the period. For example, he deemphasizes the importance of conspiracy in the overthrow of President Jodio Goulart in 1964 by patiently describing how most of the army leadership adhered to the coup only at the last minute. One must be a specialist in the period to understand truly what Gaspari has achieved. He implicitly rejects certain interpretations by simply omitting mention of their authors. The uninitiated reader will not perceive these omissions. Second, using Golbery's private papers, Gaspari forges a highly detailed narrative of elite politics that gives a clearer picture of the generals' project for Brazil, or lack thereof. We learn the opinions and doubts of President Geisel and his closest advisers at practically every major step in the march of the dictatorship. Gaspari, for example, provides the definitive proof of Geisel's acceptance of torture as a necessary evil in the fight against subversion, and he makes it clear that during the Geisel administration the torturers were being brought under control for primarily political purposes. Third, Gaspari taps his experience and contacts from decades of reporting on the upper echelons of the military regime and other sectors of Brazil's ruling classes. His journalistic style produces a clear, often mordant narrative. Few write so critically about the elite. Even though his volumes reflect a certain admiration for Geisel and Golbery-he had frequent contact with the latter-Gaspari ultimately portrays them as men who did not hold democracy as a value. It was Gaspari's access to the elite that brought him to Golbery's papers and to what ultimately is a serious flaw, not so much in the books themselves but in the way Brazilian society and the state treat the country's historical patrimony. Gaspari does not discuss the very private use of these eminently public documents. Did he reserve them for himself? Or was he enjoined by their owners to keep them private until a certain moment or occurrence? Answers to these key questions are not forthcoming. The social position of the journalist-scholar and his possession of the documentation thus become determinant factors in the construction of the social memory of Brazil's dictatorship. The elite writes of the elite for the elite. The overall methodological significance of the Gaspari volumes points to the need to focus on people and personalities in the formation of history. Gaspari gives little currency to so-called historical forces

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or social structures. For him the dictatorship was little more than a grand mess, a Brazilian bagunga, an unsophisticated dictatorship whose infamous doctrine of national security became inoperative because of the political meanness of the military and its allies. Contingency plays a much more central role in his view of history. He has perhaps gone too far in rejecting the structural, and other studies have pointed out the high degree of professionalism and organization in the Brazilian armed forces. Brazil actually served as a model for other Latin American dictatorships. Yet Gaspari's focus on people is an extremely valuable example of how individual decisions play a part in history. John Dinges's Condor Years provides yet another example of how revisiting a set of incidents leads to a clearer understanding of the period and affects contemporary struggles over memory. Dinges was in Chile during the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in September 1973 and wrote a book on the assassination of former Allende foreign minister Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC in 1976 (Dinges and Landau 1980). The Condor Yearsresumes the research on the assassination and brings to light new facets of the period's politics on both the left and the right. Dinges accomplishes his goals through the introduction of new evidence from testimonies from or interviews with more than two hundred people, along with the new documentation released by the U.S. government during the Clinton administration, other declassified government documents, the papers of the Paraguayan intelligence police, and secret correspondence from DINA (Direcci6n de Inteligencia Nacional), the Chilean national intelligence agency. In what he describes as "underground history" (p. 9), Dinges provides a political and operational history of Operation Condor, the eightnation league (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador) formed to allow cross-border pursuit of suspected subversives. Dinges underscores U.S. knowledge of Condor's formation, including the trips by its Chilean founders to meet with the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington. Although Condor accounted for a relatively small number of abuses, Dinges shows how its lawless character contributed to a situation in which the U.S. government simply looked the other way as regimes tortured, murdered, and disappeared thousands of people in the 1970s. Dinges skillfully portrays the primary motive behind Condor with a detailed discussion of the Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria (JCR, Revolutionary Coordinating Junta). Rarely seen in the literature on the period, the JCRrepresented a conglomeration of insurgents from several countries who plotted to destabilize Latin America's authoritarian regimes. Condor quickly defused JCR. Nevertheless, it served as a powerful justification for the Condor countries to continue repressive practices against the nonviolent opposition, to consolidate the power of the

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repressive forces within regimes (especially in Chile), and to extend the very life of those regimes. Another fine journalistic-historical account is Caio Ttilio Costa's Cale-se, which blends memory, historical documentation from the political police archives, and the discovery of new photographic and recorded musical evidence. Costa ably describes the planning and performance of a protest concert held in the wake of the death by torture of University of Sdo Paulo student and ALNmilitant Alexandre Vannucchi Leme. That series of events proved to be a turning point in the history of the Brazilian opposition (see also Serbin 2001, chap. 10).

PITFALLS SCHOLARLY
Violence Workersis another example of writing that combines concerns about both memory and hard fact. It illustrates both the strengths and pitfalls of scholarly reliance on memory. Huggins et al. argue two key points about torturers and killers in Brazil during and after the military regime. First, these men were made, not born. The authors emphasize diverse modes of masculinity as a way of describing the attitudes and behavior of different "violence workers." They focus on three kinds. The personalistic police masculinity reflects the culture of the beat cop who wants to weed criminals out of society. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the institutional functionary, a dispassionate, rational individual whose masculinity extends from the needs of the security apparatus. In the middle stand violence workers of blended masculinities, men who shift their loyalties and justifications depending on circumstances. The authors illustrate how these masculinities "functioned to obscure and legitimize official violence by structuring images of the state's relationship to it." They caution, "these men do not always fit neatly into specific masculinity compartments. Most violence workers are more multidimensional than any analytical categories can communicate" (p. 89). The authors thus take the opposite stance from Gaspari; in their view, the regime was highly structured and not at all a bagunca. The second point they make is therefore surprising. The authors assert that culture, politics, and the past are irrelevant in the making of violence workers. The foimation of small, specialized units governed by a state bureaucracy permits the transformation of ordinary individuals into torturers. Violence Workershas an ahistorical and noncultural feel about it, as if the torturers were floating in a timeless, societyless void, the products of a spontaneous generation of torture. The attempt to discover universal causes of violence is laudable, but suffers for lack of historical specificity. Frei Tito de Alencar Lima, a victim of brutal torture by the infamous police investigator S~rgio Paranhos Fleury, receives scant mention. Equally important cases, such as the

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death of Eduardo Leite, who was tortured for almost three months, and the death of four soldiers in the barracks of Barra Mansa receive no reference whatsoever. One could be shocked to read that Brazil had an "assembly line of repression" (pp. 4, 180) but would not learn the number of victims of that torture, or that Chile and Argentina had far worse experiences. (This is not to say that the writers do not sympathize with the plight of the victims.) In their interviews, the violence workers clearly express values about life, their jobs, torture, and killing, but the authors do not tell us where those values come from. Questions about who set up the system, how, and when receive little attention. Greater cross-national and diachronic contextualization would have been helpful. We are left to conclude, as in the case of psychologist Zimbardo's famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment, in which college students assumed the role of abusive guards, that any human being on any given day can become a torturer, given the right circumstances. In line with Gaspari's careful study of the authoritarian era, the authors correctly help put to rest the notion that violence workers needed the doctrine of national security to justify their actions. In this analysis, torturers and killers merely saw themselves as professionals, not ideologues. Yet the authors are too extreme in their embrace of bureaucratic explanations of violence. Although they recognize the importance of the military regime in bureaucratizing, expanding, and legitimating violence, throughout most of the book authoritarianism is unimportant. In spite of this approach, Violence Workersreveals a wealth of data and a methodological richness that are extremely useful for studying the history of Brazilian and Latin American authoritarianism. The authors' goal is to "reconstruct and write social memory about state violence" (p. 18). They explore a history shunned-perhaps feared-by most scholars: the learning of torture and its effects on its perpetrators. Violence Workersprovides anonymous but powerful life stories of the men who carried out atrocities. The interview sample does not include the most infamous of the torturers, known to the public because of the denunciations by human rights organizations. Instead, the book describes the men who worked every day in the trenches of the repressive system. A particularly poignant passage describes the so-called "hell week" of militarized police trainees, who must undergo complete degradation before they can graduate (pp. 155-56). One of the most gripping stories is that of Jorge, who recounts how, during his childhood, his own family were victims of a police raid in 1979, toward the end of the repressive period of the military regime. The police officers raped his mother and carried off his father to Rio de Janeiro's worst torture facility, the Destacamento de Operagoes de Informagoes and Centro de Operag6es de Defesa Interna (DOI-CODI, Detachment for Intelligence Operations and Internal Defense Operations

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Center). Jorge was taken to the Fundagdo Estadual do Bem-Estar do Menor (FEBEM,State Youth Foundation), a reformatory system known for its regular abuses of children. There Jorge was punished with beatings and torture. At age 16 he ran away to take up life on the streets, only to return to FEBEMin order to gain entrance to the army. Not long thereafter he joined the same DOI-CODI unit where his father had been tortured. He worked his way up through the ranks to the position of hit man. In the study, he becomes the only person to confess openly to committing torture and murder, claiming to have taken part in the deaths of 160 people in nonpolitical cases in just two years. How one gets at this history is a central concern of Violence Workers. The authors depict in great detail an economy of memory "whose valuable currency was secrets" (p. 45). Engaging in this potentially risky enterprise, the scholar must be able to network and negotiate effectively and to avoid manipulation by interviewees. The scholar must also be aware of subjects' construction of memory based on personal, political, and circumstantial factors, including those presented by the interview process itself. In the end, memory becomes a "jointly constructed" project of interviewer and interviewee (p. 62). Excavating atrocities is naturally a difficult, complex, and traumatic experience for Latin American societies. "Forgetting as well as remembering has both personal and political dimensions" (p. 17). Learning about the past can be equally difficult for the individual researcher: "As an archaeologist of memory, the interviewer must become an onlooker witness to accounts that evoke surprise, disbelief, and revulsion and that encourage silences. The researcher must deal with these realities while faithfully and accurately recording all that is said for later retelling" (p. 49). The scholarly danger in all this is whether the interviewees can be believed. How does one know whether a character such as Jorge is just bragging about the number of people he has killed? The authors of Violence Workersoffer no corroborating evidence. In addition, Jorge makes the fantastic claim of having participated in flights over the Amazon during which live prisoners were dropped into the rainforest. Most of the DOI-CODI's violence had stopped by 1976, when President Ernesto Geisel fired the commander of the Second Army in SdioPaulo for failing to stop torture by his subordinates, years before Jorge purportedly entered the DOI-CODI. (That firing is recounted in detail by Gaspari.) Unfortunately for the reader, the authors do not analyze their interviewees' statements more carefully, which casts doubt on the entirety of the interviews. They cite neither primary nor secondary sources to support the interviewees' statements and contextualize the data. They could have at least speculated about the possibility of interviewee grandstanding. The underlying lesson here is that memory needs to be crosschecked with actual evidence. Memories and perceptions of a period

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can be distorted, even downright wrong. The work of the historian is invaluable in this process.

A PLURALITY METHODS OF
The historian Steve J. Stern suggests how our interpretation of the period can incorporate the advances of the new cultural history to understand the authoritarian era. He focuses on three main areas. First is collective memory. (I would add that we must strive to find the connections between the historical moment and current perceptions without sacrificing one concern for the other.) The second area includes groups that most scholars consider the "antagonists" of the period. This point speaks to the notion of tolerance in the study of the period. It is necessary to write about military regimes without falling into the Manichaean dichotomy of so much of the earlier scholarship. Stern suggests that historians will need to study the many groups that have not attracted scholarly attention but were every bit as much a part of the era's history as those groups and individuals studied by liberal and leftoriented historians. These forgotten people are the silent, the fence sitters, the conservatives, the repressors. For Stern, they are "the Other," which must be examined and understood if we are truly to write the history of the period. Understanding this period, moreover, is going to require tolerance and openness to dialogue among historians of different political and methodological persuasions. Stern's third area is the analysis of "'youth culture' and generational politics as historical problems in their own right." During the authoritarian period, youth culture became heavily consumer-oriented, at a time when so many young people could not partake of the consumer paradise presented to them in the mass media. The legacy of the authoritarian era, which began with the idealism of revolutionary youth, is a culture of competition, drugs, and political alienation (Stern 2001, 55). As the Brazilian Catholic intellectual Alceu Amoroso Lima stated in 1969, the military leadership "anesthetized" the political participation of the populace (cited in Serbin 2001, 129). The research agenda should be broadened to include such topics as the development of the human rights movement, the evolution of the ideology and practice of both violence and nonviolence (nonviolence, of course, being a middle-ground position between the extreme left and right), biographies of key political and ecclesiastical leaders, and analysis of what authoritarian regimes achieved (or did not achieve) in terms of infrastructural and social improvements for their countries. We also need political, diplomatic, and institutional histories and other works based on new primary data.

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A plurality of approaches and methods should prevail. The theoretical sophistication of the new cultural history and memory studies notwithstanding, much traditional spadework remains to be done. This means finding and studying new primary materials, interviewing key actors, and contributing to the methodological and theoretical debates about the study of the period and memory. Whenever possible, historians also need to become activists for the opening of archival materials. In the Brazilian case, for instance, both the government and the church have yet to unlock a wealth of material. We need highly readable interpretive narratives. Bit by bit, we need to piece together global narratives. Long out of vogue in the historical profession and largely absent from Latin American studies, interpretive narrative helps define a particular period by portraying the convergence of individuals, incidents, and trends. Lack of vivid narrative has become an important item of discussion in the profession. The opposition between concern with structures in the "new history" (of which the new cultural history of LatinAmerica is an offspring) and the focus on events in traditional history is giving way to a search for their interrelation. It is certainly possible, as Peter Burke argues, to integrate narrative and analysis (Burke 2001a, 2001b, 18). In recent years, some historians have returned to narrative. "Practices of Historical Narrative"was the theme of the 115th annual American Historical Association meeting in 2001. Some have experimented with new forms, including the use of literary models. Jonathan Spence's work provides several examples of successful use of this technique (Spence 1978, 1984). The best journalistic authors have long adopted such an approach. This theme was debated, for example, on the panel titled "Journalists,Scholars, and Historical Writing"at the 114th Annual Meeting of the AHA in 2000. We can learn much from the stylistic approaches of writers such as John Hersey (1960) and David Halberstam (1986), who brought history and reportage alive through the portrayal of people, and the journalistic historian Taylor Branch (1988), who has synthesized the history of the United States during the 1960s by focusing on the life of Martin Luther King. One of the tragedies of North American intellectual life is the paucity of interaction between journalists and historians. Journalists clearly have much to learn from us. From them, we can learn how to sharpen research skills and to produce more effective prose. It is also in the interest of our profession to make our work known to journalists. Scholars of LatinAmerica can build an especially fruitful relationship with journalists in the region, who generally are more experienced and more comfortable in dealing with academics than U.S. journalists are. We should not overlook the many fine examples of journalistic narratives that are part of the great literary tradition in Latin America. In the Brazilian case, for

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example, Ruy Castro (1992) has constructed compelling biographies that are also highly informative social histories. Gaspari has shown how journalistic-historical melding can be done for LatinAmerica. His model combines the journalist's emphasis on personalities and simple narrative with the footnote-laden rigor of the most careful historian. Narratives should take into account pedagogical concerns as well as the need to appeal to a general public. Too often, our audience is only our fellow scholars. We should seek strength in the intersection of techniques, fields, and genres, as opposed to the isolation that can easily develop when scholars become too attached to their theoretical and

methodological stakes.
Let us conclude with an intriguing question: given the important and dramatic developments of the authoritarian era in Brazil and Latin America, why have historians been reluctant to study it? It is my hope that this question will soon become irrelevant.

NOTES
An earlier version of this article was presented under the title "Documents Make a Difference: Sources, Historical Methodology, and Collective Memory in the Narrative of Brazil's Authoritarian Era"on the panel "Archives, Repression, and Writing the History of Authoritarianism in Chile and Brazil" at the 116th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (joint session with the Conference on Latin American History), San Francisco, California, January 3-6, 2002. The author wishes to thank Robert Holden and Victoria Langland for their comments on that paper. An updated version was presented at the International Symposium "40 anos do golpe de 1964: novos didlogos, novas perspectivas," Universidade Federal de Sdo Carlos, Brazil, June 14, 2004. The author thanks Barbara Weinstein for her comments on that version.

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