Dimensões fundacionais da luta pela anistia

Abstract

This article analyses the meaning of the struggle for the General Amnesty in Brazil, undertaken by the Brazilian Amnesty Commitees (CBAs) - with the Womens Movement for Amnesty (MFPA), the exiles and the political prisoners - in the second half of the 1970 decade, and its political effects in the last twenty years. Three questions constitute the starting-point for the discusson of what the author calls foundational dimensions of the fight for amnisty: This movement has exausted in itself or not? What kind of newsness it represents? What is its singularity? The hypothesis investigated is the following: it was the first movement in brazilian history that established a common space for a proposition that is both political and structural, characterized by an open and direct confrontation with the military regimen, instituting a proper language based on human rights centerd on the fight against the repressive apparatus and on the right to apropriate memory as a citizenship dimension. The theoretical instrument utilized is the Hannah Arendts concept of politics: the republican principle that articulates public sphere, action and citizenship. For Hannah Arendt, the raison dêtre of politics is the freedom, wich is lived basicaly in the action. Far from being a natural and inalienable right, it is a human artifact. Its locus is the public sphere, the exclusive space to exercise the citizenship defined by Arendt as the right to have rights. Only the action and the speech render possible the construction of the public space: it isnt at all predetermined or institucional. This instituting attribute of politics and its emphasis upon the newness comprise the adequate tools for the reflection about the amnesty struggle: it is the new, as Claude Lefort says, that must be celebrated and interrogated. The two nucleus that impress the essential newness of our subject are those that determine its antitotalitarian character: - the foundation of a proper speech of human rights as from the struggle against the Terror of the military dictatorship (1964-1985); and - the priority for the right of memory as a citizenship dimension, fundamental component of that struggle against the Terror. They constitute simultaneously the centrality and the transversality of the discussion to be developed.