R. S. Rose - Böcker

An examination of the long-ignored vicious side to the legend of Brazilian President Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, this is the tale uncovered by the first civilian to spend months in the secret police archives of Rio de Janeiro. Rose has utilized new eyewitness testimony and insider information in offering explanations to several events that proved pivotal in Brazil during the 1930s and 1940s. During Vargas's tenure, the quality and quantity of human rights abuses reached unprecedented heights. Violence, as a means of coercing the public, was evident in all sectors of the security apparatus. Several tools of torture developed during the hunt for communists are still in use today.Almost by definition, politicians have to offer a semblance of providing something for each different sector of society. Vargas was better at this than his predecessors in that with ease he proudly wore the various vestments of dictator, fascist, democrat, and populist as necessary. For the poor, he was the paternalistic benefactor; for the middle class, he was the one who brought stability; and for the wealthy, he supported the status quo. This ability to juggle forces and interests was grounded in his security apparatus. Beginning with the unsuccessful Communist Revolution of 1935, the nation's police forces redefined and in some cases reinvented the torture that had occurred in Brazil from colonial times onward. The harshness of their methods was matched only by the ardor of their example for coming generations.

Portuguese and Brazilian slave-traders shipped at least four million slaves to Brazil—in contrast to the five hundred thousand slaves that English vessels brought to the Americas. Controlling the vast number of slaves in Brazil became of primary importance. The Unpast: Elite Violence and Social Control in Brazil, 1954–2000 documents the ways in which the brutal methods used on plantations led directly to the phenomenon of Brazilian death squads.The Unpast examines how and why, after the abolition of slavery, elites in Brazil imported new methods of killing, torturing, or disfiguring dissidents and the poor to maintain dominance. Bringing a critical-historical analysis to events following the 1954 suicide of President Getúlio Vargas, R. S. Rose takes the reader along a fifty-year path that helped to shape a nation's morals. He covers the misunderstood presidency of João Goulart; the overthrow of his government by a U.S.-assisted military; the appalling dictatorship that followed; the efforts to rid the countryside of troublemakers; and the ongoing attempt to cleanse the urban environment of the needy, an endeavor that produced 32,675 victims in just two Brazilian states between 1954 and 2000.The largest and most comprehensive documentation of suspected death-squad victims ever undertaken, The Unpast is an exposé of practices and attitudes toward the poor in Latin America's largest country.

Filinto Müller was the most despised police chief in Brazilian history and later a detested senator. Müller bore the brunt of many accusations of police wrongdoing owing to charges by yellow-journalist David Nasser. This volume examines the totality of Müller’s life and is the result of 11 years of research in which 66,704 documents, 500 newspapers clippings, and 165 visual items were examined. Numerous interviews were likewise conducted. This work has uncovered little archival evidence to substantiate direct charges against Müller. This book argues, however, that Müller was responsible for the invention of modern-day death squads, the first of their kind in the Americas.

This important new study is an inquiry into the origins and purposes of downwardly directed violence by economic and political elites in Brazil—violence that has led to the invention and tacit approval of contemporary death squads.