REVIEWS Brazil: Never Again? by Fiona Macaulay Lina Penna Sattamini, A Mother’s Cry: a Memoir of Politics, Prison and Torture under the Brazilian Military Dictatorship, Duke University Press, 2010; 188 pp., ISBN 9780822347361. James N. Green, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, Duke University Press, 2010; 450 pp., ISBN 9780822347354. Brazil guards its public image zealously. Its highly educated and trained diplomats are famed in international circles for their urbanity and geniality, and have been very successful in promoting Brazil as a sleeping giant now rousing itself to fulfil its long-overdue destiny as a regional and global player. It is one of the largest economies in the world, with steady growth and recently improved income distribution. Politically it managed to make a bloodless transition to democratic rule in 1985, after twenty years of military rule, pushed forward by an active and vocal civil society. The two-term governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) and Luiz Ina´cio Lula da Silva (2003-10) consolidated this parliamentary democracy, earning the fulsome praise of President Obama on his visit to Brazil in March 2011. In this future-looking narrative, the imprints of Brazil’s anos de chumbo (‘years of lead’, 1968-74) are obscured. However, these two volumes on the human-rights abuses committed during that period are a reminder of a dual legacy. The negative effects of years of unconstrained police brutality still resonate through Brazilian society and the state institutions of coercion. Yet this very violence became the impulse for Brazil’s inadvertent contribution to the development of both the contemporary international human-rights regime and the transnational civil-society networks that have supported and shaped this regime over the last four decades. Lina Penna Sattamini is a middle-class Brazilian who was suddenly dragged into the nightmarish world of secret detention centres, torture and official denial when her son Marcos P. S. Arruda was arrested by the intelligence service of the military regime in 1970. Her son had trained first as a priest, then as a geologist. Like thousands of his contemporaries he quit and joined Popular Action, a revolutionary social group that placed young educated activists in the factories to work alongside, learn from, and help History Workshop Journal Issue 72 ß The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. by guest on November 17, 2011 http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from