The Unpast

Portuguese and Brazilian slave-traders shipped an estimated four million slaves to Brazil, in contrast to the 500,000 slaves that English vessels brought to America. With such a vast number in servitude in Brazil, controlling them became of primary importance. The Unpast: Elite Violence and Social Control in Brazil, 1954-2000 documents that 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 to kill, torture, or disfigure dissidents and the poor to maintain dominance. Bringing a critical-historical analysis to events following the 1954 suicide of President Getulio Vargas, R.S. Rose takes the reader along a fifty-year path that shaped a nation's morals. He covers the misunderstood presidency of Joao 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. The Unpast is the largest and most comprehensive study of suspected death-squad victims ever undertaken. It concludes with the sobering observation that nothing has really changed in present-day Brazil since the end of slavery in 1888. The Unpast is an expose of practices and attitudes in Latin America's largest country toward the poor, who - like slaves before them - are considered human rubbish worthy of anything to keep them under control.