The Brasil: Nunca Mais (BNM) Project was developed by the World Council of Churches and the Archdiocese of São Paulo in the 1980s and was coordinated by Rev. Jaime Wright and Archbishop Paulo Evaristo Arns. The initiative had three principal objectives: to avoid the destruction of judicial proceedings of political trials at the end of the military dictatorship, as had occurred at the end of the Estado Novo (New State) in 1945; to obtain information about torture practiced by the state’s repressive apparatus; and to disseminate that information so that it would have an educational role in Brazilian society.
After examining almost 850,000 pages of legal proceedings involving political prisoners, the researchers produced reports and a book of the same name (published by Vozes Press) describing torture practices and other gross human rights violations that occurred during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-85). This information was obtained from the testimony given by defendants in military courts. When interrogated in court, some of those accused denounced and detailed the practices of physical and moral violence they suffered or witnessed in the periods they were detained in prisons of the Armed Forces or the Political Police. One of the ingenious ideas of BNM was to use official state documents to prove the repeated and institutionalized practice of torture that was used in interrogations and repression during the dictatorship.
On July 15, 1985, four months after the restoration of civilian rule, the book “Brasil: Nunca Mais” was released. Its publication was featured in the national and international press, and the book, which has already surpassed its 40th edition, was reprinted twenty times in its first two years alone. It remained on the list of the top ten bestsellers for 91 consecutive weeks, becoming—at the time—the best-selling Brazilian book of non-fiction of all time.
To this day, BNM is considered the greatest initiative by Brazilian civil society in favor of the rights to memory, truth, and justice. Over the years it has helped recover a part of the history about human rights violations that took place during the military regime. Its publication was also transformative, as it impressed upon new generations the fundamental value of respect for the dignity of human beings. In the political arena, it spurred Brazil’s ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and influenced the works of the National Constituent Assembly, which produced the Constitution of 1988 and defines torture as a crime for which bail may not be granted nor amnesty or pardon given.
Archbishop Arns decided to donate all of the project’s documents to an institution in order to ensure public access to them. They were initially offered to the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and to the University of São Paulo, both of which declined the offer. They were then offered to the State University of Campinas, which accepted the documents with the promise to make the material widely available for consultation and to permit their reproduction.
Fearing that the institutions of political repression might destroy this research material, the World Council of Churches sent microfilmed copies of all of the documentation to the United States where they were stored in Chicago by the Latin American Microform Project, which is part of the Center for Research Libraries.
The Brasil Nunca Mais Digit@l Project brought the collection back to Brazil where the documents are now fully accessible on the Internet. New horizons have opened up for research and consultations by the public. In addition, the collection includes the documents archived by the World Council of Churches at its headquarters in Switzerland, which record the first steps in the development of BNM and the international response to the project. The collection includes copies of the records produced by the BNM team and the archives of the Peace and Justice Commission of the Archdiocese of São Paulo, previously digitized and published by Armazém Memória.
The repatriation of the BNM archives has strengthened the process of truth, memory, and justice, and contributed to the mission of the National Truth Commission and various other regional commissions. BNM Digit@l also invites reflection about the necessity of deepening the process of transitional justice, above all with the enforcement of the sentence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the Gomes Lund case.
The publication of the BNM Digit@l site fulfills one of the central objectives of the BNM project, namely, to educate people about historical memory as a means of developing social relations grounded in human rights. Citizens, both Brazilians and foreigners, can share experiences about this past by means of their computers in their homes, schools, universities, and workplaces in order to better understand and act in the present. This is an ongoing process. We invite users, students, professors, and researchers to share with us any new files and relevant documents linked with BMN to aggregate on this site.
Furthermore, we indicate a set of other centers of digital documentation that can help with your research.
Below is a list of links to interesting content on the period of the military dictatorship, which will help supplement the studies conducted in Brasil: Nunca Mais Digit@l.