A Mother’s Cry: A Memoir of Politics, Prison, and Torture under the Brazilian Military Dictatorship
Lina Penna Sattamini
2010, Duke University Press
188 pages
A NUMBER of titles reviewing the Brazilian military dictatorship have recently been published, reflecting both renewed interest in the authoritarian experiment that ended a democratically elected leftwing government, and the role of the US in this dark period as part of a broader Cold War anti-communist agenda. Duke, for example, has recently released the excellent We Cannot Remain Silent about opposition to the regime within the US itself, where few people were aware of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Brazilian military. A Mother’s Cry is an important work of testimonial literature that documents the arrest and torture in Brazil of Marcos Arruda, a young political activist, and the efforts of his family to locate him and secure his release. The work is edited by James Green, author of We Cannot Remain Silent and professor of Brazilian history at Brown University. Arruda is now the general co-ordinator at the Institute of Alternative Policies for the Southern Cone and lives in Rio. – GO’T
