Impact of the truth commission on the social representations of history in Brazil

This thesis aimed to investigate the social representations of the dictatorship (1964-1985) in Brazil during the process of Truth and Reconciliation Commission – TRC – report release and the political crisis (2014-2018) as well as the TRC impact and appraisals. It is mainly based on the social representations theory, collective memory and studies about TRCs impact. Three studies were conducted. The first, aimed to investigate the social representations about the TRC in Brazil from the spontaneous discourse about the TRC final report in December 2014. Comments (N=322) were collected in the three major newspapers websites in Brazil: "Folha de São Paulo", "O Globo" and "O Estado de São Paulo" during the 48 hours after the news publication. They were transcribed into a textual corpus which was submitted to a lexical analyze on the software Alceste. Results showed three classes emerging, all of them critical against the TRC or the government: Violence perpetrated by leftist militants; Critics against the government and; State agent as victims. A radicalized discourse that justifies the human rights violations committed during the dictatorship as well as revisionist theories that negates the existence of a dictatorship could be observed. The classes seemed to represent the public of each newspaper. The second study aimed to analyze Brazilian TRC appraisals and its relation with social variables such as age and political positioning as well as with the social representations of the dictatorial past comparing three periods: pre, during and post the political crisis that ended up with Dilma Rousseff's impeachment. The sample consisted of 728 volunteer participants. Results showed that knowledge, social sharing about the TRC and the dictatorship, as well as the TRC positive appraisals increased during the political crisis. Moreover, most of the TRC positive appraisals were associated with left-wing political positioning and victimization. The associations between TRC appraisals and political positioning also increased during the political crisis. The third study aimed to investigate the structure of social representations of the dictatorship in Brazil comparing with a similar previous study (Sá, Oliveira, Castro, Vetere, & Carvalho, 2009). A 238 general sample answered questions about their knowledge, attitudes and emotions regarding the dictatorship. Moreover, a word association task was conducted with the inductor stimulus “military regime”. A prototypical analysis was conducted in IRAMUEQ software. Results showed that, though social representations of dictatorship are still critical, some elements that represent it positively are standing out, even in the central core. These positive representations seem to be anchored in political positioning and to be related to absence of information about the dictatorship in school. Results are discussed considering the political context of crisis, the social representations, collective memory and media theories comparing with previous studies about TRCs impact in other countries.