O exílio da memória: Milton Santos e a ditadura civil-militar

Abstract

This doctoral thesis analyzes the impact of the Brasilian civil-military dictatorship on the career of intellectual Milton Almeida dos Santos (1926-2001), and the specificities of the violence committed by the dictatorial regime. Well-known for his influential work in Geography, Milton Santos also worked as a journalist in the 1950s and 1960s, in addition to holding important public positions. As a public intellectual, he worked in important instances of Bahian society and national political life, whether as a member of the newspaper A Tarde (which he himself considered to function “like a political party”), or holding positions such as Chief of Staff of Jânio Quadros in Bahia, and President of the Economic Planning Commission of Bahia (CPE), between 1963 and 1964. It was while serving in this latter position, in 1964, that the civil-military coup led to his arrest and forced him into exile for thirteen years. At his time, he was also a professor at University of Bahia, from which he had to resign in 1969, due to his remoteness and pressure from the regime. The research analyzed the Military Police Inquiry that prosecuted Milton Santos and other CPE employees (“IPM da CPE”), and which raised accusations of “subversion” and “administrative corruption”, in the context of the establishment of the dictatorial regime. The analysis also sought to observe how memories of these experiences were/are mobilized, either by Santos himself or by people whose trajectories are also intertwined with his, through consideration of these public testimonies. The dimension of raciality, as a component of the perpetration of violence by the authoritarian State, was also observed in the present research. The study also analyzes a set of messages received by Santos during his imprisonment, sent by the journalist and writer Walfrido Moraes, which contain relevant historical traces of the civil-military coup’s impact on Bahian society. Documents from the Federal University of Bahia relating of his case within the university bureaucracy are also analyzed, as well as an understanding of the stages of his exile during the civil-military dictatorship, in its academic, political, and memorial dimensions. Concepts such as “shaping power” and “shaping dynamics” were coined for this study, to understand the social influence of the dictatorship on the social networks and institutions through which the intellectual moved and worked, which help in understanding the case.