The unpast

by R. S. Rose

"Portuguese and Brazilian slave-traders shipped at least four million slaves to Brazil - in contrast to the five hundred thousand slaves that English vessels brought to the Americas. Control of the vast number of slaves in Brazil became of primary importance. The Unpast: Elite Violence and Social Control in Brazil, 1954-2000 documents the ways in which 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 of killing, torturing, or disfiguring 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 through a fifty-year period that helped to shape a nation's moral climate. He covers the misunderstood presidency of Joao Goulart, the overthrow of his government by a U.S.-assisted military, the appalling dictatorship that f