With new audio, podcast ‘A Ditadura Recontada’ is launched on the 60th anniversary of the coup

With new audio, podcast ‘A Ditadura Recontada’ is launched on the 60th anniversary of the coup | The Dictatorship Retold

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On the 60th anniversary of the military coup, the series “The Dictatorship Retold” sheds light on the behind-the-scenes of this dark period, with recordings of the protagonists of this story that, for decades, were very well kept.

In the voice of Nadedja Calado, “A Ditadura Recontada” will reconstruct the period of turmoil that paved the way for the deposition of then president João Goulart. It will go through the leaden years, with torture in basements and censorship in newsrooms, and the slow and gradual political opening.

To tell this story, the podcast delves into almost 300 hours of audio from the archive of journalist Elio Gaspari, author of five books about the military regime. The material will be revealed to the public for the first time on the podcast.

Through these recordings, the podcast will help to understand how some of the soldiers who carried out the coup in 1964 worked, years later, to dismantle the dictatorship that they themselves established.

Gaspari spent decades analyzing files, tapes and documents from the dictatorship. He gathered unpublished recordings made by Ernesto Geisel, the penultimate of the president-dictators, in the early 1970s, and years later he did a series of interviews with Geisel.

This material served as the basis for the collection of books published by the journalist and will be present in “A Ditadura Recontada”.

During the podcast, Gaspari appears to help guide the listener through the behind-the-scenes context.

“Look, Geisel and Golbery are different characters until 64. Golbery was a conspirator. Geisel no way”, says an excerpt.

Ana Maria Straube writes the podcast script. She states that these behind-the-scenes stories bring the public new insights into important episodes in history.

“We know the facts, we know the decisions, we know the repercussions, but we don’t necessarily know how they were engendered, how they were constructed. What happened before all these issues became public? The reflections of these people? And even though they are in books , I think we are surprised to hear the voices of these characters. And some audios that are included in the podcast are very emblematic and, at the same time, very strong, they bring things that we knew, but that hearing from the characters’ mouths has another impact,” he says.

Helena Dias, responsible for researching the series, tells us what it was like to pore over the archives of journalist Elio Gaspari, author of the main collection of books about the Brazilian military dictatorship.

“He has these audios from Gaspari, obviously, but he has a series of other audios that are also very relevant, very impactful and that talk a lot about the dynamics of the Armed Forces in Brazil. So I think that this game of interest, this politicking, Their way of navigating was what surprised me the most. I think that, through them, we can go much deeper into the relational dynamics that led us to have this dictatorship government for more than 20 years”, he states.

In addition to Gaspari’s archives, Helena searched several collections, such as those of TV Globo and Sistema Globo de Rádio.