Postdictatorial

Rojas was expected to bring peace, prosperity, and even remedies for Colombia’s desperate social problems that still lurk—and perhaps more so in the present postdictatorial period than ever before—as the greatest danger to the nation’s long-range stability.

In practice, the four postdictatorial presidents have reflected a movement away from democratic-caesarist patterns of behavior.

In postdictatorial Brazil, where of late the most complicitous forms of forgetting have thrived to the point of hegemonizing the polis and its institutions—determining, even legislatively, how the past is to be dealt with—to speak of any kind of forgetting, however active, can surely lead to a good deal of misunderstanding.