The year of remembrance, for Herzog and for the invisible victims of the dictatorship.

In the dark spring of 1975, shortly after the assassination of Vladimir Herzog at the DOI-Codi in São Paulo, professors and students from the Faculty of Communication at UFRGS, Fabico, placed a plaque on the wall of the student union building in homage to the journalist.

Herzog was to be the patron of the center. The next day, the tribute disappeared. Everyone who lived through that period in Porto Alegre knows who stole the plaque. 

Many of those who were there and could do nothing but identify the servant of the dictatorship will place another plaque in the same spot, this time next to young people who are less than half the age that has passed so far. It will be on April 8th.  

The plaque reads: “On October 25, 1975, journalist Vladimir Herzog was murdered under torture in Army facilities. Vlado defended democracy and fought against the dictatorship. In his honor, the students of Fabico named the student union room after him. The following morning, the plaque was torn down by the Faculty's administration, on orders from the dictatorship. 50 years later, we are here again. So that it is not forgotten, so that it never happens again. Never again to dictatorship!”

The revival of the tribute to Herzog is in the context of the Brazilian Press Association's (ABI) decision to establish 2025 as the Vladimir Herzog Year. It marks half a century since the journalist's assassination.

Recovering plaques is part of an effort to reclaim concrete gestures of memory and resistance against what they try to repeat. Just as the plaque that reads: "Here, in the first clandestine detention center in the Southern Cone, enemies of the dictatorship were tortured and killed," was recovered and reinstalled on the sidewalk of Rua Santo Antônio, in front of the old DOPS building, also in Porto Alegre.

And Brazil continues to deal with the preservation of memories, but with intermittent, casual, and sporadic actions. Many people say that this cannot continue. That we need to be more intense, consistent, and effective, like Uruguayans, Argentinians, and Chileans, in the eternal comparison that disadvantages us.

The Oscar win for 'I'm Still Here', the consecration of Fernanda Torres as a representation of the woman who resists, and everything else that the film and the award inspire, push us to repeat the word that summarizes Eunice Paiva's struggle after her husband's murder: memory, memory, memory.

So much so that the appeal for truth, memory, and justice, enshrined in all countries that have faced dictatorships, often takes the form in Brazil where the first word is memory. 

Memory as respect, affection, recognition. So that memory triggers truths, and truths and memories lead to mobilizations for justice.

This should be a year of remembrance for Herzog, for all those murdered, for those who were never seen again and who, as we now know, number far more than the 232 still considered missing during the dictatorship.

In the name of memory, as Marcelo Rubens Paiva already said when criticized for writing about his white and wealthy family, others should write more and make films about Black people, the poor, settlers, and Indigenous people whom the dictatorship killed and who, due to the omissions of the restored democracy itself, have been made invisible.

May Brazil dedicate itself to the memory of these invisible people who also disappeared without documents, records, or notes registering their names and stories as victims of dictators and torturers. 

(Octávio Costa, Regina Pimenta and colleagues from ABI, we are together in this ongoing endeavor. Memory, memory, memory.)