Transitional justice initiatives do not happen in a vacuum. They are shaped by, and also shape, a universe of events, narratives and practices. The assessment of their performance and legacy cannot be easily isolated from their formative role in the political and economic contexts that provide the milieu in which transitional justice happens; the backdrop against which the promise of ‘never again’ is to be realised. These may seem like obvious statements, but they are often disregarded by the transitional justice literature. To put it simply, we need to understand in which ways the ‘common language of justice’ and the wider language of (neo)liberalism constituted the linguae francae of the years of hope in Brazil. Only then can the full impact of what I call the politics of impunity become clear.

There is no better place to start this conclusion than at the end: the dramatic fall of the Workers’ Party from power and grace, an event that shook the foundations of Brazilian politics. The coming to power of the Workers’ Party in the early 2000s was significative in terms of expanding the human rights agenda of previous administrations and introducing a new transitional justice agenda at the state and federal levels. But the Brazilian turn to the left was no radical break with the past. The party that united syndicalist leaders, the Catholic youth, and urban intellectuals around an impassionate defence of social justice in the 1980s had changed. After losing the presidential election in 1989 by the tiniest of margins, the Workers’ Party eventually fell prey to the blackmail of ‘the end of history’, sensibly rethinking its core socialist principles under the pretext of winning over the centre ground. No one personified this slow shift more than the party's historical leader, Lula da Silva. Lula, the face of new syndicalism in São Paulo's industrial belt during Brazil's civic-military dictatorship (1964–85), dropped his fiery anti-capitalist rhetoric after three frustrated attempts to run for office. Reimagined as a reasonable politician, mindful of the limitations and restrictions inherent in Brazil's complex political system, he was elected the first president with working-class origins in 2002.