This chapter presents an analysis of the Resistance Memorial of São Paulo (RM-SP), a memorial whose mandate is to preserve the history of contemporary political struggles in Brazil. The RM-SP is an example of a site of memory, a space ‘where memories converge, condense, conflict, and define relationships between past, present, and future’. Built in a former iconic site of torture, the RM-SP was one of Brazil's first public institutions to openly address the topic of political violence during the civic-military dictatorship (1964–85). In a country marked by the legacy of a blanket amnesty and the relative absence of measures of accountability, the site has become a reference centre, reaching an annual viewership of 78,000 persons on average.

The RM-SP is one of the most important, but unfortunately least studied, transitional justice initiatives in Brazil. But my decision to focus on the memorial at this point in the book is also strategic. The history of the RM-SP as an institution is, in many ways, representative of the history of the Brazilian transition. Inaugurated in 2003 as an ode to liberalisation and re-inaugurated in 2009 with its current focus, the memorial's trajectory was shaped by the contextual changes of the post-transitional scene. The institutional mission statement, the architecture and the very designation of the RM-SP are witnesses to the different policies of accountability that characterised the democratic transition, from the fall of the military regime to the leftist turn in the 2000s. Put simply, the RM-SP provides the perfect shortcut to explain the history of transitional justice in Brazil, from the publication of Brasil Nunca Mais to the creation of the CNV.

But this is not only a historical chapter. The analysis presented here is also an investigation of the wider aspects of the particular languages that characterise the discipline of transitional justice. As a site of memory situated in the present, the RM-SP is also a site of struggle expressing the dilemmas of a (neo)liberal society, torn in between the liberal defence of democratic principles and the reorganisation of social relations according to the neoliberal market. In the spirit of a political economy of memory, 4 this chapter analyses how the RM-SP's duty to remember the past is contrasted with, and sometimes shaped by, the (neo)liberal urge to sanitise the present and to celebrate the future.