In Chapter 5 I analysed the implementation of the CNV (2012–14), focusing on the challenges and problems faced during the commission's mandate as well as its alleged failure to deliver truth, justice and reconciliation. In this chapter I move away from the conditions of implementation of justice to its conditions of possibility: the historical and logical assumptions grounding the works of transitional justice mechanisms. This chapter investigates the shape and substance given to the promise of ‘never again’ in the Brazilian case; in other words, it seeks to clarify what exactly the Brazilian truth commission meant by justice. Therefore, the chapter focuses on the set of recommendations provided in the end of the first volume of the CNV's final report.

The final report of the CNV is an impressive historical document. The text narrates with rigour and overwhelming breadth the socio-political foundations, the ideological origins and the most perverse consequences of political repression in Brazil. As a historical document, it expresses the longstanding demands of survivors and family members for accountability. Any critique of the truth commission must acknowledge these facts to avoid falling into vulgar historical revisionism, right-wing sophistry or pure nonsense. But even a sympathetic critique, such as the present one, must be critical at some level. It must point out the blind spots, the internal contradictions and the political consequences that can always be drawn from even the most important of historical documents. In the present case, the point is to identify how the recommendations of the CNV ended up incurring two fundamental problems: (1) the unreflective acceptance of logical assumptions dear to the discipline of transitional justice and (2) the reproduction of a limited, parsimonious promise of justice that overlooks the complexity of violence in Brazil. The thesis presented here is that these two problems are indicative of what I call the economy of anti-impunity: a set of assumptions about wrongdoing and blame that, together with transitional justice's narrow understanding of violence, result in an equally narrow form of accountability.

In the first section, I analyse the main conclusions of the final report, including a list of twenty-nine policy recommendations.