Narrative Disputes and Political-Legal Strategies on the Memorialization of the Carandiru Massacre

This paper aims to present a description of the narrative disputes and the political-legal strategies that have been constructed around the memorial spaces marked by the Carandiru Massacre, based on the understanding of collective memory as a social construction process (Ricoeur, 1999) and political struggles (Jelin, 2021). The Massacre, which occurred on October 2, 1992, at São Paulo's House of Detention, is a traumatic event that involved the deaths of at least 111 incarcerated individuals and the bodily injury of numerous survivors. As a result of this episode, accountability processes were initiated at both the national and international levels, including the publication of Report 34/00 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which determined reparative measures. Despite these determinations, the state's process of memorialization of the event is marked by disagreements and absences. In 2002, three of the detention facility's pavilions were imploded, and today it is home to the so-called "Youth Park". The remaining pavilions were renovated and have become a library and a technical school. There is no indication that the park serves as a space for difficult memories. At the São Paulo Penitentiary Museum, located outside this park, the narrative provided by the state is that the episode of violence was a reaction to a "prisoners' riot." The inauguration of a Memory Space about Carandiru in 2018 marked the possibility of confronting the "riot" narrative through the exhibition of objects and letters produced by individuals imprisoned at Carandiru, but there are still controversies over the ways this collection is portrayed. Victims have organized around the "First Front of Prison Survivors" and the group "Carandiru Memories" to resist the erasure of the living memories of the massacre and demand new ways to remember and tell this story.