While I was wrapping up my master’s in Brazilian Studies, I took up a voluntary post at Senate House Library. My job was to sift through the library’s collection of Latin American Political Pamphlets, which needed cataloguing, labelling and rescuing from their rusting steel paper clips, a task that ended up taking over a year. The boxes containing materials from Brazil had hardly ever been touched, and I was immediately drawn in. Without looking for anything in particular, I began piecing together remnants of social movements and resistance to the military dictatorship, which I was researching at the time. I became curious and descended into the rabbit-hole clues that the documents – which ranged from economic forecasts to solidarity posters – had left behind. Eventually, my curiosity evolved into a PhD project, and those clues led me to visit numerous other archives across Western Europe and Brazil. I learned that underneath the story of resistance to Brazil’s regime was a vast transnational network that had yet to be fully excavated and mapped.

Brazil and the Transnational Human Rights Movement explores how solidarity with victims of dictatorship contributed to the global human rights movement that emerged in the 1970s. Through a range of activities, solidarity for Brazil popularised the language of human rights and prompted the international community to join the fight against the military regime. They also reframed the debate on human rights, expanding beyond dominant interpretations that elevated the violation of ‘basic’ individual rights – such as the use of torture and political imprisonment – to also incorporate social and economic rights, inequality, indigenous minorities and the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies and development projects. Crucial to the very essence of solidarity for Brazil in Western Europe were pre-existing networks of exiles, Catholic activists, journalists and academics, which shaped the language and discourse of global human rights. This story challenges mainstream narratives and exposes the construction of human rights from below.

On 1 April 1964, the Brazilian government was overthrown by a military coup that would last for twenty-one years. Things happened slowly at first. Political opposition was disassembled through a series of constitutional amendments, while members of the military apparatus were woven into the organisational hierarchies of unions and universities.