Aluízio Palmar is the Forrest Gump of Brazilian militant activism. He always seems to be in the middle of history as it unfolds—at the onset of military dictatorships in South America, participating in guerrilla movements across the region, during the founding of Brazil’s landless movement, or amid the construction of one of the world’s largest dams, Itaipú. In Argentina, he supported the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) and ran a soda factory. In Santiago, he met Salvador Allende and sat through one of Fidel Castro’s famously long speeches. In Brazil, he was imprisoned and tortured, witnessed the return to democracy, and began a quest to recover the bodies of six militants killed by the government. His biography reads like a whirlwind tour through some of Latin America’s most dramatic political turning points.
If life is a box of chocolates, Jacob Blanc’s Searching for Memory offers a sampler that is rich, unexpected, and at times bittersweet. Blanc takes on the challenge of writing about someone who is not only still alive but also deeply invested in shaping how his own story is told. He calls Palmar a “memory activist,”—someone who has fought hard to preserve and shape the past by giving interviews, posting on social media, and writing his memoirs. This raises tricky questions: Do you let your subject read and respond to what you have written? Do you break the historian’s fourth wall and write in the first person? Do you acknowledge your own blind spots, even when they clash with documents or contradict your subject’s recollections? To all of these questions, Blanc responds with an unusual “yes.”
That choice makes the book refreshingly honest. Rather than papering over contradictions or smoothing out inconsistencies, Blanc leans into them, making them part of the narrative. In doing so, he not only guides the reader through an extraordinary life but also reflects on the very act of remembering—and on the historian’s role in helping those “forms of political resistance” find their place in the world. He introduces the concept of a “memory script,” which underscores the subjective nature of remembering as something practiced, repeated, and performed.
If life is a box of chocolates, Jacob Blanc’s Searching for Memory offers a sampler that is rich, unexpected, and at times bittersweet.
In the first two chapters, we learn about Palmar’s upbringing. His mother was the niece of the wealthy farmer in whose sugarcane fields his father worked. While Palmar’s first exposure to politics came from his father, a member of the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB), it was President Getúlio Vargas’s death in 1954 that “pushed him to think about the world around him, and what it meant to fight for a fair and democratic society.” As a teenager, he joined the student movement, several Marxist groups, and the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) in Rio de Janeiro. Toward the end of 1963, he was hired to work in one of the government’s most extensive programs, the National Literacy Plan (PNA), modeled on educator Paulo Freire’s methodology. A few months later, a coup d’état overthrew President João Goulart and forever changed Palmar’s life. Influenced by historian Caio Prado Júnior and French Marxist Régis Debray, he grew frustrated with the PCB and concluded that the solution was to take up arms. Palmar became one of the founding members of the guerrilla group DI-RJ/MR-8, which embraced a Cuban-style foquista approach. The only armed group that seemed genuinely interested in collaborating with them was in Paraná, a state in southern Brazil. In 1968, off went Palmar.
In Foz do Iguaçu, the border city where he settled, Palmar underwent grueling—though at times monotonous—guerrilla training alongside other MR-8 members. It was also there that he met Eunice, his wife and the mother of five of his children. Eunice’s refusal to give interviews to Blanc speaks volumes about Palmar’s complicated personal life, as does the brief mention of Amanda, his daughter born outside the marriage. These absences could be problematic, but Searching for Memory is not a typical biography. Blanc focuses on the “full-time activist and militant since the age of 16” who prioritizes revolution over family. While Palmar is driven by revolution and falls into depression when forced to abandon militant life, Eunice devotes herself to her husband. Their children still resent this. Although they sensed something was wrong with their father—he would get jumpy “when he heard the sound of keys”—the children only learned about his past when he published his memoir in 2005.
When Florita, his first child, was born, Palmar was behind bars. In chapters three, four, and five, Blanc recounts his imprisonment, sentencing, and the various forms of torture inflicted on the regime’s political opponents. Palmar endured the pau de arara (parrot’s perch)—in which victims are suspended from a bar between their bent knees and wrists—, the “telephone,”—a deafening and aggressive hit into both ears simultaneously— and even a mock execution staged in a national park. He was transferred from prison to prison and admits to harboring thoughts of suicide. Meanwhile, Eunice lived in constant anxiety, as did Palmar’s parents and brother—who was savagely beaten by police after failing to reveal Palmar’s whereabouts. Their episodic but harrowing appearances give readers a sense of the suffocating climate of the dictatorship, even for those who were not politically active. No life was left untouched.
In the late 1960s, guerrilla groups adopted a dangerous tactic: kidnapping ambassadors and releasing them only after the government freed political prisoners. Palmar was one of seventy people released in 1971 in exchange for the Swiss ambassador to Brazil, Giovanni Bucher. Chapters 6 and 7 follow his life in exile, first in Chile and then in Argentina. In Santiago, he was finally reunited with Eunice and their daughter, Florita—a meeting he describes as “the heaviest thing, most traumatic, most complicated.” The book offers a rare window into clandestine life in Latin America, as opposed to exile in Europe, where people “had contact with other exiles, they could read newspapers, they were in constant contact with the reality of Brazil.” Palmar recalls this period as “really hard times. I took any odd jobs I could find, and the isolation really stressed me out.”
These absences could be problematic, but Searching for Memory is not a typical biography. Blanc focuses on the ‘full-time activist and militant since the age of 16’ who prioritizes revolution over family.
Palmar was only reunited with his family for good after the 1979 Amnesty Law was approved—and Eunice gave him an ultimatum: he should come back to Foz do Iguaçu to reunite with her or she would file for divorce. He also realized that he could continue his activism in Foz do Iguaçu. After a brief period working as a reporter for local publications, he and two fellow militants founded the newspaper Nosso Tempo. Their main stories soon centered on the construction of the Itaipú Dam (the subject of Blanc’s 2019 book Before the Flood: the Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil), the call for local elections (Foz do Iguaçu was considered a “national security zone,” and the military appointed the mayor), and the imprisonment—from 1982 to 1984—of one of their reporters, regarded as Brazil’s last political prisoner.
The final three chapters trace Palmar’s activism in democratic Brazil. After his time as a journalist, he served as Foz do Iguaçu’s secretary of the environment. His commitment to justice took on a new dimension when he began searching for the bodies of six militants who had disappeared during the dictatorship. He explains this fixation as “driven by a curiosity to know what my own death would have been like” had he joined the group in 1974. After several fruitless searches, the only tangible result of this pursuit was his decision to write a memoir, published in 2012. Palmar also played an active role in the Brazilian Truth Commission and, during that period, created Documentos Revelados, an impressive online archive containing more than 75,000 documents from the dictatorship.
The book concludes with the far-right administration of Jair Bolsonaro, at the start of whose term, Mário Espedito Ostrovski, a former torturer of Palmar, sued Palmar. Although the judge dismissed the case, it stands as a powerful example of both the endurance and fragility of memory. Searching for Memory is a beautifully written story of a real hero—a man full of doubts, failures, and extraordinary acts. Its power lies in the courage of two people: Blanc, who lays bare his own limits and struggles as a biographer, and Palmar, who refuses to put the past behind him and move on.
Mila Burns is the author of Dictatorship Across Borders: Brazil, Chile, and the South American Cold War (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2025). She is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College and of History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is also the Associate Director at the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) at The Graduate Center.