Lost in transition: victims’ attitudes towards TJ in Portugal

This paper examines a post-authoritarian democracy in which, despite the implementation of a comprehensive transitional justice process, a mild feeling of impunity persists: Portugal. During the 1970s, after a transition by coup, a few political elite members were sent into forced exile and others fled the country, many individuals were temporarily prevented from exercising their electoral rights, more than 2,000 political police officers and informers were tried and convicted to six to 24 months years in prison, and around 12,000 regime collaborators were (temporarily) vetted. Yet despite this reasonably punitive approach, transitional justice plays no major role in Portuguese citizens’ collective memory today, as attested by a few recent public opinion surveys. More importantly, victims themselves have a fuzzy memory of the measures that were implemented 40 years ago. This study takes a two-step approach to understand how victims recall the transitional justice process and the reasons why they do not demand more compensation, memorialization and truth measures, unlike what happens in other post-authoritarian societies. First, the research strategy comprised the collection of qualitative and quantitative data on the victims including: focus groups, an online survey, and qualitative interviews with former political prisoners and exiles to map their attitudes and explain their passive behavior. Second, the ‘victim’ data was combined with data regarding the parliamentary activity and policy production to examine the potential detachment between victims and policy-makers. The study concludes that most transitional justice laws and policies implemented in Portugal were proposed and/or written by former victims of the ‘winning’ side of the transition. The transition process therefore emerges as a powerful explanation of victims' attitudes towards the transitional justice process and the way the state deals with the past.