Mara Marques Cavallaro is a writer and editor based in Harlem, New York, where she is the assistant director of Columbia’s Incarcerated Writers Initiative. Her work has appeared in the Nation, Jacobin Brasil, the Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere.

01.30.2026

• Mara Marques Cavallaro

The Flawed Memory of Brazil’s Dictatorship

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Oscar-nominated The Secret Agent examines how authoritarianism corrupts and distorts memory. Forty years since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro’s far right is proof.