Discussing the access to documents produced in the 1960's and 1970's by the Brazilian military dictatorship, the article emphasizes some points: the nature of the democratic transition, the history of archives legislation, the characteristics of the archives of political repression. It is argued that the right to privacy, although being the element that, in practice, restricts access to part of this documentation, has not yet been the subject of public debate, due to the (apparent) incompatibility between the demands of social movements to unrestricted access to the sources of military dictatorship, at the collective level, and the protection of privacy, at the individual level.
dictatorship archives; sensitive archives; access to information law; right to information; right to the truth