Sociabilidad en Buenos Aires: Hombres, honor y cafes, 1862-1910 (review)
age in 1970 and left his post as army chief of staff after the first meeting of the Commission. Thus “it was never quite clear where the Grupo da Situação (the military side of the Commission) fit into the nebulous web of the Medici administration nor to what extent it represented the president” (p. 96). Indeed Candido Mendes, in an interview with the author, argued that “Muricy’s effectiveness was reduced because he had lost power upon retirement and therefore was not an ‘insider’ in the Medici government” (p. 97). Dom Eugênio likewise questioned the influence of the Commission vis-à-vis President Medici, and Serbin even notes that Muricy himself was unsure about the status and influence of the Commission. The author does provide a few specific examples of how the Bipartite dialogue led directly to the release of Catholic activists imprisoned by the regime. And yet, elsewhere in the book (pp. 106–12) he suggests that a principal goal of the military was to use the Commission to collect intelligence on Catholic leaders. As such, Serbin is left largely with the negative (and unverifiable) thesis that refusing “dialogue would have further increased tensions and sharply reduced the possibilities of mutual understanding and protection of human rights” (pp. 9–10). After all, the meetings were secret, and there is precious little evidence of Muricy’s ability to influence policymakers above him. Serbin writes well, and his book sparkles when he describes the little-known episode of the military’s torture and murder of four of its own soldiers in Barra Mansa in early 1972. In this case, he does succeed in demonstrating that pressure from the Bipartite Commission in part forced authorities to denounce the affair in public. His prose also presents deftly the larger narrative history of churchstate relations in Brazil, and the church’s public campaign against repression in the mid-1970s. Unfortunately, his prose alone cannot prove that the study of the Bipartite Commission is necessary for understanding this period of Brazilian history.