How is the civilian access to military records in Brazil and what does it say about Brazilian civil-military relations? It is true that Brazil have been promoting reforms in order to establish civilian control. Since the end of the military regime in 1985, it has eliminated many military authoritarian prerogatives in the 1988 Constitution, it has created the civilian Ministry of Defense in 1999, and has empowered the minister of defense autonomy in 2008.
Civilian leaders, however, seem to have a chronic lack of interest in military ideology reforms, which led to the persistence of old habits. In the face of the loss of many privileges, Pion-Berlin, Ugues and Esparza (2012) contend that the Brazilian military tends to incorporate protective and corporatist behaviors, such as disclosing only the missions that can benefit their image with the population.
Nevertheless, strict military doctrines emerge from a historical background. War (and its avoidance) has always been made of good information management, involving the ability to get it, keep it, hide it and strategically disclose it. Whole secrecy systems were built to serve this purpose, in contexts such as the World Wars I and II, where nothing else was more important than physically and ideally winning. Besides that, these systems were built to enable safe communication between countries, and most of them still have matching secrecy tiers (Rodrigues, 2013).
War-peripheric countries were not immune to these systems, since protagonist armies also influenced the doctrine of the Latin American military. Brazil, for example, received military training from two important countries during the XX Century, one from France, in 1919, and another one from Germany, between 1906 and 1910 (Santos, 2017). Later, the United States would turn out to be the greater influencer in Latin America, even establishing a military basis in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Norte from (Bandeira, 2008).
However, the birth of modern democracies in the after-wars brought new and urging responsibilities to governments and, suddenly, words such as participation, accountability and transparency became common. Transparency, especially, is emerging as an important driver of democracy. “[…] [M]any people believe that the presence of elections alone is not sufficient for a country to be considered a democracy, and that transparency must be included as part of the definition of political regime” (Hollyer, Rosendorff, & Vreeland, 2011, p. 4). Initiatives like the Open Government Partnership and the enactment of many freedom of information laws around the world are clear signs that transparency came to stay, and governments must be prepared to deal with it.
In such an environment, the need to keep a strategic management of information and, at the same time, to fulfill transparency democratic demands, emerges for defense institutions. This is a complex process, though. In the one hand, it is logically expected some resistance to this process, because it involves the need to assess risks more accurately, it can mean the loss of bureaucratic and political power, an increase of the chance of being exposed (due to corruption or inefficiency). Among the many available examples of resistance to disclosure, we list three: the U.S. have hidden its torture practices and mass surveillance programs from its citizens (Sagar, 2013); Brazil’s military hid documents of the military regime from the country’s Reconciliation Commission; and Mexico’s government simply forbid the disclosure of Mexico’s Truth Commission report (Doyle, 2004; Prieto, 2014). Secrecy can be legitimate, but there is often an over classification of information for illegitimate reasons (Thompson, 1999; Wells, 2004).
Resistance to disclosure can be a symptom of the creation of 'reserve domains' in defense, which are areas of knowledge that the military deliberately restrict to itself. By doing this, they leave civilian leaders and civil society aside, potentially jeopardizing civilian control over them. Secrecy emerges as a prerogative in modern democracies, which Stepan (1988) defines in his work. For him,

"[…] the dimension of military institutional prerogatives refers to those areas where, whether challenged or not, the military as an institution assumes they have an acquired right or privilege, formal or informal, to exercise effective control over its internal governance, to play a role within extra military areas within the state apparatus, or even to structure relationships between the state and political or civil society" (Stepan, 1988, p. 93).

In the other hand, transparency in defense is a sensible subject, since it is directly related to many legitimate national security issues that should be protected. Democracy generates secrets that can be justified in the ‘exact same values of democracy’. It is essential to recognize that there are democratically endorsed secrets, needed by those policies that would collapse if the whole process is not secret. The national security policies give us many examples of that need, but also the criminal justice, intellectual property and financial public institutions (Aftergood, 2009; Heald, 2003; Thompson, 1999).
Most studies of governmental and national security secrets are focused on the United States (Pozen, 2014; Sagar, 2013; Schulhofer, 2010; Wells, 2004, 2006), some of them establish generalist comparative approaches (Colaresi, 2014; Transparency International, 2011) and very few others take into account general overviews of other national units, such as Chile and Brazil (García, 2009; Klaus, 2016).
This article aims to fulfill the gap of knowledge of a detailed legal panorama of Brazil’s civilian access to military records and how it reflects the Brazilian civil-military relations. In order to do so, the study elaborates a descriptive analysis of the legislation, contextualized by the historical background of recent legislation. Furthermore, several interviews were undertaken, including interviewees such as archival military and civilian personnel, legislative commissions in charge of defense and intelligence matters, civilian officials from the Brazilian Ministry of Defense, among others.
Findings show that Brazil has a broad and complex legislation system regarding access to information and archives. The Brazilian Freedom of Information Law (Law 12.527/2011), e.g., establishes limits to classification of documents and a list of legitimate reasons to classify. The Archives Law (8.159/1991) also creates clear rules for eliminating documents, also preserving documents of historical value. However, the lack of enforcement mechanisms raises doubts about the correct implementation of these regulations, which sometimes can be just a bureaucratic facade.
In addition to that, civilian leaders do not take interest in defense issues, which is another barrier to an effective civilian access to military information. Even when there are well designed mechanisms of access, they are often ignored. The Senate’s Commission on Foreign Affairs and National Defense, e.g., does not pay attention to the Brazilian military budget and rarely demands public audiences about defense matters. The Ministry of Defense, in turn, does not have its own civilian career, and it is fulfilled with military personnel in civvies and public federal employees ‘borrowed from other ministries’, with no special knowledge of national defense, which arises questions regarding the effectiveness of the civilian control promoted by the Ministry.
Finally, it was possible to identify from the armed forces a willing to cooperate with transparency regulations as long as they do not touch the past. The answers to the several information requests sent for this study show acceptable levels of completeness, with few exceptions. Nevertheless, historians and reconciliation study groups had no support from the military to conduct their research, often facing strict barriers to access information, even when declassified.