More than the final report of, thousands of streets, avenues and squares of the country still honor military personnel who were pointed out by the working group as responsible for crimes such as torture, execution and concealment of corpse during (1964-1985).
The change of street names was one of the recommendations made by CNV in 2014 with the purpose of repair and memory, in an effort to prevent the repetition of authoritarian practices in the country. There was, however, only occasional advances.
In May this year, the São Paulo Court determined that the City of São Paulo. The municipal management appealed the decision, and the process goes to the second instance.
Survey made by Sheet Based on data from the harvested in Na, it points out that at least 2,039 unique addresses in the country are named after any of the 377 people in the CNV report. There are also addresses that refer to the “March 31”, the day of the coup.
The number may be even higher, as the analysis was conservative when disregarding possible homonyms (read more about the methodology at the end of the report).
The two largest cities in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, are the ones that have the most addresses linked to the dictatorship: 15 and 14, respectively. Manaus and Salvador follow, with 13 and 12 addresses each.
“These cities are centers of political power. Rio de Janeiro, because it has been capital for so long, has a staff of military and equipment of the Armed Forces still very present in the city,” says the historian and researcher of the working group Doi-Codi Deborah Neves.
Altamira, in Pará, is the only city with less than 200 thousand inhabitants – and that is not a capital – among the first five on the list, with 11 addresses. The tributes are distributed around the Transamazônica Highway, a large project designed by the military dictatorship that cuts the city.
In the regional analysis, the Northeast appears first with 705 addresses, compared to 552 from the Southeast. São Paulo is the state with the most cases, 243 unique places. In second place comes to Bahia, with 227.
President Castello Branco is the most honored figure, with mentions in at least 729 addresses. “The fact that he was the first president, in addition to died in a tragic circumstance in a plane crash, may have contributed to creating this hero aura,” says Neves.
The date March 31 ranked second in the ranking, giving a name to 363 streets, avenues and other public places. “The date is symbolic because to this day there is a dispute around its meaning.”
In recent years, March 31 has been marked by pro demonstrations and against the 1964 coup in several cities of the country. In 2025, leftist groups used the date to protest against the amnesty requests to those involved in.
Then in the ranking of the honorees, former Presidents Arthur da Costa e Silva (310 addresses) and Emílio Garrastazú Médici (279 addresses), as well as the Minister of Aeronautics Marechal-Do Eduardo Gomes (104 addresses).
Gomes is also considered a patron of the Brazilian Air Force, so part of the tributes may not be directly linked to the period of his role as minister of dictatorship.
References to the presidents of the military dictatorship are not only in the streets: there are also municipalities that carry the names of the representatives. Among them are mediatile in Pará; Two President Médici, in Rondônia and Maranhão; Two President Castello Branco, in Paraná and Santa Catarina; and President Figueiredo, in Amazonas.
For lawyer Pedro Dallari, one of the CNV coordinators, the reason for so many allusions to the military in the northern region is due to the occupation of the Amazon that took place during the period, including to combat the Araguaia Guerrilla, a rebel movement established on the border between Tocantins, Pará and Maranhão between the 1960s and 1970s.
The city of Medicilândia, for example, was founded during the construction of Transamazônica in 1973. “Also because it is a very uninhabited region, where the presence of the Armed Forces was justified even for the sake of border security,” says Dallari.
Bills propose change of street names
Dallari states that the number of addresses with references to the military dictatorship is likely to be higher, as the CNV recommendation for the names to be changed was little implemented by the municipalities.
For him, the change of nomenclature is necessary for Brazilian society to recognize the ills of the period and move on. “The fact that there was no overcoming of the past makes this past survive,” he says.
For the “Streets of Memory” project, implemented in the city of São Paulo in 2015 ,. In 2016, there was one of the most emblematic changes: the change of the high President Costa e Silva, known as Minhocão, to a high President João Goulart, agent deposed by the 1964 coup.
However, important roads, such as Avenida Castelo Branco, still resist in the city. In his May decision, Judge Luiz Manoel de Fonseca Pires, from the 3rd Public Finance Court, accepted a civil action filed by the Vladimir Herzog Institute in conjunction with the Union Public Defender’s Office.
“For over ten years the municipal government has been silent on the rename of these public spaces in compliance with the right to political memory,” said the magistrate.
The Attorney General’s Office appealed and achieved the suspensive effect of the decision. In the City Council, two bills that propose the alteration of the names of the addresses in the state capital, but without prediction to be voted.
In Salvador, the City Council filed a bill that prohibits honors to torturers and dictators on the city streets. The proposal also vetoes that the addresses receive names of owners and slave traffickers, thinkers who defended and legitimized slavery and people defending fascist and Nazi ideals.
In Rio de Janeiro, a law that prohibited the alteration of existing street names over 20 years ago was revoked in 2024.
The current city’s master plan prohibits the appointment of addresses in honor of people convicted of acts of torture, pedophilia or femicide crime. Nevertheless, there is no bill that proposes to change the names of places linked to the military dictatorship in process.
The same is observed in Manaus. In the capital of Amazonas, the Public Prosecution Service forwarded to the City Council a recommendation for the names of the addresses to be reevaluated. The Attorney’s Office said it analyzes the document.
METHODOLOGY
The report used the IBGE public places base, updated to the 2022 Census, to reach the names of unique addresses in Brazil through the Python programming language. From the result, the crossing list was crossed with the list of the CNV final report that bears the full name, patent and position of 377 military personnel pointed out as responsible for crimes of the dictatorship.
In addition to the exact correspondences with each full name, were also considered variations of spelling and compositions with the position. In the case of the first president of the dictatorship, for example, both “Humberto de Alencar Castello Branco” and variations such as “President Castello Branco”, “Marechal Castello Branco” or “Humberto Castelo Branco” were included.
Cases were excluded where “Castelo Branco” appears with only one letter “L”, with no military patent or title of president, as the name may refer to a construction or a city of Portugal. There are 742 records of “White Castle” disregarded.
Following the same logic, there are still 187 “Costa e Silva” and 24 “João Figueiredo”, who may or may not be related to the other two presidents of the dictatorship period. There are also 403 disregarded records of common names and surnames such as “José Ferreira da Silva” and “Eduardo Gomes” when not accompanied by office or patent.
As the IBGE base is updated by 2022, some names of public places may have already changed.
