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BRAZIL: The Long Shadow Of The Dictatorship
By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO (IPS) - Those who died and
"disappeared" during the 1964-1985 military
dictatorship in Brazil represent a mere "one
percent of the agenda" of the Special
Secretariat for Human Rights (SEDH), but
captivate "99 percent of the attention of
the press," complained Human Rights
Secretary Paulo Vannuchi.
The SEDH is holding conferences on the
rights of children and adolescents, in which
170,000 people are participating all over
the country, and running campaigns against
sexual exploitation of children and for the
rights of the elderly, the disabled,
homosexuals and other minorities, the
cabinet-level official pointed out.
It is also fighting other problems, such as
slave-like conditions for some labourers,
torture, and discrimination against women,
Afro-descendants and indigenous people –
part of "a very broad agenda," said the
minister in a recent interview with IPS and
the Italian news agency ANSA.
But its activities do not generally attract
the attention of the media, which are more
interested in unresolved issues relating to
the dictatorship that ended in 1985, such as
finding the remains of opponents of the
regime who were "disappeared" and the
questions of the punishment of torturers and
public access to classified documents and
archives.
A new search is under way for the bodies of
the Guerrillas of Araguaia, an insurgent
group created by members of the old
Brazilian Communist Party who were massacred
in a military operation between 1972 and
1975 in the vicinity of the Araguaia river
in the northern jungle state of Pará. At
least 70 people were killed, including local
civilians, and many questions remain
unclarified.
Victims' families and civil society
organisations brought the case to the
Inter-American human rights system. The
Brazilian state must answer for its actions
to the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court
of Human Rights next year, and may be issued
with a judgment condemning it for illegal
detention, torture and killings.
Moving out of the dark shadows left by the
military dictatorship is a challenge on
which "there is no consensus; on the
contrary, it has caused divisions within the
government itself, and even among the
families involved," Vannuchi said. Some, for
example, disagree with the way the search
for remains is being carried out in the
Araguaia river basin, he said.
Public access to secret documents from the
dictatorship, which would shed light on the
fate of the victims of forced disappearance,
is the goal of another longstanding struggle
by family members and activists that has so
far been unsuccessful.
According to Vannuchi, many documents have
been made public in Brazil, in the National
Archive, more than in neighbouring countries
that were also ruled by military regimes.
But there is a long way to go to recover
"The Right to Truth and Memory", the title
of a 2007 book published by the SEDH as a
result of 11 years of investigation and
fact-finding by its Special Commission on
Those Who Died and Disappeared for Political
Reasons (CEMDP).
The armed forces, which created irregular
agencies of political repression, claim that
all files related to those activities were
destroyed. "But I don't believe the military
intelligence centres would have destroyed
everything," without keeping some records,
Vannuchi said.
The Brazilian Foreign Ministry, which played
a role in the clampdown on dissidents during
the dictatorship, has some 60,000 historical
documents dating to that period, but argues
that making them public could reopen old
wounds connected to past relations with
neighbouring countries, like Bolivia and
Paraguay, with which Brazil had been at war
or had border disputes.
In this respect "I was not able to persuade"
the Foreign Ministry, "but I will keep
trying," as sensitive documents affecting
foreign policy could be excluded while the
rest were made accessible to the public,
Vannuchi said.
The recent publication of documents of
former U.S. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger, mentioning the support given by
Brazil to the 1973 military coup in Chile,
added to the pressure on the Foreign
Ministry to open up its files.
Latin American countries like Argentina and
Chile have made more progress than Brazil in
bringing to justice members of the military
and police for dictatorship-era human rights
crimes like torture and extrajudicial
executions. In Brazil the argument put
forward is that the 1979 amnesty applies to
"both sides," meaning guerrillas and state
agents.
"I am in favour of punishment," particularly
in the form of alternative sentencing and
reparations, because the amnesty "was not an
agreement between the different parties,"
but instead was imposed by the military
regime and was effectively a defeat for the
civil society proposal of a "broad, general
and unrestricted" measure, Vannuchi said.
In fact, there were still political
detainees in Brazil until October 1980, over
a year after the amnesty had been signed.
Nor does the amnesty explicitly say that it
applies to "agents of the state," he said.
But above all, torture is a crime that has
no statute of limitations under
international law, he said.
The question of what is and is not covered
by the amnesty is due to be decided soon by
the Supreme Court.
The SEDH is best-known for its activities
involving issues inherited from the
dictatorship, but its "strategic" goal is
education on human rights - its priority for
the 2009-2010 period, said Vannuchi, who
uses the question of those who were
"disappeared" for political reasons as an
opportunity to highlight other forgotten
rights, like those of minorities.
Military training in this country, for
instance, does not include education about
constitutional law, which could discourage
coups d'état, nor about human rights, he
noted. And it is still inconceivable for the
armed forces to admit they made a mistake
when they overthrew the government in 1964,
he added.
This subject is even absent from the study
programmes of law schools and from the
Brazilian bar exam, Vannuchi said.
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