Brazil president weeps as she unveils report on military dictatorship’s abuses. (Photograph: Agencia Estado/Xinhua Press/Corbis)
• Dilma Rousseff was herself tortured; thousands of people killed and ‘disappeared’
• US and UK trained interrogators in torture during 1964-85 military rule
Jonathan Watts in Rio de Janeiro and Jan Rocha in São Paulo
The Guardian (UK)
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, wept on Wednesday as she unveiled the findings of a Truth Commission investigation into the systematic murder, torture and other abuses carried out during the country’s military dictatorship.
After a nearly three-year study, the commission confirmed that 191 people were killed and 243 “disappeared” under military rule, which lasted from 1964 to 1985. More than 200 have never been found. (These official figures are notoriously conservative. The actual figure is widely known to have been much higher.—Eds)
The 2,000-page report named 377 officials who were blamed for serious human rights violations and recommended a revision to the 1979 Amnesty Law so that perpetrators can be prosecuted.
It also called on the military to recognise its responsibility for “grave violations” of the law and human rights, noting that even today the armed forces were uncooperative in providing materials and granting interviews about alleged abuses.
A share of the blame went to the United States and the UK, which were found to have trained Brazilian interrogators in torture techniques. (As they did throughout Latin America, particularly in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. These nations had also plotted to bring about these coups.—Eds.)
Among the victims of abuse was Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who was beaten and jolted with electric shocks during her three-year detention at Tiradentes prison in the 1970s.
The president was visibly moved as she released the report of the seven-member commission, which she set up in 2012.
“Brazil deserves the truth,” she said as tears welled up in her eyes. “The truth means above everything the opportunity to reconcile ourselves and our history.”
As was the case elsewhere in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, the elite and middle class aligned themselves with the military to stave off what they saw as a communist threat. Killings, torture and detention were commonly used against political enemies. In Argentina and Chile, the toll of dead and missing were proportionally much higher than in Brazil.
Many of the worst crimes in Brazil were already known, but the commission emphasised the political motives and organisation behind them, dismissing claims that the killings and other abuses were isolated acts of overzealous individuals.
“Under the military dictatorship, the repression and elimination of political opposition was [carried out] because of the policy of the state, conceived and implemented based on decisions by the president of the republic and military ministers,” the commission concludes.
Several other countries have been implicated by commission members. The Brazilians initially used French counter-insurgency techniques developed in Algeria, but in the 1960s US influence became stronger.
Many Brazilian officers went to Panama to train at the School of the Americas, alongside military and police officers from almost every other Latin American country, whether run by dictators or not.
Courses they were given included training in “counter-insurgency techniques, command operations, intelligence and counterintelligence, psychological warfare operations, police-military operations and interrogation techniques,” the report says.
Secret instruction manuals used at the school were declassified by the US department of defence in the mid-1990s, revealing training in torture and other serious violations of human rights.
In the 1970s, Brazilian officers were sent to London for training in torture techniques. A former president, General Ernesto Geisel, who ruled from 1974-79, is quoted as saying, “The English, in their secret service, acted with discretion. Our people, inexperienced and extroverted, did it openly. I don’t justify torture, but I recognise there are circumstances when the individual is impelled to practise torture, to obtain certain confessions and so avoid a greater evil.”
The report also quotes former general Hugo de Andrade Abreu, who said “at the end of 1970 we sent a group of army officers to England to learn the English system of interrogation. This consists of putting the prisoner in a cell incommunicado, a method known as the ‘refrigerator’.”
In 1971, the “English system”, as it became known, was put into practice in Rio army HQ in Barão de Mesquita street, which had become a torture centre. Four new cubicles were built. One, lined with polystyrene and asbestos, was a “cold room”, another a “sound room”. A third was all white and the fourth all black.
Each cubicle was monitored to enable interrogators to listen to the prisoners’ heartbeats.
“They were variations on the techniques used by the British army against Irish terrorists,” said Amílcar Lobo, an army psychiatrist who worked in a torture centre at Petrópolis known as the ‘house of death’. “They were destined to destructure the personality of the prisoners without touching them.”
To uncover the truth about such abuses, the commission questioned victims and former officers, combed archives and re-examined medical records.
Many activists, however, said the truth was not enough. After the report was unveiled, a group of 10 protesters waved banners and shouted demands for punishment of those responsible for executions and torture.
Members of the commission also called for punishment. They said abuses continue today because the dictatorship era set an example of impunity.
“Amnesty does not extend to the agents of the state who put in practice excesses of violence,” said the former minister of justice José Carlos Dias, one of the six out of seven commission members to call for a lifting of the amnesty.
But there are many obstacles to doing so. Supreme court justices have previously rejected requests to lift the amnesty and described the issue as a “page that has been turned”.
Rousseff has also previously indicated her reluctance to settle old political scores, saying national unity was a higher priority.
The report notes that even though the widespread torture and executions were not covered in the Brazilian media due to censorship, “surprising” details of how they worked were revealed in a recently declassified telegram by the US consul general, Clarence A Boonstra, in Rio de Janeiro in 1973.
The commission notes that Boonstra told his superiors about a crackdown in which there was an increase in arrests, mostly of college students. Their interrogations, he noted, were carried out under “a system of intensive psychophysical abuse, developed to extract information without leaving visible and lasting marks on the body”. The detainees suspected of being “hardline terrorists” continued, according to the report, “to be submitted to old methods of physical violence that sometimes cause death”.
One of the few former military officers who agreed to talk to the Truth Commission was ex-colonel Paulo Malhães, who was among those sent to the UK for training. Malhães told the commission “psychological torture was best, and England was the best place to learn it”.
“It didn’t leave physical marks, and it was much more efficient than brute force, especially when you were trying to transform militants into infiltrated agents.”
Malhães, by his own admission was also a sadistic physical torturer, who used snakes, crocodiles and rats to terrify prisoners. Two weeks after giving evidence to the Truth Commission in Rio, he was found dead at his home in mysterious circumstances. Former political prisoners believe he was eliminated to stop him talking more to the Truth Commission and providing the names of torturers.
Some of the information in the report came from diplomatic correspondence in the UK National Archives at Kew, but the commission notes that a request for access to still-classified British documents, sent to the British government, has not yet been answered.
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