An old CIA memo provides rare proof of abuses by Brazil's dictatorship
Last edited Sun Jun 6, 2021, 10:23 AM - Edit history (1)
By
Marina Lopes
May 21, 2018 at 4:29 p.m. CDT
From 1964 to 1985, Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship that tortured and murdered dissidents in the name of fending off communism. The generals who ran the country have long denied the use of such brutal tactics, but a newly unearthed CIA memo reveals that Brazil’s top leaders knew and approved of a policy to execute people seen as threatening to the regime.
In the two decades after Brazil’s military overthrew a democratically elected government in 1964, researchers say, the regime committed numerous atrocities. Interrogators utilized electric shocks on victims, drilled nails into their hands and doused their extremities in alcohol before setting them on fire. Hundreds of people deemed a threat to the government died or disappeared.
But whether the country’s top leaders endorsed such behavior has been hard to pin down: Brazil’s military maintains that all classified documents from the dictatorship were destroyed. The CIA document offers a rare crumb of hard evidence.
The 1974 memo to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger describes a meeting between Brazilian President Ernesto Geisel and military intelligence leaders. According to the memo, Geisel was briefed on an existing policy of executing “subversives.” After reflecting on the policy for a weekend, he decided to maintain it.
“This document specifically shows that in fact, there was a chain of command when it came to repression, that it was not something happening in the basements of prisons that the leadership knew nothing about,” said Marcelo Ridenti, a sociology professor at the University of Campinas in São Paulo. “It reveals something that historians and even family members of political prisoners already knew, in some sense, but it offers proof to claims that had yet to be confirmed.”
The violence of the dictatorship still haunts Brazilian politics. The country’s past three presidents were jailed or went into exile during military rule. In 2012, then-president Dilma Rousseff, a former political prisoner, launched a Truth Commission to investigate the generals’ atrocities. The commission accused more than 300 people of grave human-rights abuses, but they never faced jail time thanks to an amnesty law they negotiated before relinquishing power.
In Brazil, nostalgia grows for the dictatorship — not the brutality, but the law and order
In light of the explicit endorsement of the murders described in the CIA memo, many in Brazil are calling for a second look at the amnesty law and the return of the Truth Commission. Ivo Herzog, whose father was tortured and killed by the dictatorship, petitioned the Brazilian foreign ministry to request that the United States release more documents about the generals.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/05/21/an-old-cia-memo-provides-rare-proof-of-abuses-by-brazils-dictatorship/
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This morning I learned about a new article published only an hour ago or so. I tried to read it immediately, and learned I must buy a subscription, which I really don't want to do, just for this story:
The House of Death and a human incinerator: dark tales from from Brazil's military dictatorship. A federal court ordered the expropriation of a Rio de sugar cane mill this week notoriously used to incinerate the corpses of tortured dissidents.
The story is locked tighter than a drum, no way can I get in there without forking over some money. Rats.
https://brazilian.report/society/2021/06/06/dark-tales-brazil-military-dictatorship/
One way or another I'm going to finally find out about this. It just may take a while.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Taken from an article about Brazil's President
João Figueiredo:
A young girl refuses to greet President
João Figueiredo.
Courtesy of Portal São Francisco.
~ snip ~
The continuation of the Lula-led “new unionism” only added to the Figueiredo administration’s inability to avoid a recession and control the Brazilian economy’s inflationary spiral. Labor leaders organized large-scale strikes in 1979, 1980, and 1981, and on each occasion Figueiredo struggled to exercise authority. He arrested Lula under the auspices of the National Security Law and attempted to prohibit businesses from bargaining directly with labor. But, even with their charismatic leader imprisoned, workers continued to strike and business executives disregarded the military regime’s labor courts to negotiate settlements between labor and management. The Figueiredo administration’s lack of coordination with the business community, which had consistently collaborated with the dictatorship since the coup d’état, further exposed the military regime’s declining support.
~ snip ~
While Figueiredo attempted to diffuse the opposition’s momentum with subtle legislative modifications, radical officers expressed their discontent with liberalization by planting bombs in public spaces, blaming it on left-wing subversives, and hoping that the public’s response would empower the hard-line and derail democratic reform. When the public discovered that the security apparatus, not communists, were responsible for the acts of terrorism, unity in the armed forces diminished even further, and General Golbery, the military’s chief advocate for liberalization, resigned.
More:
https://library.brown.edu/create/fivecenturiesofchange/chapters/chapter-7/military-rule/figueiredo/