State Violence, Torture, and Political Prisoners by Renata Meirelles

Author:Renata Meirelles [Meirelles, Renata]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781351135658
Google: ZZa0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-10-08T04:59:02+00:00

The year of 1969 marked a substantial increase in Amnesty’s work regarding Brazil. In October 1969, Amnesty sent a researcher over to Latin America to investigate torture charges.13 Swedish investigator Kjell Johansson visited Brazil around the end of November and beginning of December of 1969. Besides Brazil, he visited Uruguay; Argentina; Chile; Peru; and Costa Rica, where he attended the Inter-American Conference on Human Rights. According to Amnesty, the purpose of his visit was to make contacts, give information about Amnesty, and encourage the creation of new sections. According to Amnesty, his trip aroused considerable publicity (Vreche, 2017).

At the time Johansson was in Brazil, President Emílio Garrastazu Médici gave a public statement on torture, denying its existence within his government. It is important to remark that although torture was a state policy during the Brazilian dictatorship, it was neither implemented as a legal instrument nor ever publicly admitted to by the military officers. On a number of occasions, Brazilian military officers publicly denied the use of torture by the dictatorial regime. On one of these occasions, in late 1969, President Médici publicly stated that he would not admit to the use of torture in Brazil. While in Brazil, Johansson witnessed this and mentioned it in his report:

Around the end of November, beginning December 1969 when I was in Brazil, the president Emílio Garrastazu Médici and later the Minister of Justice Alfredo Buzaid chose, however, to make a statement about torture. Factors that contributed greatly to make the Government take this step were clearly foreign publicity about outrageous examples of aggression towards political prisoners, occasional – mostly indirect – hints in the national press and a growing uneasiness over the increasing brutality and extension of torture which had begun to spread even to circles in whose interest it would normally have been to support the present dictatorship.

The statement of the President and the Minister of Justice were given large space in the Brazilian press. What was their attitude? The president declared that he could not accept that torture was practiced in his country. The Minister of Justice endorsed this statement and gave assurances that if anybody was found guilty of such actions he would be punished. (…)

The declarations of the President and the Minister of Justice gave the press welcome opportunity to start talking about these matters again. During the following days the newspapers, in spite of being very conscious about the evident limits of what they could dare to publish – were very helpful in informing the government about cases of practiced torture.14

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