HUMAN RIGHTS: Torture – a Growing Blot on Brazil’s Foreign Image

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 9 2001 (IPS) - Things have not changed much in Brazil since a graffiti artist referred to South America’s giant on a wall in Geneva in 1970 as the “world champion in football and torture”, according to human rights activists.

The London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International issued a statement Tuesday calling attention to the persistent practice of torture, especially by police, and noting the lack of enforcement of a law against torture passed four years ago.

Brazil ratified the International Convention against Torture in 1989. But not until last year did it present a report – 10 years overdue – which began to be discussed Tuesday by the United Nations Committee against Torture in Geneva, which regularly assesses countries’ compliance with UN conventions.

Amnesty reported that “torture is regularly used as a means to extract confessions, to dominate, humiliate and control those in detention, or increasingly to extort money or serve the criminal interests of corrupt police officials.”

The report cites several cases, one of which clearly reveals the “effectiveness” of police brutality in obtaining confessions – even when no crime was committed.

Alexandre de Oliveira, who was arrested in January in the state of Minas Gerais, confessed to raping his one-year-old daughter. But it was later found that the infant’s genital bleeding was caused by a tumour, not sexual abuse.

De Oliveira was eventually released, and an internal police investigation launched. But the truth did not come out until after a confession was extracted from the suspect by beatings with an iron bar and electric shock – among the preferred methods of Brazilian police.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nigel Rodley, presented a similar report to the UN Human Rights Committee on Apr 11, documenting hundreds of cases of mistreatment of suspects, detainees and prison inmates in Brazil.

In his report, Rodley gave the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso a list of 30 recommendations to eliminate the “culture of brutality,” violence, overcrowding and other human rights violations suffered by Brazil’s prison population of more than 220,000.

Through the Justice Ministry, the Cardoso administration admitted the degrading situation in the country’s prisons and the persistence of torture, but responded that it had adopted a number of mainly legal measures to deal with the problem.

Besides the 1997 law that made torture a specific crime and provided for prison sentences for perpetrators, a National Human Rights Programme was put into effect in 1996, and a National Plan on Public Security, one of whose goals was to clean up the police force, was implemented last year.

The government’s acknowledgement of the existence of torture in police stations and jails is a step forward, say human rights activists, who add, however, that the problem lies in “the gap between discourse and practice.”

However, torture is not only a problem in police stations and prisons, but in pyschiatric hospitals and juvenile reform schools as well, parliamentary Deputy Marcos Rolim, chairman of the Chamber of Deputies’ Human Rights Commission, told IPS.

In recent years, the Human Rights Commission of the lower house of Congress has carried out inspections of such institutions, where they have documented systematic abuses.

The lawmakers found that in some juvenile detention centres, the children are subjected to “continuous torture,” as they are left semi-naked and forced to sit for hours on the floor without speaking, said Rolim.

In psychiatric hospitals, electric shock treatment continues to be used, and people who were actually in sound mental health are made ill, according to Autregésilo Carrano, a victim of that practice, who wrote a book on his own experience.

Around 70,000 people are submitted to subhuman treatment in Brazil’s mental hospitals, says Carrano, whose book was made into a film, “Seven-Headed Creature”, and who is part of a national movement for the eradication of lunatic asylums.

Torture in the armed forces, meanwhile, is a target of the Brazilian human rights organisation Torture Never Again. Cecilia Coimbra, the movement’s vice-president, said that although it is a taboo issue, it exists, and at least 11 cases, including five deaths, have occurred since 1990.

Coimbra and other representatives of Brazilian NGOs are attending the discussions on the Brazilian government’s report in the Committee against Torture in Geneva this week.