RIGHTS-BRAZIL: Justice on Trial in Sao Paulo Massacre Case

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 19 2001 (IPS) - The trial of military police Colonel Ubiratán Guimaraes, accused in Brazil of ordering a 1992 prison massacre in which 111 inmates were killed, opens Wednesday in Sao Paulo in a major test for this South American country’s justice system.

“Two opposing models” of security are facing off in the trial: one which encourages police to “shoot to kill,” and another that seeks to combine law enforcement with respect for human rights, the director of the non-governmental Centre for Global Justice, James Cavallaro, told IPS.

The case is seen as an acid test for Brazil’s justice system. Acquittal for Guimaraes “would confirm the widespread view that those who wear uniforms and kill outlaws never go to jail in Brazil, even when they commit serious crimes,” said Cavallaro, a political scientist and human rights activist from the United States.

The mass killing that took place Oct 2, 1992 in the Carandiru House of Detention, in the city of Sao Paulo, culminated a crackdown on a prison riot, and according to Guimaraes came in response to aggression by the inmates.

But the prisoners were unarmed and had already surrendered, according to José André Araújo, an ex-convict who survived the shooting by hiding under the bodies of his fellow inmates.

In the massacre, 103 prisoners were shot dead by a total of 515 bullets, and eight were killed by knives. In addition, 153 people were wounded, including 23 police.

Although a total of 149 military police were charged in connection with the incident, none were arrested.

Four have since died and 11 are off the hook because the statute of limitations expired on the offences of which they were accused – “causing bodily injury” – or because they were sentenced to community service rather than to jail.

The outcome of the separate trial of Colonel Guimaraes, the officer who headed the brutal crackdown, is crucial to the fate of the rest of the military police facing charges, who will be tried at a later date.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights already condemned Brazil last year for failing to protect the lives of state wards and for the delay in bringing the culprits to trial and indemnifying the victims’ families.

The Guimaraes trial was deferred several times. It finally opened on Nov 29, 2000, but was suspended two days later because one of the jurors fell ill and had to be hospitalised.

Now everything is ready, and there is “clear proof that the colonel, and the rest of those involved in that barbaric act, were guilty,” said Cavallaro – who added, however, that the sentence to be handed down was anyone’s guess.

Since the defence lawyers and prosecutors will cite Brazil’s high level of violence and the duties of the state in their arguments, the trial will also put the government’s public security policy to test, he remarked.

Those who justify the massacre see “criminals as animals to be exterminated,” and say human rights come into contradiction with effective law enforcement, “a false dilemma,” in the view of activists like Cavallaro.

Brazil’s justice system is also on trial in another high- profile case: the April 1996 killing of 19 landless protesters in the town of Eldorado de Caraxás in northeastern Brazil – another example of the impunity and excessive delays in dispensing justice when it comes to crimes committed by the police.

In the Sao Paulo case, in which 149 military police were charged, the three commanding officers were brought to court in 1999. However, that trial was annulled due to irregularities.

The retrial was delayed several times, and was finally rescheduled for Monday – when it was cancelled yet again.

The slowest-moving human rights case, however, involved the 1983 murder of Margarida Alves, a rural labour activist in Alagoa Grande, in the northeastern state of Paraíba.

Not until Monday, 18 years after the crime was committed, was Jose Buarque de Gusmao Neto, the local landowner accused of ordering the assassination, tried – and acquitted.

His absolution by a jury that voted five to two came as a huge disappointment for Raimunda de Mascena, the women’s coordinator for the National Confederation of Farm Workers (CONTAG), which mobilised thousands to stand vigil outside the courthouse in Joao Pessoa, the capital of the state of Paraíba.

Monday’s verdict demonstrated that “economic clout still rules in this country,” even in legal decisions, the trade unionist lamented in an interview with IPS. “There was no lack of evidence in the more than 4,000-page file that the latifundistas” or large landowners ordered Alves’ killing, she maintained.

CONTAG and the prosecutors are considering whether to appeal or to take other measures.

But “little can be expected” of a judiciary that took 18 years to bring to trial the murderer of a worker, in a country where “we all know who’s in charge,” said Mascena, alluding to the big moneyed interests.