HUMAN RIGHTS DAY-BRAZIL: Relatives of Disappeared Find Little to Celebrate

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 10 2004 (IPS) - There was little to celebrate this International Human Rights Day for the relatives of those tortured, killed and “disappeared” during Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship, as their attempts to gain access to secret military archives were frustrated once again.

Early Friday morning, left-leaning Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a decree establishing new timeframes for the declassification of official military documents.

Despite earlier promises to speed up access to the files, the new decree will allow documents considered “top secret” by the government to be kept sealed for up to 60 years.

Cecilia Coimbra, vice president of the Torture Never Again Group (GTNM), an association of relatives of the victims of military rule, referred to the president’s actions as “shameful”.

In accordance with the new decree, documents considered “reserved”, “confidential”, “secret” and “top secret” can be kept sealed for five, 10, 20 and 30 years, respectively. But once the original timeframe has elapsed, the period of secrecy can be extended for an equal number of years, although only on a one-time basis.

The GTNM and other human rights activists have been pushing for the opening of the military’s secret archives, primarily to gain access to information on the fate and whereabouts of the roughly 150 people murdered and “disappeared” by the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s.

Their demands were largely aimed at the revocation of a decree signed in 2002 by former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), through which documents deemed “sensitive” for state security reasons could be kept sealed for 50 years, with the potential for unlimited extensions.

The revocation would have meant a return to a 1991 decree that established timeframes of between five and 30 years, with no extensions. “That was what we wanted, and that is what we were promised by the National Secretary of Human Rights, Nilmario Miranda, on Thursday,” Coimbra told IPS.

Further frustrating the hopes of human rights activists, Lula also signed a provisional measure establishing an interministerial commission that will classify documents in accordance with the need for secrecy to “protect the state”.

The commission will be empowered to change the timeframes set for documents, evaluate requests for access, and delete certain information.

Coimbra said it was “unacceptable” for a “commission of dignitaries” to have the authority to rule on these matters, adding that her organisation will continue to push for “full, unconditional and unrestricted” access to the documents.

What makes the new measures even more dismaying, she noted, is the fact that they were adopted on Human Rights Day.

Even worse, just 24 hours earlier, Secretary Miranda – whose post has ministerial ranking – had announced that Lula would mark the day by adopting measures to revoke the decree that prohibited access to the files, in recognition of the people’s right to see them.

“We accept the timeframes, because we recognise the need to maintain secrecy for a certain period of time, but we can’t accept the fact that a limited number of government representatives will have the power to double them,” said Coimbra.

The struggle for access to the military archives reached a peak in October, when the Brasilia daily Correio Braziliense published photographs of a naked and visibly suffering man in a prison cell, purported to be journalist Wladimir Herzog, who died in a Sao Paulo military installation in 1975.

In response to the photographs and accompanying report, the Brazilian army issued a press release praising the military regime and justifying its repressive actions.

The resulting furore forced Lula to intervene by demanding a retraction from army chief Roberto de Albuquerque.

The controversy also led to the resignation, several days later, of the defence minister at the time, José Viegas, who was replaced by vice president José Alencar.

It was subsequently claimed that the man in the photos was actually someone else, a Canadian priest named Leopold D’Astous, who was kidnapped and tortured by the security forces in 1973.

Regardless of the man’s identity, however, the photographs were clear evidence of military repression, and the entire incident merely served to reinforce the demands for the opening of the archives, with transparent rules and “reasonable” timeframes.

Herzog’s death was officially attributed to suicide, which would have been practically impossible given the conditions of his imprisonment.

Pressure is also mounting from relatives of the Brazilian Communist Party members who organised a guerrilla movement in the Araguaia River basin in northern Brazil, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Some 70 guerrillas and campesinos (peasant farmers) who supported them were exterminated by the army. The current president of the ruling Workers Party (PT), José Genoino, is one of the few surviving members of the movement.

The bodies of those killed were never recovered, despite ongoing attempts to find them.

The relatives of the victims hope that the secret military archives can shed light on the details of the massacre and the whereabouts of the remains of the “disappeared”.