This comes barely a week after the high profile suicide of Carlos Alexandre Azevedo, son of a well known Brazilian journalist. Azevedo was captured with his mother in 1974 and apparently abused by the jailers--to torture his watching mother--when he was not yet two years old. Azevedo suffered from numerous social and psychological traumas as a result of the abuse he suffered as a toddler, apparently never recovering. Other reports of the willingness of Brazilian authorities to abuse the children of suspected subversives have surfaced in recent months, though it is not yet clear if the practice was as systemic as the Argentinian corollary, where children were systematically taken from their parents (who were usually then killed) and given to be raised by members or friends of the ruling junta.
The National Truth Commission (Comissão Nacional da Verdade), established May of 2012, has been looking into disappearances, torture, rape, and other abuses that took place during Brazil's "dirty war" against suspected leftists and insurgents. On Monday, the Commission revealed that it had identified dozens of individuals--mostly military and police officials, but some civilians--who had been involved with certain atrocities.
The Commission has run into strong criticism though, as important segments of the public are strongly resistant to any digging around in the unpleasantries of the past. Many are simply too young or care too little about what they see as relatively minor abuses of a distant past. An estimated 500 individuals disappeared during the twenty year period, while another 9,000 were jailed and tortured in brutal crackdowns. The Commission estimates that approximately 50,000 were arrested in 1964--the first year of military rule--alone. Compare these numbers to the more spectacular horrors of Peru or Guatemala for example where nearly 70,000 and 200,000 were killed, respectively (or tiny Uruguay, where around 200 disappearances had a much more pervasive effect); much of Brazilian society--now a country of around 200 million--was relatively untouched by state violence during the period.
On the other hand, since Brazil passed a military amnesty in 1979 (which was upheld in 2010 by the Supreme Court), no prosecutions will result from the Commission's work. Still, the body hopes to name names, and to provide a deeper and clearer history of what actually happened during this dark period. And, digging up the truth is not just an academic exercise. The history, and especially the personal histories that emerge during this process (the Commission has a two year mandate) could have unimaginable consequences on Brazilian society and politics, not to mention the families and societies that lived them.
It will be interesting to see what the emergence of a (potentially) new collective knowledge and understanding of this period could do for the prospects for justice in Brazil. If the Commission does reveal atrocities or abuse that were, perhaps, more extensive or more heinous than generally accepted, could a civil-social groundswell provide the kind of political momentum to revisit the amnesty issue a la Uruguay and Argentina? Too soon to say, for sure. But, it seems a positive sign that Brazil is dealing with this difficult part of its past. Combined with last year's high-profile corruption scandal (Mensalão), which resulted in 35 convictions in a country that does nearly as well on corruption indexes as it does in the World Cup, the Truth Commission's first fruits, though devastatingly bitter, are a step forward.
