Records of Brazil's dark past surface after years of denial

Records of Brazil's dark past surface after years of denial

Hidden Files Force Brazil to Face Its Past
By LARRY ROHTER

Published: January 31, 2005


IO DE JANEIRO, Jan. 30 - As if by magic, incriminating documents supposedly incinerated years ago by the government have suddenly reappeared. As a result, Brazil is being forced to confront one of the most distasteful aspects of its past: the death, disappearance or torture of hundreds of political prisoners during 21 years of military dictatorship.

For years, the military and state intelligence agencies swore that no records of that dark era still existed. "They were all legally destroyed in the 80's and 90's, in accordance with established procedures," José Viegas said in an interview late in 2003 when he was the civilian minister of defense, citing assurances he said he had received from the military high command.

But in October, a pair of photographs said to be those of Vladimir Herzog, a political prisoner killed in 1975, unexpectedly resurfaced. In the outcry that followed, the former military intelligence agent who supplied the pictures said they were among thousands of pages of documents supposedly destroyed after democracy was restored in 1985 but were in fact in secret archives still out of the reach of civilian authorities.

Reluctantly, the state intelligence agency and the intelligence branches of the armed forces admitted the claim was true. Since then, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former labor leader who was himself briefly jailed by the dictatorship, has been grappling with the problem of what to do with the documents and how to punish senior intelligence and military officials, some still in government service, who lied about the records' destruction.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/31/international/americas/31brazil.html?oref=login
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Same story is repeated at this registration-free site:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/02/01/2003221825

They part of the BIG BAD 4, Russia,China,India, Brazil pact.

They've been stirring things up in South America lately between Columbia and Venezuela, distributing propaganda flyers to Brazil and surrounding countries trying to turn them against Venezuela, etc...

US foreign policy, cause civil wars, weaken the region and then move in for the kill...lot's of oil there.

around oil theft and killing democracy.

...how to punish senior intelligence and military officials, some still in government service...

be an attack of conscience by one former file-pusher in the Brazilian Ministry of Love.

Have to ask how many duplicate files exist of the CIA "crown jewels" that Bush Sr. gathered and then supposedly destroyed in 1975 after the Church/Pike Committees started poking around.

What a great way to blackmail all the wet ops/black ops participants -- and their bosses in Washington -- into keeping their mouths shut for life. Devil's in the details.

...Venezuela was the opening salvo of a continent-wide fight against neo-liberal "free market" economics and all the old vested classes who lined their pockets at the expense of national development. Lula, despite his sometime-weakness in the face of the IMF, is light years ahead of anything seen there since the 1960s.

WE were TOTALLY unaware our own government was creating so much suffering in Latin America, planting right-wing idiots in Presidencies who were more interested in getting more power than putting their countries on the right course.

It has taken DECADES before we started learning about the hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed, some with torture involved first, many children, elderly who were unable to escape when their villages were leveled, etc. What a damnable shame.

many people in the US still think that it was right for the government to do that. They are the same people that today are willing to swallow all the crap that rains down from the * administration. It is an undercurrent of the american society that we, foreigners, have been aware for a long time.

A good part of the rest of the american society are good, but don't really know the depth of the damage done in South America. They wonder WHY most people in SA hate the US guts.