The Brazilian Truth Commission

Local, National and Global Perspectives

Nina Schneider

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789200041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Bringing together some of the world's leading scholars, practitioners, and human-rights activists, this groundbreaking volume provides the first systematic analysis of the 2012–2014 Brazilian National Truth Commission. While attentive to the inquiry's local and national dimensions, it offers an illuminating transnational perspective that considers the Commission's Latin American regional context and relates it to global efforts for human rights accountability, contributing to a more general and critical reassessment of truth commissions from a variety of viewpoints.

Part I

The Brazilian National Truth Commission

Section 1

Emergence and Context

Chapter 1

Dear Madame President

A Never-Delivered Speech and a Never-Ending Story

Vera Paiva

‘Victim’ is the term used by the United Nations to name persons subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including torture. Victims are entitled to compensation and rehabilitation.¹

I was invited to be part of this edited volume because my family is ‘victim’. My father was detained by agents of the military government and ‘disappeared’ in 1971. Without any prior accusation, my mother and fourteen-year-old sister were also arrested at home, one day later, and deprived of due process. Being the voice of the ‘victims’ in this collection makes this contribution a moment of testimony. Giving testimony is an important part of the process of rehabilitation and psychosocial reparation, so for this opportunity I am thankful.

I must say that as a professor and researcher in the psycho-­sociological field working within a human rights framework for almost four decades on the global response to AIDS, I found that a dramaturgic perspective of social life is quite productive for inspiring both academic and activist imaginations. By understanding everyday life through scenes and their scenarios, and by decoding each scene and embodied actor’s perspective (as sujeitos em cena), we help people to comprehend their lives, changing the way they live their scenes. This dramaturgic approach has helped mitigate unnecessary psychosocial suffering in my area of scholarship. Understanding and changing scenes and scenarios – that is how we have moved on from unacceptable oppression and humiliation, from naturalized inequalities that deny the humanity of many people on the basis of their ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, territory or economic status, or religious or political beliefs.

So, I will share my views of this never-ending story through some real episodes and scenes that I lived and observed, and will offer some interpretation. I will begin with the Brazilian National Truth Commission (the CNV) sanction act.

Scene 1: Invitation to the Palace (16 November 2011)

Our family had been invited to attend the ceremony at which Presidenta Dilma would sanction the CNV law. We decided that I would go with my son, João Henrique, to represent our family. The night before, I got a phone call inviting me to speak at the ceremony on behalf of all families and significant others of ex-political prisoners and the missing. It was quite unexpected, a task that involved some hours of work that night, with no time to discuss it with other families.

Scene 2: Waiting for the Emblematic Event (17 November 2011)

It was a typical sunny day in Brasília. I had travelled from São Paulo to the Palácio do Planalto, the working place of the president-elect. The room was filled with people for the special ceremony. You could cut the tension with a knife. While we waited and waited for the ceremony to begin, many of us gave interviews to the press.

Scene 3: Unexpected Reactions… (17 November 2011)

The president-elect begins to descend the ramp, apparently still debating with ministers at her side. All presidents elected since the democratization were there, of different parties: José Sarney (PMDB/Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro), Collor de Mello (PSC/Partido Social Cristão), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (PSDB/Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira) and Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva (PT/Partido dos Trabalhadores). The chiefs of the army, the navy and the air force were sitting side by side with congressmen and congresswomen, as well as many of us – the affected families, friends and partners.

It was not a long session. Many of us kept looking at the military for their reaction. Even now, twenty-six years after the military had stepped down from power, and twenty-three since the new human rights-based Constitution had been declared, among the president’s own military cabinet there was no applause, not a single change in facial expression.

Figure 1.1. Military officials during the official signing of the law to instate the Brazilian Truth Commission. Palácio do Planalto, Brasília. Photo: Wilson Dias/ABr. Wikimedia Commons, CC BBY 3.0.

A few ministers gave speeches, followed by a representative of the amnesty movement, and then, finally, the president. Since the president is always the last speaker, it was then that I realized that none of us, the affected families, would be given the opportunity to speak.

I was happy with that political moment. Just after the end of the ceremony, while wishing my mother could have been there to witness it, I received a warm hug from the president and from the Minister for Human Rights, Maria do Rosário, who said only: ‘I am so sorry’.

Scene 4: Would They Defend…? (18 November 2011)

The next day, the ‘so sorry’ became clear. Journalists called me the next morning to get my reaction to the press coverage, claiming that, following negotiations with the military, I had been ‘prevented’ from talking. If a so-called victim [i.e. me] talks, they [the military people] would have to talk….² I had not read the papers, but my answer was simple: the military wanted to talk? Why not let them talk? What were they going to say…? Would they defend the dictatorship or the torture sponsored by their now-retired ex-superiors? Would they defend the ‘disappearing-technology’ that the Brazilian dictatorship inaugurated in Latin America to destroy the political opposition who had turned into the ‘enemy of the people’ (inimigos da pátria)? That afternoon, I decided to disseminate my speech, and my brother, Marcelo Paiva, published it on his blog.³

I invite you now to imagine yourself in that scenario, embodying any participant in a scene that never happened. Let us imagine we are now at the Palácio do Planalto, I am facing you from the podium, Presidenta Dilma is on my right, as is the ramp that she had descended. The huge windows of the Palácio are behind me, through which you can see the Praça dos Três Poderes, Niemeyer’s architectural monument to the three branches of government. Choose any ‘character’ you would like to be – an affected family member, a member of the armed forces, a member of Congress, a journalist, a government official, the coffee lady, the security guard, one of the past presidents. Here we are, and I am giving you and the president this speech for the first time.

A Never-Delivered Speech (Imaginary Scene 5, 17 November 2011)

‘Your Excellency Presidenta Dilma,⁴ dear Human Rights Minister Maria do Rosário and all ministers present, representatives of the National Congress and the armed forces. Dearest former political prisoners and relatives of the missing who have been in this struggle for such a long time.

João Henrique and I, grandson and daughter of Rubens Paiva, we thank you for the honour of witnessing this historic moment. It is a privilege to speak before you. There are hundreds of families of the killed and the still missing, thousands of teenagers, women and men arrested and tortured during the military regime, and this is a key moment in our history.

We hope that by facing the truth about this period, by preventing human rights violations of any kind from remaining under seal, we are closer to facing the legacy that still today haunts the daily lives of Brazilians. I speak not only of the lives of families marked by periods of dictatorship. Countless Brazilian families today, in 2011, still suffer abductions, torture and arbitrary arrests, and humiliation – with no defence lawyer, without bail. Is it not unacceptable to hear, almost every day, about the burdens of the citizens of the favelas in every city, the massacres of civilians by the military police, or to see on TV the ‘war’ scenes in Rio de Janeiro?

Hard data indicate that especially the poorest and blackest Brazilians are still routinely abused in the streets, are still arbitrarily detained without any respect for their civil rights.⁵ The same never-ending story happens with those men and women perceived as homosexuals or identified as non-gender-normative, deprived of any guarantee of their most basic rights to non-discrimination, and the physical and moral integrity guaranteed by the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights and by our 1988 Constitution. Yet all this keeps happening, most excellent Presidenta. It is still being carried out by public servants who disregard their constitutional obligation and perpetuate actions inherited from the state of exception that we lived from 1964 to 1988. Respect for human rights, democratic respect for differing opinions, as well as building the peace, must be worked on every day and by every generation! All of us, civilians and military, must commit ourselves to support this effort.

My own family’s history is only one of many, and the myriad other stories out there should continue to be recorded for posterity. Today in Brasília, a remarkable public exhibition illustrates the horrible ordeal of Frei Tito, a much-beloved Catholic priest. His emblematic case offers another lesson about the period, and ought to be investigated by this commission being established today so that cases like it never happen again. We hope many other similar initiatives will multiply the work of the commission. Establishing memorials (marcas da memória) is reparatory and healing, not only for those directly affected but also for the communities that choose not to live those experiences again. They are a way to reframe the collective memory and to build the future.

In March, exactly forty years after we had last seen him or last heard his voice, an exhibition about my father was inaugurated in the National Congress. It would soon travel to four capitals. The young Rubens Paiva, my father, had been an activist as a university student, leading the fight to nationalize our soil. ‘O petróleo é nosso! The oil is ours!’, he used to make us sing whenever we passed Petrobras oil power plants. To put the abundance of the Brazilian soil to use and mitigate inequality among the Brazilian people, rather than enriching only a few, was his dream. He was a civil engineer, building roads and bridges, and he participated in the construction of a mythical Brasília – a dream of many in the 1950s to integrate the country around a geographical centre. In 1962, he was elected to the National Congress by the people, only to be impeached and exiled in 1964 by the military-civil coup. By 1971, he was once again a successful engineer, democratically concerned as a citizen about his country, and the father of five children. On 20 January 1971, he returned from the Leblon beach, happy to have played volleyball and ready to have lunch with his family on a holiday. Immediately upon his arrival, he was arrested. He must have negotiated to drive his own car to his destination. This car, which my mother would later locate at a military precinct, would for decades be the only proof that he had been arrested. My mother was arrested the next day with my fourteen-year-old sister, along with two young men who had passed by to visit us. They were held for days in the DOI-CODI (Departamento de Operações de Informações – Centro de Operações de Defesa Interna), one of the most notorious locations of that period of horror. When I finally met them after their release, I found my sister with her soul gone and my mother squalid. From barracks to barracks, headquarters to headquarters, Eunice Paiva, my mother, spent years trying to find my father, or at least have news of him. No news.

It was only at the opening of the exhibition in São Paulo, forty years later, that we, for the first time, held a memorial where family and friends came together to honour his memory. After that, we were finally able to talk to each other and break the silence, a silence typical of those whose lives have been held in the suspension that forestalls the experience of mourning. To finally accept that my father had been murdered was to kill him once again. On that Memorial Day, at the newly inaugurated Museum of Resistance (Museu da Resistência), we found that the date on which each of us had accepted that Rubens Paiva was dead varied widely, by months and even years.

This scar can be less painful now. With the installation of a National Truth Commission (CNV), Brazil may consolidate its democracy and its path to peace.

Most excellent Presidenta, besides the marks on the soul from the dictatorship period, we have many things in common: we are women, mothers and public servants. We share the view that human rights and ethics should serve as the foundation for public policies in Brazil. When I was nineteen years old, I also got involv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The Brazilian Truth Commission in Local, National and Global Perspective
• Part I The Brazilian National Truth Commission
• Part II Truth Commissions in Context: Comparing Latin America
• Part III Truth Commissions between the Global and the Local
• Afterword
• Appendix 1 List of Selected Local Truth Commissions in Brazil by Region and State
• Appendix 2 Selected List of Brazilian Online Resources (in alphabetical order)
• Appendix 3 Photos from the Brazilian Truth Commission
• Index