Amnesty Commission: ‘Denying the dictatorship set up a coup bomb’ – 02/03/2023 – Power

For the new president of the Amnesty Commission, Eneá de Stutz e Almeida, the relationship between the coup acts of January 8 and the military dictatorship goes beyond the posters that asked for an intervention by the Armed Forces.

In the understanding of the professor at the Faculty of Law at UnB (University of Brasília), the invasion of the headquarters of the three Powers at the beginning of the year is the result of decades of negligence and lack of accountability for crimes committed by State agents during the military dictatorship (1964- 1985).

“This denialist attitude towards the dictatorship means what we call ‘forgetting repression’: a posture of pretending that nothing happened, the popular sweeping the dirt under the rug. What is the result of any and all repression? Violence”, says Stutz in an interview with Sheet.

“Forgetting or pretending that nothing happened during the dictatorship set up a time bomb, and that bomb exploded on January 8.”

For Stutz, this process of forgetting goes through the distortion of the Amnesty Commission during the governments of Michel Temer (MDB) and, mainly, of Jair Bolsonaro (PL). According to her, during this period there was a transformation of a State commission into a government commission.

For the new head of the body, this process began when Temer determined that the commission no longer needed to publicly ask for forgiveness from each of those who were considered worthy of receiving compensation for having been persecuted by the dictatorship.

“When the commission deferred [um pedido de indenização], she made a declaration of forgiveness. That is, it vocalized, on behalf of the Brazilian State, the guarantee that political persecution would never happen again”, she explains.

Later, with Bolsonaro, the commission began to be made up of military personnel, including General Luiz Eduardo Rocha Paiva, who wrote the preface to the biography of Carlos Brilhante Ustra, until today the only military member considered by the Federal Supreme Court as a torturer — despite never having been criminally held responsible for it.

As a result, during the four years of the last government, 95% of the claims for compensation judged by the amnesty commission were denied, including that of former president Dilma Rousseff (PT), arrested and tortured during the dictatorship.

Stutz says that at least part of those processes will be reviewed. Those in which an illegal denial is identified (that is, that the person proved to have been persecuted, but even so had his application rejected) will be tried again.

The size of this liability is still being determined. It is estimated that there are up to 8,000 lawsuits, among those judged in the last four years and those pending analysis. The president also predicts that, once the commission returns to grant indemnities, new requests will begin to arrive.

“It is a denialist stance, in relation to the pandemic, denialist in relation to deforestation and in relation to the dictatorship. The impact of this is not only for those who were politically persecuted and had their request [de indenização] eventually rejected, but also those who thought of filing a request and turned back because they thought nothing would come of it”, she says.

For her, however, the movements that led to the 1964 coup and the attempted coup in 2023 are different.

At the time of the 1964 coup, he says, there was an international political scenario favorable to the military taking power and the defenders of the dictatorship had a power project, in addition to support from economic sectors of society.

In the case of January 8, authorities in other countries quickly condemned the invasion. In Stutz’s assessment, there was no organization or idea of ​​what to do if the Bolsonarist group actually took power.

She warns, however, that this does not reduce the size of the risk to which Brazilian democracy was subjected.

“It was, yes, an attempt at a coup d’état. There was a rehearsal on December 12 [quando bolsonaristas tentaram invadir a sede da Polícia Federal]then with the [tentativa de] bomb at the airport and during the entire period of these camps. The apex was on the 8th of January,” he says.

She claims that the biggest lesson of the episode is “that democracy is always at risk and that we need to reiterate, permanently, the memory” of that period.

Stutz says that, in 2023 and due to the tight budget, the Amnesty Commission may not be able to rebuild population awareness programs that were closed in recent years.

He says that among the group’s first steps, in addition to a detailed investigation of the liabilities of processes, is also the creation of a new regiment. She claims that the current one, made under the management of Damares Alves, is unconstitutional as it gives the Minister of Human Rights the power to make decisions regardless of the opinion of the collegiate.

There is still no date set for the group’s first session, but the president has already said that the meetings will be broadcast again.

Finally, she argues that working with the memory of the military regime is also understanding that the violence of the dictatorship era is the same that currently victimizes various segments of society, such as indigenous peoples, blacks, the lower classes and even environmentalists. A “state violence”, she says.

“We cannot allow the State to repeat this persecuting behavior, of a dictator and totalitarian State. Facing this authoritarian legacy really means building the democratic State of Law”, he opines.