Government wants to recompose Commission for Dead and Disappeared – 03/31/2023 – Power

The federal government decided to reappoint former members of the Special Commission on the Dead and Disappeared, extinguished by the Jair Bolsonaro government at the end of 2022.

According to the Ministry of Human Rights, Vera Paiva and Diva Santana, representatives of the relatives of politically disappeared people during the military regime, and attorney Ivan Marx, who represents the Federal Public Ministry, will also return.

“The commission is formed, but there were two unforeseen events”, says Nilmário Miranda, special adviser for the Defense of Democracy, Memory and Truth at the portfolio.

“First, the nomination of the Chamber of Deputies took a while, because they took a while to define the commissions. Second, the forecast was that President Lula would make an order [reinstalando a comissão] this Friday (31), but he caught pneumonia. We were going to present it to the families, but there has to be a decree already published.”

Eugênia Gonzaga left office after an imbroglio with then-President Jair Bolsonaro.

The commission had determined the correction of the death certificate of Fernando Santa Cruz, who disappeared along with his friend Eduardo Collier Filho in 1974, after being arrested by agents of repression. The purpose of the measure was for the certificate to say that Santa Cruz was a victim of state violence.

In response, Bolsonaro exchanged 4 of the 7 members of the group. In place of Gonzaga, entered Marco Vinicius Pereira de Carvalho, linked to Damares Alves, today a senator and at the time Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights.

The official argument was that the group’s work was over and there was no way forward.

“This is silly. There are no more cases to [a comissão] judging for a long time, but the search for mortal remains needs to continue”, says Nilmário de Miranda.

Santa Cruz and Collier Filho are part of a list of 243 politically disappeared persons made by the National Truth Commission. The search for the whereabouts of bodies not yet located has several unfinished fronts — including obstacles that predate the Bolsonaro administration.

“The commission was created in 1995 with no funds and no technical structure”, says Eugênia Gonzaga. “When I took office, parliamentarians began to allocate resources for amendments to our work. That’s how we managed to move forward.”

Collegiate may face the same problem when it is recreated. Nilmário says that, as the group was extinguished, there was no provision for funding for it in the Budget: “We’ll have to see how to resolve this”.

One of the main work fronts still open is the case of the clandestine grave of Perus, discovered in the Dom Bosco Cemetery, in São Paulo, in the 1990s – since then, only five missing people have been identified, the last two in 2018.

The set found in Perus is made up of 1,049 boxes with bones, now under the care of Unifesp’s Center for Anthropology and Forensic Archeology (CAAF), which oversees the research. Fernando Santa Cruz and Eduardo Collier Filho are two of those wanted there.

According to doctor Samuel Ferreira, scientific coordinator of the commission, the genetic material of 750 people has already been analyzed. There is still a set of 151 cases with a result expected by the end of April.

“Of this whole set, there are degraded samples that may need new analyses, because they are very old bones”, says Ferreira.

Once this step is finished, there will still be a lack of research involving boxes with bones from different people mixed together, which make up 26% of the total. In addition, it is also necessary to investigate which victims of the dictatorship may have been buried in Perus, but outside the ditch.

“I estimate that we have between three and five years of work ahead of us”, says Professor Edson Telles, CAAF’s coordinator.

Telles also says that the university received, last year, bones that could be up to eight people and they were in Petrópolis, where the House of Death operated, one of the most terrible torture centers of the military regime.

In addition, the university now holds mortal remains exhumed in other cemeteries, such as Vila Formosa, also in São Paulo – there is suspicion that the bodies of 12 victims of the dictatorship may still be there.

There are also other cemeteries to be investigated outside São Paulo. The Truth Commission pointed out that the bodies of at least 15 left-wing militants may have been buried in a clandestine grave in Ricardo Albuquerque, in Rio de Janeiro, where 2,000 bones were found.

Another crucial point is the investigations involving the Guerrilha do Araguaia. Over the years, the federal government has carried out expeditions to the region and found several bones, but the identification of mortal remains needs to continue – and there are new searches to be carried out.

It is a job that involves not only trips to excavations. In addition to the search for witnesses, there is a whole historical research to be done: in the case of cemeteries, for example, the numbers in old books and guides rarely match the current number of graves. Therefore, it is necessary to map these spaces.

For Eugênia Gonzaga, the job would be easier with the collaboration of the Armed Forces.

“Throughout all these years, the governments never gave clear orders for the military to present information about the fate of the bodies”, says the prosecutor. “The Armed Forces claim they don’t have that information, but that doesn’t hold up. I believe that that information exists, but it’s kept under lock and key.”

The issue of bones thrown into mass graves does not end with left-wing militants victimized by the dictatorship either. In Vala de Perus, for example, research has indicated that most of the dead are made up of poor people from the outskirts of São Paulo, whose families also deserve answers.

For cases like this, there is a defense that the Commission for the Dead and Missing could expand its scope.

“The commission could play a very important role in expanding the notion of who were the victims of the dictatorship”, says historian Lucas Pedretti, from the Coalition for Memory, Truth, Justice, Reparation and Democracy.

“It did not address violations against indigenous peoples, peasants or victims of death squads in urban peripheries.”