Worker tortured by mistake asks for reparation after 53 years – 02/13/2023 – Power

A buzzing in his left ear haunts retired worker José Vicente Correa day and night. At 86 years old, the annoying noise is not only a nuisance, but also a reminder of the days he tries, in vain, to forget. And for which he is now seeking redress in court.

It was on January 29, 1970 that the house where he, his wife, their two children and their mother lived was invaded by armed men. For three days the family had shared a two-room home in the Pirituba neighborhood, in the north of São Paulo, with Carlos Alberto Savério, known as Adilson.

Correa had met him at union movement meetings at factories in Suzano, in Greater São Paulo, where he lived and worked. “Without a strike, there was no increase at all”, he justifies.

When he lost his job in Suzano and got a job at a paper factory in São Paulo, it was Savério who helped him find the house where he settled with his family in Pirituba.

“One afternoon, after a meeting at the paper factory, the striker [Savério] told me there was no way back home. I told him he could stay with us,” she says.

Born in the small town of Jambeiro, in Vale do Paraíba (SP), Correa lost his father as a child, and the family lost everything. Homeless, at the age of eight, he and his mother spent two years wandering between the charities of others, poor people’s homes and the homes of families where his mother worked as a maid.

“I left school without knowing where I was going to sleep and I was marked by that. I grew up with a lot of pity for those who don’t have a place to spend the night”, says he, who stopped studying in the second year of elementary school to start working in a glass factory. at age ten.

In that January of 1970, in Pirituba, Savério spent the night sleeping on the kitchen floor of the Correa family’s house. He said a friend would pick him up the next day.

The friend didn’t show up, and Savério ended up staying another night, and then another. “The house was small, and my wife, Lourdes, was uncomfortable. I warned him that I wouldn’t be able to stay there any longer”, she recalls. “But that was the very night it all happened.”

During the night, Correa heard a noise at the door. He got out of bed and says he was surprised to find Savério in the room already with a gun in his hand. He took out an old revolver that he kept at home and that he says he never used until then. He thought they were thieves. He fired a warning shot into the air. At the shouts of “police”, they started shooting into his house.

“They shot to kill, but it didn’t catch. I was grazed in the head, which tore off that piece of my ear, oh”, he says, touching a flaw on the upper part of his right ear. “What if they killed the children? What if they killed my mother? Our Lord Jesus Christ did.”

Sandro, her youngest son, was ten years old, but he remembers details of that early morning. “The gunpowder from the shots landed on my arm and raised blisters,” he reports.

“When I managed to leave the house, I saw my father sitting on the curb, handcuffed and wearing pajamas. He, my mother and the boy were taken. Where? Why? We didn’t understand anything.”

The men who had identified themselves as police officers, even in civilian clothes, were part of the fearsome Operation Bandeirantes (Oban), a state repressive apparatus created by the Army and financed by businessmen, which maintained a torture center at the 36th Police Station, in the neighborhood of Paradise, south zone of São Paulo.

It was there that Correa, Lourdes and Savério were taken for a process registered at the Secretariat of Public Security as an “investigation of terrorism”.

“I was one of the oldest prisoners there. The rest were all young men”, says he, who was 33 years old.

In practice, such an investigation consisted of submitting Correa to brutal sessions of physical punishment and psychological torture over the course of days, between the premises of Oban and, later, of the Department of Political and Social Order (Dops).

He does not know precisely how many days he was tortured, but he recounts in detail the mistreatment he suffered at the hands of police and military personnel who asked him questions he could not answer.

“I struggled to take care of the family. I didn’t understand anything about politics. I didn’t even have time to think about it”, he says. “I didn’t turn anyone in, nor could I, because I didn’t know anything. I was going to die without lying.”

Correa says he received many shocks to the ears, as well as punches, kicks and headbutts. “On one occasion, instead of putting the wire around my ear, they stuck the wire inside my ears. They were crazy and, in their haste, they missed,” he explains. “But I couldn’t complain otherwise it was a punch in the face at the time”, he recalls.

With the shock, his left ear plugged up. Back in the cell, Correia lay unconscious and injured. As he got up, he noticed that the floor under his ear was full of blood.

“I felt a noise that I still feel today… A noise that never goes away. That never went away”, he reports, with a choked voice. “Sometimes I can’t stand it and I go to the bathroom to cry,” she says, as tears run down her face.

In the basements of the Dops, he says, the torture was even more savage. “I used to pass out from being beaten so much. I was hit in the head with a club, kicked when I was lying on the floor… They even threw a sofa on top of me”, he says. “I didn’t know anything they asked me. I couldn’t speak.”

In the most brutal episodes, Correa remembers seeing, among dark spots that reduced his field of vision, a doctor who was examining him under the watchful eyes of soldiers and police.

“I think they suspected that I was already dead,” he explains. “Every day I thought I was going to die and I didn’t. I asked God to give me life.”

Oban announced, in that January 1970, that it had dismantled the Vanguarda Armada Revolucionaria Palmares (VAR-Palmares) after the arrest of 24 people – among them, former president Dilma Rousseff, with whom Lourdes shared a cell during the seven days she was there. detained at Oban’s clandestine headquarters.

In a note sent to Sheetformer president Dilma did not say whether or not she had any contact with Correa at the time, but stated that he “never participated in the VAR-Palmares organization”.

“Even so, he was arrested and tortured savagely, in the dependencies of Operation Bandeirantes (Oban) and the Department of Political and Social Order (Dops), in São Paulo, without ever having risen against the dictatorship.”

Transferred to the Tiradentes prison, where he says he was not tortured, Correa only gave his first official statement more than a month after his arrest, on March 6, 1970. On August 10, he became the defendant in a lawsuit based on the police inquiry into VAR-Palmares.

The complaint offered by the Military Public Ministry states that Correa “was given the code name Miguel” and that he had been “guided by Dilma Vana Linhares [Dilma Rousseff]”. The document also states that, upon being arrested, he reacted to the bullet, classifying him as a “highlight and dangerous figure”.

He denies that he ever received the nickname Miguel.

“I never gave freedom to anyone to give me a nickname”, he says. “But they [policiais e militares] they are very liars. They told me to sign a paper saying that I had gone to Rio de Janeiro to hold a meeting about I don’t know what. They forced me to sign”, he says. “I had no choice and I signed.”

On October 8, 1970, Correa was questioned before the Special Council of Justice, in the 2nd Military Judicial Circumscription, when he clarified that he had met some of the people then identified as belonging to VAR-Palmares, but he stated that he did not know that they belonged to the organization and who never practiced any militarized action.

“I told everything straight. That I didn’t know anything, but that I was beaten a lot, that I was beaten. That I was in a basement passed out day and night”, he says. “I explained that I only shot that morning because there was no one in uniform, and I thought they were thieves.”

The Special Council of Justice, in a unanimous decision, relaxed Correa’s imprisonment.

“The colonels said I was free, that I should leave that same day, and that I was to be congratulated.” On leaving the prison, however, police said they would “keep an eye on” him.

When she got home, almost nine months after her arrest, Lourdes was ironing her clothes while her children waited at the window. “There was so much joy, euphoria and tears that the mother forgot to iron and burned all the clothes”, laughs Sandro, moved by this memory.

Once free, the days of torture and imprisonment began to haunt Correa. “Any salesperson who appeared at the door of the house I thought were people from the police who came to spy on me”, he says.

“I also never got involved with the union again. I didn’t want to mess with these things anymore”, he explains. “I was scared of everything and went 53 years without talking about what had happened to me.”

After years of insistence from his son, disturbed by the tinnitus that haunts his ear and walking with difficulty, and the help of a cane, Correa finally decided to tell his story in search of reparation by the State.

Sandro took his father to the São Paulo State Public Defender’s Office in Jaú, where Correa lives today. In the triage queue, he was attended by defender Bruno Del Preti, who found the report strange at first and began researching the case.

“I found more than 650 documents about everything that happened to him, in a documentary analysis that kept me awake for a few months. But we were able to demonstrate what he had with information from the São Paulo Public Archive”, says Del Preti.

In June 2022, he filed an indemnity action for an act of the military dictatorship in the amount of R$ 200,000. The Defender’s Office also filed a preliminary injunction so that Correa receives a minimum wage per month until there is a final decision on the case.

“We want the State to recognize that its rights were violated in this context of dictatorship and guarantee it the right to reparation”, explains Del Preti. “But, as he is already 86 years old and has health problems, we are very concerned that he will not see this process completed to receive compensation.”

The concern is supported by the slowness of the Brazilian justice system. The claim for compensation has been awaiting a hearing of the witnesses for seven months. The injunction was rejected in the first instance by Judge Paula Maria Castro Ribeiro Bressan, from the 1st Civil Court of Jaú. The appeal to the São Paulo Court of Justice has been under analysis since last October by the rapporteur of the case, Judge Leonel Carlos da Costa.

In the note issued on the case, Dilma claims that it is “evident that José Vicente was a victim of the State, which kept him illegally imprisoned, based on an alleged accusation of terrorism”. And he concludes: “Let justice be done!”