• Text size  | | |
• Email this document
• Printable version

Human Rights Watch World Report 1997 - Brazil

Human Rights Developments

The year in Brazil was marked by the striking contrast between the laudable goals extolled by the federal government in its National Human Rights Plan (hereinafter, the plan) and the grave human rights violations that continued to occur. On April 19, less than a month before the release of the plan - an historic initiative composed of a comprehensive series of short-, medium- and, long-term measures designed to prevent and redress grave human rights abuse in Brazil - Military Police near the town of Eldorado do Carajás, in the Amazon state of Pará, opened fire into a crowd of landless squatters, killing nineteen and wounding dozens of others. The Eldorado do Carajás massacre instantly became a symbol of the abuses committed by state agents and third parties in the increasingly tense conflicts between squatters, large landowners, and police over land. Violations in other areas such as forced labor, urban police violence, prison conditions, abuses against minors, women, indigenous peoples, and other minority groups such as transvestites, continued.

The May 13 release of the National Human Rights Plan capped eight months of effort by the Ministry of Justice in conjunction with Brazilian and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) since the president announced the plan on September 7, 1995, Brazilian Independence Day. Human Rights Watch/Americas, among the international organizations invited to assist in the drafting process, participated in meetings with other NGOs and government officials - including Justice Minister Nelson Jobim and Attorney General Geraldo Brindeiro - to express our views on the plan. The fact that the plan was a product of the joint efforts of government agents and NGOs marked an important shift in the federal government’s approach to the issue of human rights. Since the election of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, federal authorities have consistently recognized the existence of grave human rights violations, often citing NGOs as the source of their information, and have sought to work together with members of civil society to address these violations. The plan constitutes a first critical step beyond mere recognition of abuses. Still, almost two years after election, the Cardoso administration has been unable to pass legislation to achieve the goals elaborated in the plan. This failure, as explained below, resulted primarily from a lack of cooperation by other sectors of the federal government.

For example, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs continued to oppose ratification of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and of the compulsory jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Both would force Brazil to submit itself to the jurisdiction of international bodies authorized to examine claims of human rights abuse. As a result, only the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights could consider individual violations by Brazil.

The plan consists of a series of measures, which, with a few exceptions, must pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the president in order to become law. One of the key measures contained in the plan, known as the “Bicudo law” (named for long-time human rights activist and Congressman Hélio Bicudo), would transfer from military to ordinary courts the jurisdiction over crimes committed by uniformed police officers. On May 9, just days before release of the plan,the Senate defeated the original draft of the Bicudo law, substituting a weakened version that transferred jurisdiction only in cases of murder, and then only once the case had proceeded to trial. Rejection of the original Bicudo law was widely received as a sign that the Senate would not cooperate with the president on the plan. Indeed at the time that this report was written more than six months after the plan’s release, none of its measures in the area of public security had passed the Senate.

One key element of the plan concerns the codification of the crime of torture. Ironically, on the very day that the Chamber of Deputies voted to approve legislation criminalizing torture, security agents of the Chamber of Deputies beat until unconscious magazine salesman Severino de Araújo Maciel to force him to sign a false confession. This contrast demonstrated the vast gulf between law and practice in this area. In 1996, torture continued to be practiced on a routine basis in police precincts throughout Brazil, by methods including the use of electric shocks, near-drownings, burning with cigarette butts, and the rape of criminal suspects with nightsticks, broomhandles, and similar objects. In the overwhelming majority of cases, police officers who practiced torture were neither prosecuted nor dismissed. One exception was the August dismissal of two federal police officers involved in the October 1995 death of José Ivanildo Sampaio de Souza after his detention and torture in Fortaleza, capital of the northeastern state of Ceará. The decree determining the officers’ dismissal was signed by President Cardoso, in accordance with Brazilian civil service law. Though clearly an important step, the dismissal of these two police officers underscored the need for reform of the civil service provisions that guarantee employment to police involved in grave human rights abuses, pending extended administrative proceedings. For instance, the 120 police officers involved in the 1992 massacre of 111 detainees at the Carandiru prison facility, in São Paulo, continued to serve actively. Many of those involved were promoted within the Military Police. Similarly, all of the military police involved in the April 1996 Eldorado do Carajás massacre continued to serve on active duty.

The constructive attitude of the Cardoso administration constituted a welcome relief from the hostile, anti-human rights policies of many Brazilian state government authorities. This tension between the generally pro-human rights position of the federal government and the entrenched, often violent policies of many states, constituted perhaps the greatest obstacle to the effective implementation of the National Human Rights plan. In Brazil’s federal system, state governments maintain vast authority, over public security in particular. In many states, governmental authorities failed to curb abuses; in several instances, as detailed below, they promoted policies that violated fundamental human rights.

Police violence, particularly unjustified killings and summary executions, intensified in Brazil’s major cities and in rural conflicts. In the city of Rio de Janeiro, press figures based on analysis of police reports noted a nearly six-fold increase in the number of civilians killed by military police from just over three (3.2) per month to more than twenty (20.55) per month since Gen. Nilton Cerqueira took over as head of the police in the State of Rio de Janeiro in May 1995. This surge in police killings was widely seen as linked to two policies given priority by the State Secretariat of Public Security. The first promoted - and the second authorized a pay raise for bravery - thus advertising that officers involved in fatal shootings which, at a minimum, raised doubts as to the veracity of the versions offered by the police involved, would be honored. General Cerqueira refused to consider our recommendation in an August interview that the pay raise and promotion for bravery only be available in cases with no civilian fatalities. Cerqueira told Human Rights Watch/Americas during that interview that “crooks are not civilians” and that “crooks are crooks, dead or alive.”

In the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, Deputy Secretary of Public Security Maurílio Pinto de Medeiros continued in that position despite vast evidence of his supervision of a death squad composed primarily of civil police officers. The State Prosecutor’s Office determined that the death squad was responsible for at least thirty-one homicides and indicted several of its participants. Pinto de Medeiros faced charges in at least two incidents, and the Human Rights Commission of the Chamber of Deputies requested that he be dismissed. Despite this, in a July 1996 interview, Col. Sebastião Américo de Souza, Pinto de Medeiros’s direct supervisor, told Human Rights Watch/Americas that the latter would remain in his post because “there was nothing on him.”

Grave allegations of urban police violence also surfaced in the Amazon’s major cities. In Manaus, press reports in late May exposed a death squad run by police officers responsible for killing twenty-two people. The victims were believed to be criminal suspects, detained and killed by the death squad. In Rio Branco, capital of the Amazonian state of Acre, a special operations battalion composed of military policemen went on a killing rampage to avenge the death of a police officer at the hands of a reputed drug dealer. According to a local prosecutor, the operations battalion cut off the arms, legs and genitals of one victim before gouging out his eyes and killing him.

In contrast to authorities in many other states, São Paulo government officials took several important measures to reduce police violence and professionalize the police force. In September 1995, the secretary of public security created a program to track officers involved in fatal shootings, providing them with psychological counseling and removing them from active duty, at least temporarily. The secretariat also created the position of ombudsman for human rights. In its first six months of operation, the ombudsman’s office received and responded to 1,241 complaints, including 126 complaints of police violence. Largely as a result of these programs, the number of civilians killed by the São Paulo Military Police fell from roughly 500 in 1995 to 104 in the first six months of 1996. In August, Human Rights Watch/Americas representatives met with the governor of São Paulo and his cabinet to express support for their efforts to reduce police brutality.

Similarly, authorities in the northeastern state of Pernambuco made significant advances in the battle to prosecute violent police, death squad members (many of whom were police) and those involved in organized crime. In January 1996, the state government created a witness protection program in conjunction with the prestigious nongovernmental Office of Support for Popular Organizations (Gabinete de Assessoria as Organizacoes Populares, GAJOP). In its first six months of existence, the program assisted thirty-seven people in danger.

Witness protection - or its absence - was highlighted when Wagner dos Santos, the key witness in the July 1993 Candelaria massacre of eight sleeping street children in downtown Rio de Janeiro, returned to Brazil for the trial of the first of seven military police officers charged in the crime. Dos Santos, who survived being shot three times during the Candelaria incident and a December 1994 attack on his life, had been forced to leave Brazil. His protection, survival, and testimony were critical to the April 1996 conviction of former military police officer Marcus Vinicius Borges Emmanuel. Significantly, Officer Borges Emmanuel was tried and convicted to an extended prison term before a jury, rather than a five-judge military tribunal, because the killings were committed while the police involved were off-duty. Another Rio de Janeiro jury convicted Officer Borges Emmanuel in his second trial several months later. Two other police officers and a third person involved in the sale of a weapon used to kill the children were scheduled to be tried by the end of 1996.

Another important step forward in the battle to end impunity was the August conviction of Osvaldo Rocha Pereira for the 1987 murder of rural leader Paulo Fontelles. Rocha Pereira was hired to kill Fontelles by a security firm working for local landowners in the state of Pará. Underscoring the importance of prompt criminal investigation, Rocha Pereira had been at large for several years, and was brought to Pará to stand trial following his arrest on charges of involvement in death squads in the Baixada Fluminense section of Rio de Janeiro that had claimed the lives of dozens.

On September 20, the federal government and the state of São Paulo signed an accord to destroy the chronically overcrowded Carandiru prison facility and to build twenty smaller, better-run facilities. Human Rights Watch/Americas visited Carandiru in August and verified the abysmal conditions there. Carandiru, which in 1996 housed roughly 6,400 prisoners in units designed for 3,200 inmates, was the site of an October 1992 massacre in which State Military Police killed 111 detainees while suffering no fatalities themselves. As of this writing, no one had been brought to trial for the massacre.

Prison conditions throughout Brazil continued to violate international standards. Brazilian prison facilities remained overcrowded: Ministry of Justice figures released in October 1996 showed that more than 148,000 persons were held in facilities designed to accommodate roughly half that number of prisoners. Thousands of detainees and convicted prisoners were routinely held for weeks, months, and even years in holding cells within police precincts because of a lack of prison space. In larger facilities, revolts, like the March 29, 1996 incident in Goiânia in which prisoners seized a delegation composed of Goiás State authorities, holding them for almost a week, were not uncommon.

Detention conditions for minors also continued to be abysmal. In May, Human Rights Watch/Americas joined a group of Brazilian NGOs and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) in a petition denouncing horrendous conditions in three detention centers for minors in Rio de Janeiro. In those centers, youths were not separated according to age, size, or the gravity of the crime committed. Older, more violent youths abused others, both sexually and by beatings, apparently with the complicity of authorities of the detention centers. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ordered the Brazilian government to take immediate measures to separate the adolescents held in the three centers by age, size, and criminal infraction in correspondences sent in May and again in August, and the government initiated construction to comply with the commission’s recommendations.

Increasingly violent conflict over land made headlines throughout 1996. On April 19 in Eldorado do Carajás, Pará, in order to evict a group of nearly 2,000 families occupying a state highway to force negotiations, the Pará state military blocked off opposite ends of the road, trapping the landless squatters. After a brief scuffle in which squatters tossed rocks and sticks, the police opened fire into the crowd of men, women, and children. The result was nineteen dead squatters and dozens of wounded. Coroners’ reports demonstrated that several of the victims had been hacked to death with their own sickles and other farming instruments, killed from behind or at point-blank range. After the incident, the police registry of weapons could not be located. None of the surviving squatters were asked to identify individually the police officers involved. Three months after the killings, the State Prosecutor’s office submitted a poorly supported indictment to the military courts.

In the aftermath of the massacre, more than 120 police were detained for four days in their barracks. Several officers were confined to their barracks for up to fifteen days, and the commander, Colonel Pantojas, was detained for thirty. At this writing, none of those involved was in detention, and, due to a recent amendment in military court jurisdiction, it remained unclear whether the case would continue in the military or ordinary courts.

Though particularly extreme, the Eldorado do Carajás massacre was not the only case of fatal violence over land in Brazil. According to the Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra, CPT), through mid-September, at least forty-three people had been killed in land conflicts nationwide. In all of 1995, the CPT documented forty-one such deaths.

The CPT also continued to document grave cases of forced labor and degrading labor conditions approximating forced labor throughout Brazil. Figures for 1996 were not available at the time this report was released. Figures for 1995 showed that the number of individuals subjected to forced labor had risen to 26,047 from a 1994 figure of 25,193, according to the CPT.

In January, the government provoked concern among those who defend the rights of indigenous peoples when it issued Decree 1775/96 strengthening the procedural rights of large landowners and others claiming title to traditional indigenous people’s lands and threatened the stability of tribal areas which were in the process of demarcation. As of this writing, the Ministry of Justice had rejected the vast majority of new land claims, although it had as yet not taken concrete action with respect to eight claims.

One important area of improvement was the passage on December 4, 1995 of Law 9,140/95, which authorized compensation for the family members of 136 persons “disappeared” during the military dictatorship (1964-1985), and established a seven-member commission to investigate additional claims for compensation in cases of state-authorized killings during the military dictatorship. Throughout 1996 the commission evaluated numerous requests for indemnification and had authorized payment to at least one hundred families by early October.

The Right to Monitor

The Brazilian government imposed no formal obstacles to human rights monitoring, and Brazil continued to maintain a well developed network of human rights NGOs. As in prior years, these groups nonetheless encountered threats, intimidation, and physical violence from police and large landowners.

On October 20, human rights lawyer Francisco Gilson Nogueira de Carvalho was killed by machine-gun fire in an apparent targeted execution while returning to his home in Macaíba in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte. Nogueira had been actively investigating the participation of police in Rio Grande do Norte in a death squad reportedly coordinated by Deputy Secretary of State Maurílio Pinto de Medeiros.

In several instances in 1996, courts were used to intimidate and harass monitors with groundless suits based on their defense of fundamental rights. In August, Father Antônio Ribeiro of the CPT office in João Pessoa, capital of the northeastern state of Paraiba, was sentenced to a four-year and ten-month prison term for the crime of conspiracy, resisting arrest, trespassing, and failure to obey a judicial order. The conviction resulted from the priest’s defense of poor, rural laborers involved in land disputes.

In another misuse of criminal investigation to harass human rights monitors, the Federal Police opened an inquiry in August to investigate charges that Human Rights Watch/Americas Brazil Office Director James Cavallaro had criminally slandered a federal judge in an April article published in the Rio de Janeiro daily, O Globo. The article published in O Globo criticized an oral sentence in which, according to press accounts, Judge Mário César Machado Monteiro had sought to justify the use of torture to interrogate criminal suspects. Despite the fact that his decision was criticized by numerous public figures, including the minister of justice, Monteiro filed separate civil suits against Cavallaro, the Rio de Janeiro daily Jornal do Brasil and two judges for defamation because of their criticism of his decision.

The Role of the United States

In 1996, the U.S. gave relatively little direct assistance to Brazil. For Fiscal Year 1997, the administration requested US$225,000 for training through the International Military Education and Training Program (IMET) and $1 million in anti-narcotics assistance. In October, the Brazilian government refused $600,000 authorized for anti-narcotics assistance, arguing that the amount was insignificant in comparison to the aid given to other South American nations.

In September, the U.S. embassy sponsored the visit of Gene Shur, director of the F.B.I.’s witness protection program. The visit highlighted the need for a federal witness protection program.

The State Department’s analysis of Brazil in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1995 accurately summarized the principal human rights abuses committed in Brazil. The report focused on the failings of the administration of justice, in particular the inefficiency and corruption of the judicial process, which rendered convictions of those who violated human rights extremely difficult.

Topics: Human rights,