Yesterday I received the following story from a friend in Brazil about a directive issued by President Jair Bolsonaro that shuts down efforts to identify bones found in mass graves of people likely murdered by police and military during the country’s military dictatorship. The news article in Portuguese is at https://odia.ig.com.br/brasil/2019/04/5636034-bolsonaro-encerra-grupo-de-trabalho-que-identificava-ossadas-de-vitimas-da-ditadura-militar.html. Here is a quick translation:

President Jair Bolsonaro closed the Perus Working Group – MARTIN BERNETTI / AFP

São Paulo – President Jair Bolsonaro’s Decree 9.759, which closes councils and commissions, shut down the Perus Working Group responsible for identifying the bodies of disappeared political [activists] in 1,047 boxes of bones from the common grave in Perus cemetery in western Sao Paulo.

The Group was linked to the Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances of the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights and was responsible for completing the identification of victims of political repression during the military dictatorship, a work begun in 2014 after a Federal Court ruling in a public civil action.

When asked, the ministry did not respond how it intends, and if it intends, to continue the work of identifying the bones. The brief noted only that “it is evaluating, studying and proposing something within the parameters of the decree”. During his time in parliament, Bolsonaro criticized searches for the disappeared. He posed beside a poster about the searches in the region of Araguaia that said: “Only a dog looks for bones “.

“More than burying the disappeared, the government is imploding a whole system aimed at justice. The decree affects not only the Perus Group but also the Araguaia Working Group,” said the regional prosecutor Eugenia Gonzaga. She is the chair of the commission, representing the Federal Public Ministry (MPF).

Created by federal law, the commission cannot be affected by the decree, but, according to her, the working groups and technical teams of experts needed to do the work were disbanded by the Bolsonaro decree. “Although there is a projected budget and judicial backing for getting the work done, there is no one today who can sign a document or hire anyone to carry out the work.”

These facts have been conveyed to federal judge Eurico Maiolino, of the Federal Regional Court of the 3rd Region, which ensures compliance with the judicial decision requiring the Union to identify the bones. Currently, four experts still work on the 1,047 cases because their contracts were signed before the decree. The number, however, is insufficient – the group has had 10 experts to analyze the bones.

The Perus grave was discovered in 1990. In the 1970s, police and the military, using false names, buried assassinated political prisoners there. It is suspected that up to 40 of them were in the grave – six of them had already been located there and another seven in unidentified graves in the cemetery.

After being handed over to USP and Unicamp [university] coroners – who were accused of neglecting the identification of the bones – work on the 1,047 boxes began through an agreement signed between the federal government and the City of São Paulo, which also involves the Center for Anthropology and Forensic Archeology (CAAF) at the Federal University of São Paulo.

Already 750 bone samples have been collected – 500 have already been sent to the laboratory of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) – first in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and now in The Hague, Holland. Specialized in DNA analysis of degraded bones, the ICMP laboratory was responsible for the identification of Dimas Casemiro, a militant of the Tiradentes Revolutionary Movement (MRT), and the lawyer Aluísio Palhano, leader of the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (VPR).

Casemiro died from gunshots and Palhano under torture by men from the 2nd Army Information Operations Detachment (DOI) in 1971 under the command of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra. A new shipment of 250 bone samples is going to The Hague in early May – the paperwork on it had already been signed before the Bolsonaro decree. Not yet analyzed is the content of about 30% of the boxes, where bones of more than one individual were detected. “We have to extend the work to analyze the remaining bones,” Eugenia said.

“The decision ending the groups is consistent with the honors that Bolsonaro gives Colonel Ustra. Instead of clarifying the past, this government is interested in glorifying it,” said journalist Ivan Seixas. He was 16 when he was arrested in 1971 by DOI in the company of his father, Joaquim Alencar Seixas. Both were militants of the MRT.

“I saw my father tortured and killed at DOI under Ustra, and I was imprisoned for six years.” Two of Seixas’s companions were in the Perus grave. They are Denis Casemiro, murdered under torture by police officers of the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS), of the Civil Police of São Paulo, and Dimas Casemiro.