The thoughts I have translated below were written by Aline Almeida Bentes, a professor in the Medical School of the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Her cousin was married to Bruno Pereira, an Indigenous advocate who, along with the British journalist Dom Phillips, was killed while conducting interviews with natives of the Brazilian Amazon. Pereira is believed to have been the main target of the killings. As reported in The Guardian (6/20/2002), “A defender of Indigenous peoples and a former official with the federal government’s Indigenous foundation, he knew of the illegal fishing that was rife in the area and it has been alleged he was threatened before by at least one of the men detained by police.”  The following remarks were written when the deaths of the two were suspected but not yet confirmed. They came to my attention through one of my Portuguese teachers in a 1968 Peace Corps training group that now stays in touch via Zoom.  Professor Bentes’ comments appeared in a Medical School newsletter. She has granted permission to post them here.

What Brazil Do We Want? (June 15, 2022)

“I have such a clear sense about the Brazil that can be, and will be, that the Brazil that is pains me.” Darcy Ribeiro

How painful it has been to live in Brazil in recent years. Every day our chests tighten with the news of another young black man murdered in the favelas, of a woman or child victim of violence, of an immigrant beaten to death at work, of Indians and forest defenders murdered in land conflicts. Brazil has reached the sad point of ranking as the third country in the world for the number of murders of activists and human rights defenders. The number of deaths in conflicts in rural areas of the country increased 10 times from 2020 to 2021. I agree with Eliane Brum, in her latest essay: “It is not incompetence or neglect: it is method”, we are living a war. And we need to be clear about this to choose who we will fight alongside.

The indigenist Bruno Pereira is married to my cousin Beatriz. In 2018, I was at their house in Belém and was able to read some of the diaries of Bruno’s forest tours. I remember being amazed, because he wrote down all the details, from the time he woke up, if it was raining, if he found any snakes, the conversations he had with the Indians. I felt like I was with him in the forest. It was magical. Bruno, Beatriz and Dom Phillips are among the few people who are not content just to dream about another possible Brazil. Perhaps because they have lived and learned so much from different indigenous groups, they are able to truly see our power, our riches, our diversity. It’s people like them, who work tirelessly for the Brazil that will be, who strengthen us to stand firm in the trenches of resistance.

On June 5th, Bruno and British journalist Dom Phillips disappeared while sailing up the Itaquaí River to Atalaia do Norte in the state of Amazonas.

Bruno, a licensed employee of FUNAI (the National Indian Foundation), was working in collaboration with Unijava (the Union of Indigenous Peoples in the Valley of Javari) to create a permanent surveillance team for the forest. He trained various indigenous groups on how to use drones and satellite images to monitor the forest and thus denounce illegal mining, hunting and fishing in the Vale do Javari indigenous territory. For carrying out his work, Bruno was dismissed from his position at FUNAI in 2019, after leading an operation to repress illegal mining. Bruno had to ask permission from the agency to continue protecting the indigenous people.

Dom Phillips, a journalist passionate about the forest, committed to the truth, was on another expedition through Javari, talking to the Indians, riverside dwellers, miners, trying to hear and understand all who live there, as he was writing a book about the Amazon.

Today, in an action carried out at the UFMG Faculty of Education, attacking the disappearance of the two, a student of the Xacriabá ethnic group said in a very beautiful way that Bruno and Dom Phillips, as well as all the other Indians and forest defenders killed or disappeared, were like seeds that would sprout in many fruits, in many other men and women willing to fight for the forest, for life. He asked for love, kindness and unity among all and ended by praying in their language. I was touched and my heart was comforted by their love and brotherhood, after such difficult days for my family. Stirred by so many overwhelming feelings in the last few days, I leave you with this reflection: which Brazil do we want? A country that respects the Constitution, the sovereignty of peoples, diversity, indigenous territories or a country of violence, hunger and death?

Aline Almeida Bentes, Adjunct Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, UFMG

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.

In true Orwellian fashion, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has called upon the country’s military to celebrate the anniversary of the dictatorship it inaugurated against constitutional democracy on March 31, 1964, imposing military rule for over two decades.  Contributing to the air of surreality surrounding Bolsonaro’s idea of “celebration” was the lavish praise Bolsonaro received from Donald Trump in a state visit to the White House a week ago. In spite of (or perhaps because of) Bolsonaro’s outrageous positions on the civil rights of women, homosexuals and blacks, Trump boasted that one of Bolsonaro’s monikers is “the Trump of the tropics”.

There is a deeper, darker historical significance to the Bolsonaro-Trump love fest.  The military rule imposed on Brazil from 1964 to 1985 reflected currents of authoritarianism not only in Brazil but in the United States.  The Brazilian dictatorship would never have lasted and probably would not even have occurred without an American authoritarian foreign policy toward Brazil and many other countries from the 1960s through the 1980s.  A Manichean cold war logic intolerant of the electoral success of leftists or democratic socialists overtook the U.S. State Department, equating it with Soviet-style communism.  Support for dictatorships, provided they were anti-communist, became the norm. In Bolsonaro and Trump these horrifying ghosts from the past have been resurrected.  Vigilance of the highest order is called for in order to assure they do not turn the clock back on self-government.

P.S.  The following blog about the Brazilian and Chilean dictatorships is an excerpt from my recently published essay “A Complexity Theory of Power”.