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BRASILIA – Vice President Hamilton Mourão affirmed, in an interview with the German daily Deutsche Welle, that Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, convicted of torture in the military dictatorship, was a man of “honor”, “who respected the human rights of his subordinates. “.
The military man, who died in 2015 at the age of 83, is designated by dozens of persecuted politicians and relatives of victims of the military regime as responsible for the persecution, torture and death of opponents of the 64 coup.
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“What can I say about the man Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, he was my commander at the end of the 70s of the last century, and he was a man of honor and a man who respected the human rights of his subordinates. So many things that people talk about him, I can tell you, because I had a very close friendship with this man, that’s not true, “he said.
Mourão said that torture is not a practice that the Brazilian government agrees with or “sympathizes with,” but commented that many people who fought against urban guerrillas in the 1960s and 1970s were “unfairly accused of being torturers.” .
“First of all, I am not aligned with torture, and of course, a lot of people are still alive from that moment, and they all want to put it how they saw it. That’s why I said before that we have to wait for all these actors. disappear so that history does its part. And of course what really happened during that period … that period is over, ”he said.
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Mourão affirmed that, during the dictatorship, the military “did very good things for Brazil and other things did not turn out so well” and said that “history can only be judged with time.”
“We are still about 50 years away from that period. We need another 50 years for this period to be well evaluated,” he added.
The vice president also affirmed that democracy is one of the permanent national objectives and that the government wants to make Brazil the “most brilliant democracy in the southern hemisphere.”
Asked if the position of President Jair Bolsonaro after the Federal Supreme Court (STF) authorized the operation of the Federal Police against the president’s allies, in the field of the investigation of fake news, in which the president stated that the Forces Armed forces “do not follow absurd orders.” Mourão said it was not a threat.
“The Armed Forces are aligned with their constitutional mission, and they do not abandon it. Things here in Brazil are calm and going well. And I make it very clear that democracy is a value not only for the Bolsonaro government, but also for ours. Armed Forces. So there is no threat to the Federal Supreme Court or the legislative system here in Brazil, “he said.
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The vice president also said that Bolsonaro’s participation in acts calling for the closure of Congress and the Supreme Court did not constitute a threat to democracy either. And he said that the statement of the governor of São Paulo, João Doria (PSDB), which saw “gratuitous aggressions against democracy” at that time, was caused by “polarization in politics.”
“No, this is because there is polarization in politics. The government of São Paulo opposed Bolsonaro. This is much more talk than, let’s say, action,” he said.
Asked if it was a dangerous conversation, the vice president replied that it was not, since “nobody has the power to do what they want here in Brazil.”
“No, it is not dangerous. It is dangerous when you have the power to do what you want, but no one has the power to do what you want here in Brazil,” he said.
Convicted of torture
Ustra was known in the basements of the dictatorship as “Dr. Tibiriçá ”, was the only Brazilian military man declared a torturer by the Justice.
The Dictatorship Dossier, of the Commission of Relatives of the Political Dead and Disappeared, lists the colonel with 60 cases of deaths and disappearances in São Paulo. The Archdiocese of São Paulo, through the Brazil Never Again project, reported more than 500 cases of torture committed within the Doi-Codi facilities during the period in which Ustra was the commander, from 1970 to 1974.
In 2015, the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) filed a complaint against Ustra. He is designated responsible for the death of the communist militant Carlos Nicolau Danielli, kidnapped and tortured at the facilities of the Operations and Information Detachment (DOI), in São Paulo, in December 1972.
