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35 years after the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil, Volkswagen compensates millionaires to persecuted former employees. This provides for a comparison with the country’s judicial authorities, which the company claims to have signed. The automaker is said to have collaborated with the regime at the time and betrayed employees to the military.
“It is important to deal responsibly with this negative chapter in Brazil’s history and to ensure transparency,” VW Chief of Law Hiltrud Werner said in a statement.
The background for this is the results of a government-created commission that examined the role of business during the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. Experts discovered that Volkswagen and other companies had secretly helped the military locate so-called public enemies and union activists in the workforce.
Many of these workers were fired, arrested or harassed by the police, according to an investigation by the Reuters news agency in 2014. They have not found a new job for years.
Comparison of about 5.5 million euros
Broadcasters NDR and SWR as well as the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported on the agreement that has been concluded. According to information from VW, it foresees a total payment of about 36 million reais (about 5.5 million euros). Of this, 16.8 million reais goes to an association of victims of former employees and their surviving dependents. The rest will be donated to human rights initiatives. The Brazilian prosecutor’s office announced that the agreement would end three ongoing investigations since 2015.
Bielefeld University historian Christopher Kopper, who was tasked with the matter by Volkswagen, described the comparison as historically groundbreaking. “It would be the first time that a German company accepts responsibility for human rights violations against its own workers at the plant for incidents that occurred after the end of National Socialism,” he quotes Kopper by NDR, SWR and “Süddeutscher Zeitung”.
In 2017, Kopper published a report commissioned by VW. He said, among other things, that VW factory security monitored the opposition activities of its employees and facilitated the arrest of at least seven employees through their behavior. Kopper based his research on the corporate archives of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg and its subsidiary Volkswagen do Brasil, in addition, Brazilian archives were consulted and contemporary witnesses were interviewed. “Correspondence with the board of directors in Wolfsburg shows the unreserved approval of the military government until 1979,” wrote the historian.
20,000 employees in Brazil
Volkswagen do Brasil has been active in the fifth largest country in the world since 1953 and employs some 20,000 people there. At the São Bernardo do Campo plant facilities, a commemorative plaque was inaugurated for the victims of the regime. The 21-year dictatorship in Brazil began in 1964 with a military coup; According to a truth commission, around 440 people were subsequently murdered for political reasons and hundreds more were imprisoned and tortured.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said in 2019 that he did not view the events as a military coup. Rather, “civilians and soldiers” came together in difficult times to get the country back on the right track, he said. A commemoration ceremony started by the right-wing populist president to mark the 55th anniversary of the coup was banned by a court last year. The celebrations are not compatible with the “process of democratic reconstruction” enshrined in the 1988 constitution, justified judge Ivani Silva da Luz.
