With the country poised to elect a dictator-praising, pro-torture populist, old wounds have been ripped open

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

﻿José Carlos Giannini will never forget the horrors he endured at the hands of Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship: the savage torture sessions he and others considered leftist enemies of the state suffered after being cast into São Paulo’s dank political dungeons.

Nearly five decades on – and with the country poised to elect a dictatorship-praising, pro-torture populist who plans to stack his administration with generals – those old wounds have been ripped open.

“I never imagined this could happen,” said Giannini, now 69, who spent seven years in jail during the 1964-85 dictatorship because of his membership with a communist guerrilla group called National Liberation Action.

“After what I lived through, what I saw, and the time that I served, to have a president that represents everything of that era is unthinkable to me.”

Quick guide Brazil's dictatorship 1964-1985 Show Hide How did it began? Brazil’s leftist president, João Goulart, was toppled in a coup in April 1964. General Humberto Castelo Branco became leader, political parties were banned, and the country was plunged into 21 years of military rule. The repression intensified under Castelo Branco’s hardline successor, Artur da Costa e Silva, who took power in 1967. He was responsible for a notorious decree called AI-5 that gave him wide ranging dictatorial powers and kicked off the so-called “anos de chumbo” (years of lead), a bleak period of tyranny and violence which would last until 1974. What happened during the dictatorship? Supporters of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military regime - including Jair Bolsonaro - credit it with bringing security and stability to the South American country and masterminding a decade-long economic “miracle”. It also pushed ahead with several pharaonic infrastructure projects including the still unfinished Trans-Amazonian highway and the eight-mile bridge across Rio’s Guanabara bay. But the regime, while less notoriously violent than those in Argentina and Chile, was also responsible for murdering or killing hundreds of its opponents and imprisoning thousands more. Among those jailed and tortured were Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, then a leftwing rebel. It was also a period of severe censorship. Some of Brazil’s best-loved musicians - including Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso - went into exile in Europe, writing songs about their enforced departures. How did it end? Political exiles began returning to Brazil in 1979 after an amnesty law was passed that began to pave the way for the return of democracy. But the pro-democracy “Diretas Já” (Direct elections now!) movement only hit its stride in 1984 with a series of vast and historic street rallies in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte. Civilian rule returned the following year and a new constitution was introduced in 1988. The following year Brazil held its first direct presidential election in nearly three decades.

With just days left until the decisive second round of what some call the most important presidential election in Brazilian history, emotions are running high among those who suffered during that authoritarian era, when hundreds were killed or disappeared by a regime bent on wiping out a perceived communist threat.

Jair Bolsonaro, the overwhelming favourite to win on Sunday, is an outspoken admirer of that period – “we want a Brazil that is similar to the one we had 40, 50 years ago,” he said last week – and has repeatedly praised one of the dictatorship’s most notorious torture chiefs, Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra.

During his nearly three decades as a congressman Bolsonaro has also hailed authoritarians including Peru’s Alberto Fujimori and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. “Yes, I’m in favour of a dictatorship,” he once told congress.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man holds a placard with pictures of the victims of Brazil’s military dictatorship at a 2012 protest in Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Ricardo Moraes/Reuters

Rita Sipahi, an 80-year-old lawyer who shared a cell with Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff in the early 1970s, said she was struggling to comprehend how such a person could be on the verge of leading the world’s fourth-largest democracy.

“Many of us for now can’t understand it. Tragic is all I can say at this point,” she said.

Sipahi is one of 30 former political prisoners to appear in Torre das Donzelas (The Maiden’s Tower), a new Brazilian documentary that tells the story of a dictatorship-era women’s prison in São Paulo and lays bare the brutal excesses of military rule.

The film’s director, Susanna Lira, said she felt a profound and distressing sense of deja vu among the former prisoners she knew, as they braced for a Bolsonaro presidency.

'Astonishing' CIA memo shows Brazil's ex-dictator authorized torture and executions Read more

“I think they feel as though they are living through it all over again,” said Lira, whose film will be shown at São Paulo’s international film festival this week on the eve of Sunday’s vote.

“The feeling I get from them is one of despair … They went through all of that – they managed to overcome it – and now they have to relive the same thing again, in the same lifetime.

“It’s so sad to see, that we haven’t managed to evolve as a society. Nobody expected this.”

Bolsonaro has denied he plans to lead Brazil back into dictatorship. “What we need is a government with authority but without authoritarianism,” he said in a recent television interview, pledging to be a slave to Brazil’s constitution.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest During Brazil’s authoritarian era hundreds were killed or disappeared by a regime bent on wiping out a perceived communist threat. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

Giannini, who was 22 when he was jailed in 1972, also said he did not view Bolsonaro as an immediate or direct threat to Brazil’s young democracy. He doubted whether Bolsonaro would manage to secure backing for many of his more conservative proposals including rolling back gay or women’s rights.

But he was disturbed by Bolsonaro’s reported plans to fill his cabinet with military men once he reaches the presidency.

Bolsonaro’s vice-presidential running mate is Antônio Mourão, a retired general who last year hinted Brazil’s military leaders had considered overthrowing the government.

Bolsonaro is also expected to hand plum jobs to a series of generals including Augusto Heleno, the former commander of the UN stabilization force in Haiti, and Aléssio Ribeiro Souto.

Sipahi, a member of a Brazilian amnesty commission that has been digging into the dictatorship’s crimes, said she feared that as president Bolsonaro would seek to stymie efforts. “He’ll extinguish the commission, that I’m sure of,” she said.

Sipahi blamed Bolsonaro’s rise on decades of “misinformation” about the crimes committed during Brazil’s dictatorship. “That’s Brazil’s problem, there’s no memory,” she said.

Bolsonaro could drag Brazil back into dictatorship, cultural legends warn Read more

Unlike some other cold war-era South American dictatorships, Brazil never put military officials on trial.

In part that was because they negotiated an amnesty law several years before leaving power, which protected them from future prosecution, creating what some observers describe as a pact of silence in democratic Brazil.

One of the former political prisoners interviewed in Torre das Donzelas admits to never having told her sons – now in their 30s – about the beatings and psychological torture she endured while incarcerated in the women’s prison.

Torture methods reportedly used there included the so-called “lata”, or can, where victims were forced to stand on cut-open tin cans of condensed milk, balancing for hours. Prisoners also suffered electric shocks to the genitals and repeated near-drownings in kerosene-filled baths.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest During nearly three decades in congress, Bolsonaro has also hailed authoritarians. ‘Yes, I’m in favour of a dictatorship,’ he once said. Photograph: Evaristo Sa/AFP/Getty Images

Sipahi said she did not hold millions of young Bolsonaro voters – born after the dictatorship and ignorant of its realities – responsible for backing him. “How can I, when they are not told [about that period]?”

Today, the majority of Brazil’s 147 million registered voters did not live through the dictatorship, allowing what critics call an increasingly benevolent narrative about military rule to take root.

But Lira, who was a teenager when democracy returned to Brazil in the 1980s, said she felt her generation should shoulder some of the blame, for failing to sufficiently cherish – and defend – democratic ideals and freedoms.

“I feel completely impotent and ashamed that we are living through this now, after everything these women went through in order to bring democracy back to Brazil,” she said.

“My generation wasn’t able to [stop this]. We thought the game was won,” Lira added. “We thought we had a democracy. But in truth we were kidding ourselves.”