Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday appointed soldiers to the commission that investigates the deaths and disappearances during the dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), explaining his decision by the fact that the government was now "right".
"The reason for this decision is that there has been a change of president, now it's Jair Bolsonaro, right, end point," said the former army captain to reporters, after the publication of the decree in the Official Journal. Retired Colonel Weslei Antonio Maretti and Officer Vital Lima Santos join the Special Commission on the Dead and the Disappeared (CEMDP), which reports to the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights.
480 requests for identification or compensation since its inception in 1995
The CEMDP, created in 1995, aims to "locate the bodies" and "identify the dead or missing" before the amnesty law of 1979. It is also responsible for defining the amount of compensation for the families of victims. The CEMDP has already processed 480 requests for identification or compensation. Jair Bolsonaro, who has never hidden his admiration for the military dictatorship, has recently multiplied the shattering statements, calling into question official documents that mention the disappearance of opponents during this period.
"This story of 1964, if there are documents showing who killed or did not kill, is nonsense," he told reporters in Brasilia on Tuesday. He also attacked the National Truth Commission, created by former president Dilma Roussef, whose report in 2014 reported 434 murders perpetrated by the military regime, not counting the hundreds of detentions. arbitrary and torture cases of opponents. "Do you believe in the truth commission - it was composed of seven people, named by whom, by Dilma Rousseff," he said.
Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), ex-guerrilla tortured by soldiers, was dismissed for makeup of the public accounts. On Monday, the right-wing president had already sparked heated debate, including in his own camp, questioning the official version of the disappearance under the dictatorship of the father of the current president of the Brazilian Bar Association. (ATO). "If one day he wants to know how his father disappeared during the military regime, I tell him, but he will not want to hear the truth," said the head of state about Fernando Santa Cruz, student and activist leftist, disappeared at the age of 26 in 1974 after being arrested by government intelligence in Rio de Janeiro (south-east).