‘Brazil needs to debate a nation project’, he says

Organized by the Association of Judges and Judges for Democracy, a member of the Brazil Coalition for Memory, Justice, Reparation, Truth and Democracy, the debate “Dictatorship: Memory, Truth, Justice and Reparation – Non-Repetition” took place last Friday (12). , at UniRitter, in Porto Alegre.

The event was attended by Antônia Mara Loguercio, former prisoner and persecuted politician and Retired Labor Judge, and João Pedro Stedile, social activist from the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) and economist. The activity was part of the Coalition’s calendar to remember and denounce the 60th anniversary of the military coup.

“The importance of memory seems like it is nothing, but it is a lot. The importance of memory so that we know what happened, because for 21 years we could not know. And throughout the other period of democracy we did nothing that institutionally made the facts known to the vast majority of the Brazilian people”, began her speech by former prisoner and persecuted politician and Retired Labor Judge Antônia Mara Loguercio.

“We know what it’s like to fight for any right within a dictatorship” / Photo: Uniritter

The judge recovered her history and trajectory during the period of the military dictatorship and in the subsequent process of the resumption of democracy. To the Brasil de Fato RS, Mara commented that now society is starting to give ‘credit’ to what happened during that period. “Perhaps because of the things that have happened recently, one can imagine what they were capable of in terms of the politics of hate and all the perversities that were done. We are here to spread the truth. No more dictatorship, we no longer tolerate dictatorship,” she stressed.

As he pointed out, dictatorship comes every time a government approaches national sovereignty or anything that benefits the poorest layers, rural and urban workers. “Transitional justice is a very important thing to recover, the commission of deaths and missing people. Because the crime against them is ongoing, no one assumes that they died, that they killed, that they left unburied, or that they threw them into the sea, that they incinerated them. To this day, the family still dreams about the body, searching for it.”

In Brazil, in 2014, the National Truth Commission recognized, in its final report, 434 deaths and disappearances of victims of the military dictatorship in the country, among these people, 210 are missing. “This all needs to be told more, in colleges, to young people, and it has not yet been told to the general public. It seemed like something just for militants.”

Regarding the issue of reparation, Mara pointed out that she should only not receive any reparation if one of the two hypotheses in the Civil Code that provides for reparation had occurred. “If what they did had been a legal thing, it wasn’t. The president was democratically elected. They were the ones who were subversive, who broke, tore up the Constitution to do that. It was an illegal act and caused me physical, work and moral harm. I should be repaired. Just like everyone.”

Fight against dictatorship

As personal experience has shown, fighting against all injustices is much easier in a democracy than in a dictatorship. “I was already a militant when 64 arrived, I was already fighting against injustice and I continued fighting. We know what it’s like to fight for any right within a dictatorship.”

In turn, when Brazil in fact RS, Stedile pointed out that the military business dictatorship that carried out the coup in 1964 was a coup by Brazilian elites supported by the Americans. “They used the Armed Forces to, in fact, interrupt a national development project that was defended by the João Goulart government. And within the national development project, agrarian reform was one of the basic reform proposals.”

In his opinion, the consequences were a tragedy for the entire people, “because in the case of the peasants, they closed all the peasant organizations, interrupted the debate on agrarian reform, arrested their leaders, some were tortured, killed and others had had to endure exile, and then systematic repression was carried out during the 21 years of the dictatorship”.

An unprecedented study carried out by the collaborating researcher at the University of Brasília (UnB) and former political prisoner Gilney Viana, 78, points out that 1,654 peasants were killed or disappeared from the 1964 coup until the promulgation of the Constitution in 1988.

Stedile reinforced that the crisis of the economic model and the resurgence of the mass movement led to the end of the military dictatorship. According to him, from 1979 to 1984, with the crisis of the military dictatorship’s economic model, it was a very rich period of social mobilization, in which social movements and, in the countryside, the MST re-emerged, with the first occupations in RS.

“They used the Armed Forces to, in fact, interrupt a national development project that was defended by the João Goulart government” / Photo: Uniritter

“There is a symbolism, of the end of the dictatorship and the resurgence of the struggle for agrarian reform, in the figure of Lieutenant Colonel Curió, who was sent to Encruzilhada Natalino to try to put an end to the MST camp, which resisted. It was a sign that it was possible to defeat the dictatorship. And here we are in the fight for agrarian reform and, above all, not just the fight for democracy, this country urgently needs a popular project for national development.”

For him, Brazil needs to debate a nation project, otherwise it won’t solve economic problems, it won’t solve social inequalities, it won’t solve agrarian reform, which isn’t expropriating one farm here and another there.

“Agrarian reform is a model for restructuring Brazilian agriculture to produce food, to produce in the form of agroecology, to guarantee the fight against rural poverty.”

Check out the debate in full:

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Source: BdF Rio Grande do Sul

Editing: Katia Marko