Brazil unveils first charges for dictatorship crimes

Brazilian prosecutors Tuesday unveiled the first criminal charges for crimes committed during the two-decade military dictatorship which ended almost a quarter of a century ago. Army colonel Sebastiao Curio Rodrigues de Moura, better known as "Dr Luchini," was charged over the unresolved kidnapping of five militants captured during a crackdown on leftist guerrillas in the 1970s and still missing today, prosecutor Tiago Rabelo told a press conference. Araguaia guerrillas, a movement founded by a splinter group of the Brazilian Communist Party, were active against the military government between 1966-1974 on the Araguaia river banks. The charges come after President Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla jailed and tortured during the 1964-1985 dictatorship, in November endorsed the creation of a truth panel to probe human rights abuses during the period. The truth commission is meant to investigate issues including politically motivated abductions in the Cold War-era, rights abuses and murders over a time span longer than the dictatorship -- 1946-1988. It does not however lift an amnesty for those who carried out the crackdown, in effect since 1979, and upheld in 2010 by the Supreme Court. Rabelo said the charges would be officially filed Wednesday in his jurisdiction in the northern Amazon state of Para where the insurgents operated. Three other prosecutors from the states of Sao Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul are also involved in the legal action. Brazil has acknowledged 400 abductions and presumed deaths during the dictatorship. After a three-year probe, the prosecutors said they concluded that the five militants -- two women and three men -- were seized by troops led by the accused, who was then a major, between January and September 1974. The militants were then taken to military bases and subjected "to grave physical and moral abuse and were never seen again", they added. Human Rights Watch hailed the decision to bring charges against a retired military officer "for grave abuses committed in the 1970s (as) a landmark step for accountability in Brazil." "This is tremendous news for the families who lost loved ones in the brutal repression that followed the 1964 military coup," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Americas division. "A quarter century after Brazil's transition to democracy, they are still awaiting justice." The Brazilian prosecutors meanwhile warned more civil and criminal cases could follow. Other countries in southern South America which had right-wing dictatorships and political abuses and killings during the 1960s-80s -- Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile -- have put some of the perpetrators of the era on trial. Last year, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights slammed Brazil for past abuses of rights abuses and dismissed the 1979 amnesty laws as being legally invalid saying they were incompatible with the Inter-American Declaration of Human Rights. The president of the Brazilian Bar Association, Ophir Cavalcante, expressed sympathy for Tuesday's court action, but said it could only succeed if the Supreme Court reconsiders its decision to uphold the amnesty law. The prosecutors said they based their action on two rulings of the Supreme Court which agreed to extradite to Argentina two former soldiers whose crimes allegedly committed during the dictatorship were not covered by legal statutes. "The victims were never located, the crime of kidnapping is not over. The 1979 amnesty law does not apply in this case because the crime is still in effect," said Sao Paulo prosecutor Sergio Gardenghi Suiama. Rousseff also promulgated a law lifting indefinite secrecy for public records and mandating their publication after a maximum of 50 years, another historic step to investigate crimes committed during the dictatorship.