Lula recreates commission on political disappearances

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday ordered the reinstatement of the Special Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances, which was dismantled at the end of the Jair Bolsonaro administration in late 2022.

Originally established in 1995, the commission was tasked with recognizing political disappearances, searching for the remains of the dictatorship’s victims, identifying bodies found, and rectifying death certificates.

The Human Rights Ministry had carried out “administrative and legal measures” to re-establish the commission back at the start of the Lula government, but the actual recreation is only occurring now, some 18 months after the president took office. Eugênia Augusta Gonzaga, who served as the committee’s president at the time of its dissolution in 2022, confirmed to The Brazilian Report that she will return to her role.

In 2014, during the Dilma Rousseff administration, a truth commission issued a report concluding that 434 people were killed or disappeared by the military regime — a figure Amnesty International considers an underestimation.

Jair Bolsonaro is an unapologetic nostalgist for the military dictatorship era. As a congressman, he displayed photos of Brazil’s five dictatorship presidents in his parliamentary office. As president, he met with people notorious for their roles during the regime, including retired Army lieutenant Sebastião Curió Rodrigues de Moura and Maria Joseíta Silva Ustra, the widow of Colonel Brilhante Ustra, who was convicted of torture in 2008.

In 2022, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former defense minister — who would later become his running mate for his failed re-election bid — published a statement praising the 1964 military coup as a “milestone of political evolution” for Brazil, which “resulted in the re-establishment of peace in the country and the strengthening of democracy.”

You may also be interested in: Love It or Leave It: 60 years of Brazil’s 1964 coup d’état (a four-part podcast series)

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