Brazilian Military Official To be Tried for Abuses Despite Amnesty Law

As Globo reports, a federal judge in Sao Paulo has agreed to open a criminal case against a soldier and two officers accused of kidnapping a dissident during Brazil’s 1964-1985 dictatorship. One of them, ex-colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, was the head of the infamous DOI-CODI state intelligence agency (which has been accused of torturing and disappearing several individuals during this period) from 1970 to 1974.

According to Folha de Sao Paulo, Ustra and the two other suspects are accused of orchestrating the June 1971 kidnapping Edgar de Aquino, a former soldier who was expelled from the army for opposing the 1964 coup which brought the military to power.

This is only the second time that a high-ranking military figure in Brazil has been successfully charged for human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship, as the country’s 1979 amnesty law shields them from prosecution. The first instance occurred in April, when a court in Para state agreed to hear a case against retired Colonel Sebastiao Curio, accused of kidnapping and “disappearing” five suspected guerrillas in the mid-1970s. In 2010 Brazil’s Supreme Court upheld the amnesty, blocking a reinterpretation of the law that would limit its applicability to human rights abuses.

If convicted, Ustra and the other accused could be sentenced to between two and eight years in prison, and it could also clear the way for prosecutors around the country to get around the amnesty in bringing human rights abusers to justice. The prosecutors in Para and São Paulo argue that kidnapping is not protected under the amnesty, and base their reasoning on a September Supreme Court ruling which upheld the extradition of Claudio Vallejos, an ex-Argentine military official accused of kidnapping, torture and murder. In the case, the court ruled that Vallejos could only be extradited on the kidnapping charges, and stipulated that if convicted he must face a maximum sentence of 30 years in keeping with Brazilian law.

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