Tag: DOI-CODI

When Torture Wasn’t A Crime

All of us can agree — I hope — that torture is morally abhorrent. But that does not mean that it has always been understood to be a crime.

Today, it is hard to see beyond the idea that torture is a criminal act and that those responsible for it deserve to be punished. This vision has become so ingrained in international law and political discourse that it can seem both obvious and inevitable.

Yet a half century ago, the criminality of torture was far from self evident. Indeed, many on both the left and the right understood torture not as a criminal violation but as a tactic of war, one to be counteracted through violent confrontation. This framing of torture surfaces again and again in my research, but rarely with the clarity of the 1980 interview with guerrilha fighter Reinaldo Guarani that I encountered yesterday in the archives of Rio de Janeiro’s political police.

Like many of his peers in the leadership of Brazil’s student movement, Reinaldo Guarani grew convinced in the late 1960s that the dictatorship that had seized political power in 1964 could be defeated only through force. So Guarani joined the insurgent group Ação Libertadora Nacional and took up arms against the regime. In 1970, he was captured and interrogated by agents of the country’s joint military-police force, DOI-CODI, who repeatedly tortured him. Guarani was eventually released and expelled from the country. The amnesty law passed in 1979 allowed him to return, and occasioned a striking in-depth interview published in Rio’s Tribuna da Imprensa in June 1980.

The former headquarters of DOI-CODI in Rio [From the Ministério Público Federal]

Asked about his experience with torture, Guarani responded:

The torture phase [of my detention] was nothing new, nothing original. From a sociological point of view, it’s understood: they [DOI-CODI] believed we were at war, and we did too. So, when they captured someone from a clandestine organization, they knew they had little time to extract something new about the group. That’s why they hit us so hard in the face, to uncover a meeting point or a safe house. Then came the torture, pau-de-arara [suspension in a stress position], blows, electric shocks, suffocation, palmatória [beatings to the hand with a metal instrument].

These tortures served a function clear to Guarani: to extract from suspected “subversives” as much information as possible. Knowledge of this purpose, he explains, offered seasoned guerrilheiros limited but still meaningful room for counteraction:

[…T]he guy with a little more experience, instead of revealing a meeting point that was still in use, he’d reveal a cold one. That’d give him a three, four hour break. And because the repressors had to go one way or the other to all the places you mentioned, he could even give another cold one that the police would have to investigate. Back then the activity in the jails was immense, incessant; the torturers had to beat everyone as quickly as they could, so they couldn’t get lost in the details.

In just a few sentences, Guarani brings the reader into a terrifying and violent world, one built not on sadism but on the drive to extract the maximal quantity of information from the largest number of people in the least possible time. The frenetic pace of this world is corroborated by many repressors themselves, who in period documents and subsequent interviews repeatedly emphasized the urgency of the first hours of interrogation and the need for “efficiency” above all else. While Guarani does not play down the horror or the power of the torturers’ violence — even the “experienced” militant has to tell her captors something — his emphasis is on the ability of more skillful guerrilheiros to manipulate their interrogators even under conditions of extreme adversity. Sending agents to disused meeting points didn’t just earn a few hours of rest for the victim, it also bought her comrades critical hours to discover that she had been captured and move to safer ground. Indeed, the security practices of insurgent groups were centered on detained militants’ ability to hold out for a specified period of time — often two days — before revealing any “hot” information that could compromise the group.

Nowhere does Guarani indicate that he was not disgusted by DOI-CODI’s deployment of torture — only that he was not surprised. “They believed we were at war,” he explains, “and we did too.” Torture may have been immoral; it may have been a violation of the law of war. But these questions mattered less to Guarani than torture’s use to those employing it — its specific value, in other words, as a tactic of war. Understanding the counterinsurgent information-gathering ends to which torture was employed could give Guarani and his comrades a bit of space to maneuver, granting them a degree of power they could then turn against the regime.

Guarani’s words make the case at the heart of my dissertation more compellingly than I possibly could. The history of torture cannot simply be the history of our abhorrence of it — or we will miss what repressive violence meant to those who lived it, and to the political struggles within which it was deployed.

The Armed Left Confronts Torture: São Paulo, 1970

Planning has its limits, in historical research as in life. This has never been clearer to me than at the archive where I’ve been spending most of my time these past three months, the Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo (APESP), where receiving the wrong box late one Friday afternoon opened a path to understanding a critical but seemingly inaccessible dimension of the past.

APESP, I’ve mentioned before, houses the voluminous files of the state’s political police, the Departamento Estadual de Ordem Política e Social, or DEOPS. Extant from 1924 to 1983, this police force produced hundreds of thousands of pages on groups and individuals linked — according to DEOPS, at least — to communism or other forms of subversion. Miraculously, the documents are open to researchers with virtually no restrictions — beyond, that is, the difficulty of navigating them. Unlike the fully text-searchable Paraguayan police archives to which I dedicated last October, the DEOPS files can be accessed only through the name-based index built by their creators, making it easy to reconstruct, but hard to escape, the repressive logic of DEOPS itself.

Understanding these constraints, I’d arrived with a list of names to follow through the archive. I kept to this plan for the first week, and it yielded some insights. Thanks to the kind suggestions of those who know the files well, I was able to hone in on documents sent to DEOPS from the São Paulo unit of the joint military-police intelligence operations system know as DOI-CODI, responsible for a disproportionate share of the dictatorship’s worst violence. These DOI-CODI files illuminate the counter-revolutionary constructs and operational patterns that guided the repression, but they do little to clarify the meanings of torture for those who lived it most acutely.

At the end of my first week at APESP, however, my archival fortunes took a sharp turn for the better. That Friday, about two hours before closing time, I received a folder one code away from the document I’d requested. As it was already sitting in front of me, I figured it couldn’t hurt to give the folder a quick glance before I took it back.

The contents of the folder didn’t look anything like the documents I had been requesting. Instead of standardized third-person accounts of endless interrogation sessions, it was brimming with hard-to-read copies of notebooks, letters, and pamphlets — papers that DOI-CODI had seized, I soon learned, from the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária, or VPR. One of the armed revolutionary groups to emerge from the post-coup shakeup of the Brazilian Communist Party, the VRP set out in 1969 to build an insurgent training camp in the south of São Paulo state, led by former Army captain and famed insurgent Carlos Lamarca. The facility, located in the fertile Vale do Ribeira, was operational for ten months. But in May 1970, following leads provided under torture by captured VPR militants, security forces learned of the camp’s location and quickly encircled it with a force of thousands. A small band of militants, including Lamarca, managed to escape, enabling the group to carry on until, battered by ongoing repression, the VPR dissolved itself in 1971.

Lamarca training a VPR militant in the Vale do Ribeira. [From the Comissão da Verdade do Estado de São Paulo.]
One of the escapees was Yoshitane Fujimori, who returned to São Paulo to continue organizing. In December 1970, he and fellow guerrilheiro Edson Quaresma were spotted by DOI-CODI operatives and gunned down as they tried to escape in Fujimori’s car. The documents I was looking at, it turned out, had been in the vehicle at the time of the killing. Among them were letters, records of internal debates, self-critical evaluations, and notes from strategy sessions; taken together, they offered an unvarnished look at a persecuted insurgent group’s attempts to counteract and overcome the devastating effects of widespread interrogatory torture.

Given this context, it is hardly surprising that the documents seized from Fujimori’s car paint torture, above all, as a threat — it was, a letter from April 1970 states, the regime’s “most efficient weapon to combat us.” The Vale do Ribeira camp fell, the group understood, because of comrades who had talked under extreme physical duress. These militants had been unable to resist weeks of torture, the VPR concluded, because they had not managed to commit themselves sufficiently to the cause, to fully extinguish the internalized liberalism that led them to treason. Only “daily combat” against the individualistic enemy lurking within could constrain the torturers’ power.

Yet while torture was the dictatorship’s most effective weapon, it was also one that the VPR hoped to turn against the very regime employing it. The group’s most powerful tools for consciousness-building and recruitment, one leader wrote in November 1970, were agitation and propaganda, and nothing made for agitprop like direct accounts of torture. “For example,” the leader wrote, “an agitator could demonstrate at the entrance to a factory, speaking to hundreds of workers, denouncing the brutal repression in the [regime’s] treatment of political prisoners. This should be detailed, citing the most brutal concrete cases, such as the death under torture of a comrade they know.”

The reach of this anti-torture agitprop, the VPR believed, should not be limited to Brazil itself. Some “honest liberals” abroad had begun to investigate systematic torture by the regime, a practice that had deepened in the wake of the December 1968 “coup within a coup” that pushed the dictatorship far to the right. These liberal denunciations were a good sign, another writer posited in October 1970; the regime needed to be attacked on all fronts, and international denunciation of state repression was a promising one. Indeed, as early as June 1970, the VPR had written a report titled “Sequestro e Tortura” (Kidnapping and Torture), to lend further force to the growing wave of condemnation from abroad.

Two hours with these papers on a Friday afternoon were sufficient to convince me that if I wanted to understand what torture meant to the groups grappling with it most immediately, I would have to read more documents like the ones I had just seen. Fortunately, leads have a way of generating more leads, and painstaking work over subsequent months led me to dozens more documents addressing torture, from the VPR as well as several other insurgent groups. These documents include descriptions of organized campaigns to denounce torture at home and abroad, to prepare individual militants to resist it in detention, and to come to grips with its effects once released. They offer, in sum, a window onto understandings of torture that overlapped in certain ways, but differed in many other crucial ones, from those of the “honest liberals” who would soon come to dominate discussions of state violence in Latin America and beyond. All but absent from the academic literature until now, this is a perspective that only period documents can reconstruct — an operation now possible thanks to one of the most fortuitous mistakes to which I’ve ever been party.