Amnesty for Brazil Dictatorship Is Challenged

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

RIO DE JANEIRO — A human rights court said that a Brazilian amnesty law covering crimes during the country’s 21-year dictatorship was invalid and that the country was responsible for the forced disappearance of at least 70 peasants and militants who were part of a resistance movement.

The ruling was announced Tuesday by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; the court adheres to the American Convention on Human Rights, to which Brazil is a signatory.

While Argentina and Chile have begun more vigorously investigating and prosecuting human rights violations committed during those countries’ dictatorships, successive Brazilian governments have refused to investigate and find those responsible for crimes committed during the dictatorship that ended in 1985. And Brazil’s Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the amnesty law, which protects military officials from prosecution for abuses committed during the military regime.

But the Inter-American Court, based in Costa Rica, found that Brazil was responsible for the actions of state agents who carried out disappearances of members of the Araguaia guerrilla movement.

The court said Brazil must conduct a criminal investigation into the Araguaia case, bring the guilty parties to justice, search for those who have disappeared and provide medical and psychological treatment to their surviving relatives. It also said 42 direct relatives of the victims should receive $45,000 each in compensation for their suffering.

“This is a turning point in the search for truth and justice in Brazil,” said Viviana Krsticevic, the executive director of the Center for Justice and International Law, a human rights group involved in the case. “Brazil, unlike other Latin American countries, has not found a way to investigate or even partially punish those responsible for the most egregious human rights violations committed during its dictatorship.”

The responsibility for deciding how to deal with the Inter-American Court’s decision will fall to the president-elect, Dilma Rousseff, a former resistance fighter who was imprisoned and tortured by the military regime. Ms. Rousseff, who takes office on Jan. 1, vowed in the campaign to bring human rights violators from the dictatorship to justice.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government did little to break the pattern of earlier governments in not going after those responsible for the dictatorship’s crimes, reflecting how the military remains an influential political actor in Brazil, Ms. Krsticevic said. His government supported the decision in April by the Supreme Court not to investigate the anti-guerilla military operation in the Araguaia region in that period, as requested by families of the victims. The court cited the 1979 amnesty law in its decision.

In its ruling on Tuesday, the human rights court said, “The provisions of the Brazilian Amnesty Law that prevent the investigation and sanctioning of severe human rights violations are incompatible with the American Convention, have no legal effects and cannot continue to stand in the way of investigating the facts” of the Araguaia case.

On Wednesday, Paulo Vannuchi, Brazil’s departing minister for human rights, called the court’s decision “very important to continuing to develop human rights” in Brazil.

“We need to find the bodies of those resistance fighters and return them to their families,” Mr. Vannuchi said. “This is indispensable to talking about democratic reconciliation, about being one united country.”

Myrna Domit contributed reporting from São Paulo, Brazil.