Only a few friends, family and former clients who have become friends know much of my history--despite the urging of my daughters, I have not written an autobiography. But I have shared with a few of you some bit about my and my family's experience in the late 1960s in Brazil. This article just came to my attention.even though it was posted in December.
If one looks for a single experience to explain everything in one's life, one will be in error. Life is made up of many experiences some more important than others, but the whole is even more than the sum of the parts. Still, some of the parts are key and, in 1968, watching the Brazilian military invade the campus of the University of Brasilia with equipment still marked US Army, then having two Catholic priest friends and colleagues murdered by the secret police and one woman friend tortured in unspeakable ways; finally learning that the death squads associated with the military (Often off-duty military and out of military uniform) had threatened not only my life but the lives of my wife and baby was surely among the key experiences of my life.
That the report noted below showed the US involvement may surprise some people, but when Tamayo, Frances and I returned from Brazil we smuggled out microfilms which had evidence of CIA and US military training the torturers in the Brazilian prisons on live prisoners--including the specfic names of prisoners and of the US personnel. Also in those microfilms was evidence that the electrical torture equipment was manufactured in the US. *
Brazil is a wonderful country and culture. The ordinary people were warm and welcoming, treated us with kindness, they brought us into their homes and taught us a lot about joy and life. I would cheerfully return to spend time in Brazil and to renew my ties there. But that period was traumatic for the Brazilian people as well as for us.
I'm sharing this without drawing an explicit political statement because I respect those who receive it to be able to draw your own broader conclusions. It is not just about Brazil, nor just about the US in that era.
Shalom, but never forget,
* Some of my friends and others berate religion and the Christian church in particular. There is much that the church has to answer for, but in those days and today, the mainline denominations, like Methodists and Presbyterians, Episcopalians and others as well as Jewish synagogues have made major contributions to social justice.
In Brazil, during this awful period, the Presbyterian church paid for specialized training and sent me there to help to teach psychotherapy/counseling at the university and to help the city of Brasilia government "Humanize" the way they worked with poverty. It was also the head of our mission in Brazil, Jaime Wright who, together with the Catholic archbishop of Sao Paulo, Paulo Evaristo Arns, broke the story of torture in Brazil and published it for the world to see (Funded by the World Council of Churches). It was another Roman Catholic Bishop, Dom Helder Camara of Recife who stood solidly with the people even when the military machine-gunned his home.
So yes, the churches--especially the conservative churches--have much to answer for, but the mainstream churches are often found leading the way in social justice.
This is from Huffington Post, but similar reports are available from the New York Times, Washington Post and other news reporting sources.
Brazil Released Its Own Torture Report This Week, And The U.S. Is Implicated
The Huffington Post | By Nick Robins-Early(Reposted for private use under the fair use doctrine. Please do not further reproduce, but go to The Huffington Post link and read the whole story there.)
Posted: 12/12/2014 4:31 pm EST Updated: 12/13/2014 4:59 am EST
As Americans learned about the deeply disturbing tactics of the CIA's post-9/11 torture program this week, the government in Brazil released a report filled with its own history of systemic abuses. The nearly-2,000-page report by Brazil's National Truth Commission detailed a pattern of killings and torture during a period of military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
The report not only shed light on the brutal methods of Brazilian interrogators, but also showed that the United States and the United Kingdom had trained some of the perpetrators in torture techniques.
An emotional Dilma Rousseff, the country's president now and a victim of torture herself in the 1970s, delivered the findings on Tuesday at a ceremony in the capital, Brasilia.
The truth commission was established by Rousseff in 2012, a move that was welcomed by the United Nations' leading human rights official. Rousseff said at the time that the purpose was not to seek revenge, but rather to bring greater transparency to these events. The Obama administration actively cooperated with the Brazilian government and the truth commission in the investigation, with Vice President Joe Biden personally bringing documents to Rousseff last June.
The military regime that engaged in this campaign of killings and torture had come to power in a 1964 coup. It set out to repress anti-government groups amid fears of a communist uprising. Its targets included leftist and Marxist guerrilla organizations, as well as members of society who were simply deemed subversive, such as gay people, labor unions and indigenous tribes.
The security forces' methods included killings, disappearances, sexual violence and other forms of torture, as The Washington Post notes. There were such horrific violations as "the introduction of insects into victims' bodies," according to Newsweek.
The truth commission identified 377 perpetrators from all levels of the Brazilian state. Many of the accused had received training from the U.S. and U.K. in interrogation tactics that, according to The Guardian, violated human rights.
Buzzfeed writes that a large part of that education occurred at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas. This facility, located in Panama until the mid-1980s, acted as a training ground for military members from many Latin American countries. It has since been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and is now run out of Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia.
Ethical concerns arose over the School of the Americas' curriculum in the mid-1990s, when declassified U.S. training manuals revealed the nature of the lessons being taught. According to an Amnesty International report, those manuals advocated the use of "torture, extortion, kidnapping and execution" of a regime's foes. Newsweek cites a report by Brazil's O Globo newspaper that says more than 300 Brazilian officers trained at the School of the Americas.
As for British involvement, The Guardian writes that Brazilian officers were flown to London in the 1970s to learn methods of interrogation that included elaborate psychological abuses.
Brazil's report found that 434 deaths -- that's 191 individuals killed and 243 "disappeared" -- and thousands of acts of torture were attributable to the military dictatorship during its two-decade reign. The report also cautioned that the numbers could be higher, for these were only the incidents that could be proved.
Prosecution of those named by the truth commission is unlikely. A controversial 1979 amnesty law, passed as Brazil was moving slowly toward democracy, covers both regime and dissident figures. The current government has also shown no real desire to pursue these cases.
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