Silence, hindrances and omissions: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Brazilian military dictatorship

ABSTRACT

This article examines the performance of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the 1970s with regard to the complaints of violations committed by the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985). Drawing on theoretical insights from historical institutionalism and using reports and recently published documents by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Brazilian Truth Commission, the work analyses how multiple unfavourable political and institutional conditions hampered the commission from fulfilling its role in the protection of human rights in the case of Brazil. Such failure would later produce long-term negative impacts for Brazilian human rights groups in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
• inter-American human rights system
• Brazil
• military dictatorship
• institutional performance
• activism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the comments received from the anonymous reviewers, Par Engstrom, Courtney Hillebrecht, Rossana Rocha Reis, and from those present at the II Leverhulme Inter-American Human Rights Network Workshop at University College London in October 2015. I also thank Crimeia Alice Schmidt de Almeida for helping me obtain the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Bruno Boti Bernardi is Professor of International Relations at the Federal University of Grande Dourados. His research interests lie in human rights policies in Latin America, with focus on the Inter-American Human Rights System, transitional justice, international norms, judiciary branch, transnational NGOs and compliance with human rights standards. His past research and publications have analysed the impact of the transitional justice model stemming from the Inter-American Human Rights System in the cases of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Bruno has a PhD in Political Science from the University of São Paulo.

ORCID

Bruno Boti Bernardi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7127-2041

Notes

1. James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, ‘A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change’, in Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency and Power, ed. James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–37.

2. See Tom Farer, ‘The Rise of the Inter-American Human Rights Regime: No Longer a Unicorn, Not Yet an Ox’, Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1997): 510–46; Ariel Dulitzky, ‘The Inter-American Human Rights System Fifty Years Later: Time for Changes’, Quebec Journal of International Law Special Edition (2011): 127–64.

3. In 1970, after the entry into force of the Protocol of Buenos Aires, the IACHR was promoted from an autonomous organ to a principal organ of the OAS that could only be extinguished through an amendment to the Charter of that organisation. Until then, the IACHR had lacked institutional security, since its very existence was anchored only in Ministerial Resolutions of 1959 and 1965, meaning that a simple conference resolution could cause its dissolution.

4. Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The OAS and the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 70–1, 91; Cecilia Medina Quiroga, The Battle of Human Rights. Gross, Systematic Violations and the Inter-American System (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijholf, 1988), 69–70.

5. David Forsythe, ‘Human Rights, the United States and the Organization of American States’, Human Rights Quarterly 13, no. 1 (1991): 82.

6. Robert K. Goldman, ‘Historia y Acción: el Sistema Interamericano de Derechos Humanos y el papel de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos’, in La Protección Internacional de los Derechos Humanos y el papel de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos: un reto en el siglo XXI, ed. Ana Covarrubias Velasco and Daniel Ortega Nieto (México, DF: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Internacionales, 2007), 124.

7. Anna P. Schreiber, The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Leiden, The Netherlands: A. W. Sijthoff, 1970), 55.

8. Goldman, ‘Historia y Acción’, 127–8.

9. Farer, ‘The Rise of the Inter-American Human Rights Regime’; Goldman, ‘Historia y Acción’; Klaas Dykmann, Human Rights Policy of the Organization of American States in Latin America: Philanthropic Endeavors or the Exploitation of an Ideal? (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2008).

10. LeBlanc, The OAS and the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, 95.

11. Given the earliness of its military coup, in 1964, Brazil became the first case in which the IACHR was confronted with gross violations committed by an authoritarian regime within the context of the Cold War, a phenomenon that would sweep across Latin America.

12. Mahoney and Thelen, ‘A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change’.

13. Ibid., 15.

14. Ibid., 18.

15. Ibid., 29.

16. Ibid., 19–25.

17. Ibid., 24.

18. Ibid., 28.

19. Ibid., 19.

20. Ibid., 21.

21. Anthony W. Pereira, Ditadura e repressão: o autoritarismo e o Estado de direito no Brasil, no Chile e na Argentina (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2010).

22. Mahoney and Thelen, ‘A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change’, 13.

23. It is worth noting that, in the universal human rights system, not even the United Nations (UN) exercised any effective leadership or pressure with regard to the abuses perpetrated by the Brazilian military regime. See Glenda Mezarobba, ‘O preço do esquecimento: as reparações pagas às vítimas do regime militar (uma comparação entre Brasil, Argentina e Chile)’ (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2007), 357; José Augusto Lindgren Alves, Os direitos humanos como tema global (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1994), 88–9; Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV), Relatório – Volume 1 (Brasília, DF: 2014), Ch. 5.

24. Cecília MacDowell Santos, ‘A justiça ao serviço da memória: mobilização jurídica transnacional, direitos humanos e memória da ditadura’, in Desarquivando a Ditadura: Memória e Justiça no Brasil, ed. Cecília MacDowell Santos, Edson Teles, and Janaína de Almeida Teles (São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, vol. II, 2009), 472–95. The data were taken from the annual reports of the IACHR of 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1973. The annual reports of 1974 and 1975 contain information on cases against Brazil, but no aggregate data on the number of petitions received and cases pending. For cases where there were conflicting numbers, I have used the lowest numbers presented in the reports. With respect to the proportion of cases accepted as concrete compared to the total number of petitions received, the data from the reports only permitted this calculation for the periods 1969–1970, 1971 and 1972. In these three periods, the proportions for Brazil were 22.5%, 15.4% and 27.3%, always considerably lower than the IACHR’s overall proportions that aggregate numbers from all countries, and whose results were 60.2%, 42.1% and 53.8%. This difference could be an indicator of a certain selectivity on the part of the IACHR when dealing with Brazil. See IACHR, Annual Reports (1970–1975), http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/reports/annual.asp (accessed 23 December 2016).

25. Flávia Piovesan, Direitos Humanos e o Direito Constitucional Internacional (São Paulo: Editora Saraiva, 2008), 304–5. The cases are the following: 1683 (death of Olavo Hanssen), 1684 (killing of Father Henrique Pereira Neto and cases of torture and political prisoners), 1697 (arbitrary detention and mistreatment of Heleno Cláudio Fragoso, Augusto Sussekind de Moraes Rego and George Tavares, lawyers from the city of Rio de Janeiro), 1700 (arbitrary detention of the physicist couple Ernest Wolfgang Hamburger and Amélia Império Hamburger), 1740 (detention of two peasant leaders in the state of Maranhão), 1746 (condition of political prisoners at the Tiradentes prison in São Paulo and the transfer of several of them to other prisons), 1769 (arrest of the priest François Jentel and the situation of other members of the clergy from the diocese of São Félix do Araguaia, in the state of Mato Grosso, including the bishop Pedro Casaldáliga), 1772 (numerous cases of arbitrary detention and torture of political prisoners), 1788 (detention of the minor Ivan Axelrud de Seixas and list of murders of 104 individuals), 1789 (arbitrary detention of the former Santa Catarina state legislator Paulo Stuart Wright), 1835 (arrest of 53 people by the secret police, with special attention to the detention of the lawyer and Army official Wellington Rocha Cantal), 1841 (arbitrary detention of Mrs Maria Mascellani), 1844 (detention and disappearance of Fernando Augusto de Santa Cruz Oliveira and Eduardo Collier Filho in the city of Rio de Janeiro), 1846 (arrest of teachers from the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning, CEBRAP), 1897 (arbitrary detention of the couple Wilson Silva and Ana Rosa Kucinsky Silva in São Paulo), 1962 (disappearance of Ísis Dias de Oliveira). With respect to case 1962, the annual report of the IACHR from 1975 does not even mention the complaint, presenting only the number of the petition and the dates of the exchanges of communication between Brazil and the commission. In this case, the identification of the petition is attributed to the following work: Janaína de Almeida Teles, ‘Os Herdeiros da Memória: A luta dos familiares de mortos e desaparecidos políticos por verdade e justiça no Brasil’ (Master’s thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, 2005), 104. In addition to these 16 cases, the IACHR opened four other cases between 1970 and 1975 that do not appear in its annual reports from the period, but that were found by the author in an official IACHR document from 6 May 2014 sent to the Brazilian National Truth Commission with a list of all the cases of violations dating from the military dictatorship that were processed by the Inter-American System. In this document, the cases are identified in the following way: 1764 (João Guedes da Silva, received in 1973), 1768 (Antônio L. dos Santos, received in 1973), 1920 (expulsion from Brazil of the reverend Fred B. Morris, received on 11 April 1975) and 1999 (Manoel Conceição dos Santos, received in 1975). Due to inconsistencies with the IACHR data, it is possible that the commission at some point combined cases 1999 and 1768 in the same proceeding, numbering them as 1740, although this cannot be confirmed. Therefore, as a result of this doubt, it can be concluded that between 1970 and 1975, including petition 1678 (case of Salomão da Silva, declared inadmissible), the IACHR processed either 19 or 21 individual cases on Brazil.

26. James N. Green, Apesar de vocês: oposição à ditadura brasileira nos Estados Unidos, 1964–1985 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2009), 277.

27. Teles, ‘Os Herdeiros da Memória’, 69.

28. Green, Apesar de vocês, 277; 283. According to Green, subsequently, ‘the general secretaries of the Christian Workers Federation in Paraguay, the Latin American Federation of Civil Construction Workers based in Venezuela, and Union Action from Argentina all joined the petition’ (ibid., 519).

29. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos 1971’, OAS/Ser.L/V/II/.27, Doc. 11 rev. 6 marzo 1972, Parte III – comunicaciones y reclamaciones, http://www.cidh.oas.org/annualrep/71sp/parte3.htm#2 (accessed 23 December 2016).

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Dykmann, Human Rights Policy of the Organization of American States, 485.

34. Ibid., 120.

35. Ibid., 89; Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV), Relatório – Volume 1, 208.

36. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual 1971’.

37. Ibid.; IACHR, ‘Informe Anual de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos 1973’, OEA/Ser.L/V/II.32, Doc. 3 rev. 2, 14 febrero 1974, Parte 3 – observaciones respecto de comunicaciones recibidas, Brasil, http://www.cidh.oas.org/annualrep/73sp/sec.1.Brasil.htm (accessed 23 December 2016).

38. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos 1972’, OEA/Ser.L/V/II/.29, Doc. 41 rev. 2, 13 marzo 1973, Parte 3 – comunicaciones y reclamaciones, http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/72sp/sec.2a.htm (accessed 23 December 2016).

39. Ibid.

40. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual 1973’.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Green, Apesar de vocês, 216.

46. Jovelino Ramos, an exiled Presbyterian pastor originally from Rio de Janeiro, and Rubem Cesar Fernandes, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and also a political exile (ibid., 215–16).

47. Ibid., 215–16.

48. Ibid., 281.

49. Ibid., 281.

50. Ibid., 282.

51. Dykmann, Human Rights Policy of the Organization of American States, 83.

52. Green, Apesar de vocês, 284; IACHR, ‘Informe Anual de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos 1973’.

53. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual 1973’.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid.

61. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual 1973’.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Green, Apesar de vocês, 303.

65. Ibid., 286.

66. DICOM Case No. 59,947 of 11 July 1975 (Brazilian National Archives, DSI/MJ: BR_RJANRIO_TT_O_MCP_PRO_432: 6).

67. Brazilian National Truth Commission Archive, 00092.000272/2015-12: Information for the President of the Republic, signed by the Minister of Foreign Relations, Antonio F. Azeredo da Silveira, Index: IACHR. Case Nos 1683 and 1684: 23.

68. Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV), Relatório – Volume 1, 208.

69. National Truth Commission Archive, 00092.000272/2015-12: IACHR Regulation, item 2, article 57: ‘If the General Assembly or Meeting of Consultation do not make any observations on the Commission’s recommendations and if the government concerned has not yet adopted the measures recommended, the Commission may publish its report’: 20–1.

70. National Truth Commission Archive, 00092.000272/2015-12: Ministry of Foreign Relations Archive, Reference: Information for the President, 1976. The 2 June 1974 edition of the Washington Post released information on cases 1683 and 1684, which was interpreted by the Brazilian government as a leak of information by Luis Reque.

71. Green, Apesar de vocês, 304.

72. Ibid., 303.

73. Ibid., 304.

74. Ibid., 304. According to Dykmann, ‘Apparently, the United States did not want to confront Brazil without a consensus among Latin American governments, but it is likely that the geostrategic importance of the largest South American country also played a role in the considerations of the US’ (Dykmann, Human Rights Policy of the Organization of American States, 217).

75. Ibid., 217.

76. Ibid., 201.

77. Ibid., 188.

78. Felipe González Morales, ‘Las Transformaciones del Sistema Interamericano de Derechos Humanos durante los Procesos de Democratización de los Estados Partes’ (PhD diss., Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2012), 48–9.

79. According to the report from the Brazilian National Truth Commission, ‘the permanent representative of Brazil in the OAS, ambassador Paulo Padilha Vidal, was instructed to tell the secretary general of the organisation, the Argentine diplomat Alejandro Orfila, that Brazil would not accept the publication of any fact related to cases 1683 and 1684 and that the Brazilian government wanted the report on Brazil to be shelved. Moreover, he had also received instructions to ask the secretary general of the OAS for the removal and transfer to other duties of Mr. Luis Reque, the executive secretary of the IACHR’ (Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV), Relatório – Volume 1, 210).

80. Ibid.

81. Dykmann, Human Rights Policy of the Organization of American States, 87–94.

82. Ibid., 97.

83. Ibid., 150, 160–1, 217.

84. A Colombian Supreme Court justice who was described as a conservative commissioner but at the same time a human rights activist (ibid., 92).

85. Ibid., 84.

86. Ibid., 95.

87. Ibid.

88. Ibid., 94.

89. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual 1973’.

90. Ibid.

91. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual 1971’.

92. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual 1972’.

93. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos 1974’, OEA/Ser.L/V/II.34, Doc. 31 rev.1, 30 diciembre 1974, Sección Tercera, Comunicaciones dirigidas a la Comisión – Brasil, http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/74sp/Brasil.htm (accessed 23 December 2016).

94. IACHR, ‘Informe Anual de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos 1975’, OEA/Ser.L/V/II.37, Doc. 20 corr. 1, 28 junio 1976, Sección Tercera, Comunicaciones dirigidas a la Comisión – Brasil, http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/75sp/sec.3a.htm (accessed 23 December 2016).

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid.

99. ‘Memorando de entendimento entre a Comissão Nacional da Verdade da República Federativa do Brasil e a Comissão Interamericana de Direitos Humanos da Organização dos Estados Americanos para o acesso à documentação para o esclarecimento de graves violações aos direitos humanos’, 6 May 2014.

100. The cases involving violations that occurred in Brazil were the following: 2014 (José Manuel Fiel, received in 1976), 2028 (Moisés Wainstein, whose receipt date is not available), 2065 (Lysaneas Maciel, received in 1976), 2067 (Ieda Santos Delgado, received in 1976), 2085 (Teodoro Ghercoy, received in 1976), 2572 (Vladimir Herzog, received in 1977), 2577 (female political prisoners detained in Bangu prison, received in 1977), 2626 (João Drummond, received in 1977), 2627 (Newton Líbano da Silva, received in 1978), 3457 (Edval Nunes da Silva, received in 1978) and 7497 (Jorge Oscar Adur, received in 1980). The cases referring to Operation Condor, on which the IACHR does not have the receipt dates, have the following numbers: 3409 (Norberto Armando Habegger), 4453 (Jorge Alberto Basso) and 2019 (Sidney Fix Marques dos Santos). It is worth noting the likely possibility that case 2014 was mistyped by the IACHR and that it refers to the murder of the metalworker Manoel Fiel Filho.

101. Kathryn Sikkink, ‘A emergência, evolução e efetividade da rede de direitos humanos da América Latina’, in Construindo a democracia: direitos humanos, cidadania e sociedade na América Latina, ed. Elizabeth Jelin and Eric Hershberg (São Paulo: Edusp, 2006), 97–132.

102. Between 1970 and 1975, the IACHR opened 19 or 21 cases, from at least 77 petitions, and only cases 1683 and 1684 had their recommendations published, while all the others were either considered inadmissible or shelved. Between 1976 and 1980, the situation was worse still: 14 cases were opened by the IACHR and its silence was absolute, since they were not even mentioned in its annual reports.

103. See Bruno Boti Bernardi, ‘O Sistema Interamericano de Direitos Humanos e a Justiça de Transição: Impactos no Brasil, Colômbia, México e Peru’ (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2015), Ch. 4.

104. In this respect, see James L. Cavallaro, ‘Towards Fair Play: A Decade of Transformation and Resistance in International Human Rights Advocacy in Brazil’, Chicago Journal of International Law 3, no. 2 (2002); Cecília MacDowell Santos, ‘Ativismo Jurídico Transnacional e o Estado: Reflexões sobre os casos apresentados contra o Brasil na Comissão Interamericana de Direitos Humanos’, SUR – Revista Internacional de Direitos Humanos 4, no. 7 (2007): 43; Fiona Macaulay, ‘Human Rights in Context: Brazil’, in Human Rights Regimes in the Americas, ed. Mónica Serrano and Vesselin Popovski (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2010).