Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was last week found guilty of leading a failed military coup d'état after he lost the 2022 presidential election to his left-wing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. His conviction is particularly significant for those familiar with the atrocities committed during Brazil’s military dictatorship, which followed a coup d'état against a left-wing government in 1964 and lasted more than 20 years.
Bolsonaro has previously publicly praised the dictatorship and the violence it committed against women. In 2016, when he was still an obscure federal deputy, he dedicated his vote in the impeachment trial of then-president Dilma Rousseff to “the memory of Col Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the dread of Dilma Rousseff”.
This celebration of one of the dictatorship’s most notorious torturers by an elected official was shocking and appalling. In 1970, the intelligence and political repression unit led by Brilhante Ustra had arrested and tortured Rousseff, then a young guerrilla fighter, for 22 days. “If [a security officer] didn't like the answers, he would punch you”, Rousseff would later tell investigators.
Bolsonaro’s grotesque praise for these events set the tone for what was to come in Brazil: a parliamentary coup against Rousseff in 2016 and a surge in gender-based violence, aggravated three years later, after Bolsonaro was elected president. Since then, the limits of violence have expanded, becoming increasingly normalised in the public sphere.
The connection between dictatorship and violence against women is no coincidence; militarism and repression have always been underpinned by patriarchy.
In 2014, the final report by Brazil’s National Truth Commission (CNV), established to investigate human rights crimes during the 1964-85 dictatorship, recognised that security forces routinely used rape to humiliate and subjugate women. The report noted that women were tortured not only for what they knew, but for defying what was expected of them as ‘wives and mothers’ and daring to enter politics, a historically male space.
Victims’ accounts published by the CNV expose the extreme cruelty of this sexual violence, which involved instruments of torture such as acid, alcohol, pliers, razors, knives, candles and lit cigarettes, broomsticks, ropes, electric shock machines, batons and even drills, as well as insects and animals such as cockroaches, rats, snakes and even alligators.
The violence went far beyond the sexual. “Mutilation of the breasts deprived mothers of the ability to breastfeed their babies. Uteruses burned with electric shocks left many women unable to become pregnant or carry a pregnancy to term,” an excerpt from the CNV report says.
One woman who recounted her story to the commission was Cristina Moraes Almeida, who was detained and tortured in 1969, when she was a 19-year-old student. She told how “hooded men” mutilated her chest and breasts and used an electric drill to destroy her leg after Brilhante Ustra ordered that she be “punished” for “wearing tight trousers to a public office”.
The CNV also reported that “the ‘honour’ of those males considered enemies by the repressive apparatus was also attacked in the bodies of ‘their women’, bodies historically treated as spoils of war in the most diverse conflicts.”
Amelinha Teles, a journalist whose children were kidnapped and who was forced to witness their physical torture, recounted in a public hearing how state agents took advantage of inequalities between men and women to intensify torture. “In one of those sessions, a torturer [...], with me tied to the dragon chair [an electric shock chair], masturbated and ejaculated on my body”, she recalled.
The perverse morality of the dictatorship did not even spare pregnant women, who suffered miscarriages as a result of the torture they were subjected to. “I definitely had a miscarriage because of the shocks I suffered in the first few days, on my genitals, breasts, fingertips, behind my ears”, Izabel Fávero, another victim, stated in her testimony before the CNV.
A few days ago, while my mother was preparing lunch, we talked about how Bolsonaro once praised a torturer to humiliate the president. I told her about the rats placed in political prisoners’ vaginas. She was perplexed. Like so many Brazilians, she did not know about that. Our collective ignorance is part of the open wound we still carry. Many of Bolsonaro’s supporters voted for him in ignorance about the past, without knowing what really happened during the dictatorship – without knowing what it was that he had celebrated.
Truth and memory are our commitment as a society; we owe both to the victims, so that the crimes committed against them never happen again. But truth and memory are built with justice. The lack of punishment for the military and agents of the dictatorship for their acts of violence opened the door to new authoritarian attacks. When, years later, a democratically elected member of parliament was not punished for praising the torture of a woman in the highest office in the country, the situation became more serious still.
Bolsonaro's speech against Rousseff hurt all women, but not only us. When she was impeached, some legislators shamelessly said that it was a dismissal “for the entirety of her work”. Well, for those of us who feel the pain of Bolsonaro’s perversity, he has now been convicted precisely for the entirety of his work; an act of accountability by the Brazilian justice system to society for the escalation of violence, for the deaths in the pandemic, for police executions, for the promotion of violence against journalists, especially against women, for the contempt for democracy.
Bolsonaro and his supporters’ recurring discourse in defence of the family is empty when it is based on forgetting or ignoring: you cannot protect the future by denying the violence of the past. The Supreme Court has now sentenced the former president to 27 years imprisonment, and that opens windows to imagine futures in which mediocrity, perversity and hatred no longer dictate the public agenda. Today, at least for today, we can allow ourselves to celebrate the convictions of Bolsonaro and seven others who planned a military coup with him.
Rousseff is a woman who dared to fight for democracy and who, decades later, was humiliated and overthrown because she would not give up on that fight. In 2022, she was acquitted of the alleged manipulation of the government budget for which she was impeached in 2016. Now justice, albeit belatedly, is being served on those who abused her: the dictatorship, Bolsonaro, misogyny. May we have more days like this. We all deserve truth, memory and justice.
*Paula Guimarães is a journalist and co-founder of independent outlet Portal Catarinas. She was part of the winning team of the III Cláudio Weber Abramo Data Journalism Award. She was a finalist for the 2023 Gabo Award and nominated for the Troféu Mulher Imprensa in 2022 and 2023. This is a translated and edited version of an article originally published on Portal Catarinas.
