RIO DE JANEIRO — Her nom de guerre was Estela. Part of a shadowy urban guerrilla group at the time of her capture in 1970, she spent three years behind bars, where interrogators repeatedly tortured her with electric shocks to her feet and ears, and forced her into the pau de arara, or parrot’s perch, in which naked victims are suspended upside down from a stick, with bound wrists and ankles.
That former guerrilla is now Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff. As a truth commission begins examining the military’s crackdown on the population during a dictatorship that lasted two decades, Brazilians are riveted by chilling details emerging about the painful pasts of their country and their president.
The schisms of that era, which stretched from 1964 to 1985, live on here. Retired military officials, including Mauricio Lopes Lima, 76, a former lieutenant colonel accused of torturing Rousseff, have questioned the evidence linking the military to abuses. Rights groups, meanwhile, are hounding Lopes Lima and others accused of torture, encircling their residences in cities across Brazil.
“A torturer of the dictatorship lives here,” they recently wrote in red paint on the entrance to Lopes Lima’s apartment building in the seaside resort city of Guaruja, part of a street-theater protest.
While a 1979 amnesty still shields military officials from prosecution for abuses, the commission, which began in May and has a two-year mandate, is nevertheless stirring up ghosts. The dictatorship killed an estimated 400 people; torture victims are thought to number in the thousands.
The torture endured by Rousseff, who was 22 when the abuse began and is now 64, is among the most prominent of hundreds of decades-old cases that the commission is examining. The president is not the region’s only political leader to rise to power after being imprisoned and tortured, a sign of the tumultuous pasts of other Latin American countries.
As a young medical student, Chile’s former president, Michelle Bachelet, survived a harrowing stretch of detention and torture after a 1973 military coup. And Uruguay’s president, Jose Mujica, a former leader of the Tupamaro guerrilla organization, underwent torture during nearly 15 years of imprisonment.
Since Rousseff took office, she has refused to play the part of a victim while subtly pushing for more transparency into the years of Brazil’s military dictatorship. She rarely refers in public to the cruelty she endured. Aside from ceremonial appearances, she has spoken sparingly about the truth commission itself. She declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the commission or the time she spent in prison.
Lima Lopes, identified as one of Rousseff’s torturers in São Paulo, has denied torturing her, while defiantly calling her a “good guerrilla.” Other retired military figures, meanwhile, have adopted a similar stance.
In Rio, the search for knowledge of the past has moved state authorities to pay reparations to nearly 900 people tortured in the state during the dictatorship. Among them is Rousseff, who said in May that she would donate her check of about $10,000 to Torture Never Again, a group that seeks to raise awareness of the military’s abuses.
Still, despite such moves, closure remains evasive. Rights activists here were stunned in July after the office of Torture Never Again was burglarized, and archives describing the psychological treatment undergone by torture victims were stolen.
