Vladimir Herzog died in military custody nearly 30 years ago in what remains one of the most notorious cases of human rights abuse in Brazil. Now the publication of a pair of photographs said to have been taken in his last hours has reopened that old wound and widened differences between the armed forces and the left-wing government that is now in office here.
The army's attempt, decades after the episode, to justify its treatment of Herzog and several hundred other political prisoners has enraged public opinion here. Though President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has moved to discipline the army, the resurfacing of the case has also exposed other violations that may prove harder to address.
"The immediate political problem may have been resolved, but the deeper one has not," Joao Luiz Pinaud, president of the government's Special Commission on the Death and Disappearance of Political Prisoners, said. "The residue of an authoritarian system is still there, concealed in the shadows."
In interviews last week, the military intelligence agent who supplied the photographs, Jose Alves Firmino, has also raised eyebrows by saying that military intelligence continued clandestinely to spy on left-wing parties and politicians, unions and social movements long after military rule ended. He said that during the mid-1990s he even monitored da Silva's activities, offering a photograph of himself with the future president as proof.
Herzog, a Sao Paulo television journalist, was summoned for questioning at intelligence headquarters there on Oct. 25, 1975, on suspicion that he had Communist ties, the government has said. He died the same day after being tortured. The military called his death a suicide, and made public a photograph, later proved to have been staged, that showed Herzog hanging from a belt in his cell.
His death became a symbol of the military dictatorship's excesses, though an amnesty precluded any attempt to bring those responsible to justice. But the Herzog case has been addressed in books, films and television programs over the years, and when the Brasilia daily Correio Braziliense learned that photographs of Herzog, jailed, naked and in despair had been found in the archives of a congressional committee, where they had been sent by Firmino some years ago, it interviewed him and made them public.
The armed forces maintains that all relevant official documents about human rights abuses were legally destroyed after civilian democratic rule was restored in 1985. But Firmino says they are part of a trove of 50,000 documents that a military officer gave him a few years ago.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS