The Brasilian Torture Report

While the world’s attention is focused upon the USA and the CIA torture report, a "truth commission" investigating abuses during Brazil's 1964-85 dictatorship has called for the prosecution of former military officers and some private companies for their role in human rights atrocities. 377 people, including some generals, as responsible for what they described as crimes against humanity, including the systematic use of torture, rape, forced disappearances and murder of the military's opponents. 200 of the alleged perpetrators are still alive. Brazil's military officers never faced trial, in part because they negotiated an amnesty law several years before leaving power that protected them from most future prosecution. But leaders of the truth commission said the 1979 amnesty law should not apply to crimes against humanity.

Brazil's military is no longer a threat to democracy but it retains influence among some legislators in Congress, so the prospect of former officers facing trial is uncertain. The truth commission also detailed how private companies, including many foreign automakers, helped the military put together "black lists" of trade union activists. Many of the activists were harassed by police or unable to find jobs for a long period. Germany's Volkswagen AG had been a particularly active provider of information to the military, providing detailed accounts of union meetings. State-run oil company Petrobras , which is currently at the centre of a corruption scandal shaking Rousseff's government, was an "iconic" case of a company that suppressed labour unrest with military assistance. Rosa Cardoso, one of the truth commission's leaders, said public prosecutors should try to bring civil lawsuits against companies whose actions directly led to serious rights violations.

CIA and US military were the architects and mentors of Brazil and Latin America's human rights, abuses, military juntas and torture. All courtesy of the "School of the Americas" (SOA). A 1996 Pentagon investigation revealing its training manuals advocated torture, false imprisonment, and executions.

During the first seven years after Castelo Branco's CIA orchestrated coup, the US military and Intelligence services "trained" 100,000 Brazilian police in torture and repression including the sale of $20 million worth of torture equipment. More than 600 Brazilian police and senior military officers who were brought to the United States. Their instruction was clear as the CIA trainer openly encouraged and lectured on using widespread torture as means of repression and intimidating the Brazilian population. Others conveyed a even more insidious message. Le VanAn, a student from the South Vietnamese police, later described what his instructors told him: "Despite the fact that brutal interrogation is strongly criticized by moralists," they said, "its importance must not be denied if we want to have order and security in daily life."

Brazil's political prisoners never doubted that the Americans were involved in the torture that proliferated in their country. On their release, they reported that they frequently had heard English-speaking men around them, foreigners who left the room while the actual torture took place. As the years passed, those torture victims say, the men with American.

accents became less careful and sometimes stayed on during interrogations and started actively participating in torture, rapes and murders of political opponents.