by DANICA JORDEN
Brazil’s National Truth Commission (Commissão Nacional da Verdade, CNV) presented its final report on the history of the human rights violations committed by the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985 on Wednesday, December 10, 2014. One of the chapters in the three volume, 4,400 page report was entitled, “Sexual Violence, Gender Violence and Violence Against Women and Children.”
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“Inserted into the logic of torture and part of the hierarchical structure of gender and sexuality, the sexual violence recounted by survivors of the military dictatorship constitutes abuse of power not only if we consider power as the faculty or possibility of the state agent to inflict suffering, but also the permission (explicit or not) to do so. It was thus that routinely, in the instances where torture became a mode of exercising power and total domination, [concepts of] femininity and masculinity were utilized to perpetrate violence, breaking down all the limits of human dignity,” the report said. [1]
Lucia Murat, in her testimony published by the CNV in May, recounted how she had been subjected to sexual torture. “I was naked with a hood over my head and a cord around my neck that went down my back to my hands, which were tied behind my waist. While the torturer was touching my breasts, my vagina, putting a finger in my vagina, it was impossible for me to defend myself because if I had moved my arms for protection I would have hanged myself, so I instinctively fell back.” [2]
Cristina Moraes Almeida was first arrested in 1969, when she was 19 years old. During torture sessions, she was mutilated on the chest and breasts, and injuries were made to her leg with a drill.
“I want to forget. But I ask you: what kind of professional in psychology could erase these marks? No one; no one. And today the [torturers] say: ‘I don’t know, I didn’t see anything, I’m not responsible.’ Look, to call them torturers is a compliment. Serial killers, without a doubt…. I want this chapter to be over for me. Because I’m still living it as if it had happened yesterday.”[3]
Likewise, Brazil’s president herself may have relived her earlier trauma during the report’s presentation. As earlier accounts have mentioned, President Dilma Rousseff was overcome in the middle of her speech accepting the report. She stroked the sides of her mouth while composing herself, perhaps viscerally recalling how, as her own deposition states, her face was beaten and teeth knocked out during her long period of torture and imprisonment. She has refused to go into further discussion of her experiences.
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