A Comissão Interamericana de Direitos Humanos e a ditadura militar brasileira: análise dos casos individuais de denúncias de violações entre 1976 e 1980

Abstract

The rupture of the democratic regime in Brazil between 1964 and 1985 brought to its history a series of human rights violations. Facing a blockage of access to internal reparation and justice channels, the numerous evidences of forced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial executions led several groups and individuals to report these facts to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in the early 1970s. However, although the agency played a more effective role in other cases years later in Latin America, its performance in the Brazilian State was practically nil because it did not turn it into an effective target of international criticism and pressure. Therefore, this work aims to understand the engagement and strategies of Brazil and the petitioners who reported to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights between 1976 and 1980, during the Brazilian military dictatorship. Based on the official documents of the IACHR of this period, which were recently made available by the National Archives, this research tried to reconstruct the history of some of the most emblematic cases of that time: the cases of Vladimir Herzog, Ieda Santos Delgado, João Batista Franco Drumond, Theodoro Ghercov, Lysâneas Maciel and Norberto Armando Habegger, in order to analyze the main arguments of the Brazilian government regarding the criticisms and denunciations as well as what framework was politically and legally mobilized by the complainants to try to hold the Brazilian State responsible. Thus, the present work seeks to recover an important period of Brazilian history and politics in order to demonstrate the unknown transnational mobilization of opponents of the Brazilian military dictatorship within the inter-American human rights system.