History (1979-1985)
In 1979, a group of religious activists and lawyers began an extremely ambitious project to obtain, through the Superior Military Court (Superior Tribunal Militar, STM), information and evidence of human rights violations practiced by agents of the state’s repressive apparatus during the military dictatorship (at that time still in place) and to compile this documentation in a book that denounced that situation. They also wanted to avoid the possible disappearance of documents during the process of redemocratization. They considered the preservation of this material indispensable as a source for research about this phase in the history of Brazil.
The lawyers who consulted cases that involved the defense of political prisoners noted the historical and legal value of the documents stored by the court. The testimony given in the military courts deserved special attention, as some of the political prisoners denounced and described the practices of physical and moral violence they had suffered or witnessed.
The leaders of the project – especially the lawyer Eny Raimundo Moreira – understood that the proceedings relating to political prisoners could be reproduced if they took advantage of the 24-hour period of provisional custody of this material permitted by the court.
The idea was brought to the Presbyterian minister, Reverend Jaime Wright, and then Archbishop Paulo Evaristo Arns of the Catholic Church, who agreed to co-manage the activities of the project from São Paulo. The necessary financial resources were solicited and obtained from Philip Potter, the Secretary General of the World Council of Churches (WCC), with the help of Charles Roy Harper Jr., a pastor and member of that body.
With the arrival of these funds to Brazil in the beginning of 1980, Luiz Carlos Sigmaringa Seixas coordinated an operation to copy the case-files that were at the Superior Military Court. He rented Xerox copy machines, hired employees nearby the court, and conducted the operation under cover of a “regular” copy business. Soon thereafter, lawyers went before the court to request case records.
Next, copies of these records were sent to São Paulo, first by night buses, and later by commercial airlines as unaccompanied baggage, or by car. At this point, a concern arose about the material’s seizure by agents of the repressive forces. In fact, on three occasions during the work of the project, there were fears of police or military invasions of the areas where documents were being analyzed and guarded, which forced the teams to change their locations. Given the technology available at the time, the best option for preservation was to microfilm the pages of all the legal cases and send them to the headquarters of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland. Luiz Eduardo Greenhalgh was responsible for logistics in São Paulo.
After approximately six years of work in secret, the project was completed. The reproduction of the 710 judicial proceedings that had been consulted produced nearly 850,000 copies on paper and 543 rolls of microfilm. Furthermore, the project produced a parent document, named “Project A,” with the analysis and cataloguing of the information from the legal cases in 6,891 pages divided into 12 volumes.
With Project A it was possible to identify, among other pieces of information: (i) how many prisoners went before the military courts; (ii) how many were formally accused; (iii) how many were put in prison; (iv) how many people declared that they had been tortured; (v) how many people disappeared; (vi) what forms of torture were most common; and (vii) where detention centers were located. Furthermore, it was possible to list the names of doctors who were on duty, as well as military officials identified by political prisoners.
Attached to the STM cases was material that had been seized, such as pamphlets, newspapers, and theoretical writings. They were also copied (approximately 10,000 documents), and became the beginning of the “archive of seized materials.”
Considering the difficulty of reading and even handling these works, Archbishop Arns envisioned “Project B,” a book that summarized Project A in a length that was 95% shorter. The journalists Ricardo Kotscho and Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo (Friar Betto) were chosen to perform this task, coordinated by Paulo de Tarso Vannuchi. The publishing house Vozes (linked to the Catholic Church) agreed to publish the project, now titled “Brasil: Nunca Mais” (Brazil: Never Again).
On July 15, 1985, four months after the return to a democratic regime, the book “Brasil: Nunca Mais” (Brazil: Never Again) was published. It was featured in the national and international press, and the publication was reprinted twenty times in its first two years alone.
Due to fear of censorship of the work’s contents, an initiative arose to publish a version of the book internationally. One year after its release to the national market, the book “Torture in Brazil”, published by Random House, appeared in bookstores in the United States.
Archbishop Arns decided to donate all of the project’s documents to an institution in order to make them accessible to the public. The content was initially offered both to the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and to the University of São Paulo, which declined to take them. The documents were then offered to the State University of Campinas, which accepted the documents with the promise to make the material widely available for consultation and to permit their reproduction.
Thus, both Project A and copies of the 710 cases were transferred to the Edgard Leuenroth Archive, founded in 1974 and tied to the Institute of Philosophy and Humanities (IFCH) at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). In this way, memory would be preserved.
Archbishop Arns also decided to make 25 hardcover copies of Project A that were bound in black with gold lettering. Fourteen copies were given to universities, libraries, and the archival centers of organizations dedication to the defense of human rights in Brazil, and eleven copies were offered to foreign institutions.
The 543 original rolls of microfilm with complete portions of the 710 cases from the Superior Military Court were sent by the World Council of Churches to the Latin American Microform Project (LAMP), housed in the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), an international consortium of universities, colleges, and independent libraries whose headquarters is in Chicago, Illinois, USA. LAMP is a project that maintains and preserves rare and historically relevant Latin American microfilm collections. Researchers tied to the universities that comprise the consortium can consult the archive.
Since 2005, the Brasil Nunca Mais Virtual Reference Center at Armazém Memória has made a digital copy of Project A available online, using the copy housed at the University of São Paulo Law School at the Largo de São Francisco. This project relied on support from FINEP (Ministry of Science and Technology) and a partnership with the Paulo Freire Institute. It was the early stage of Brasil Nunca Mais Digit@l, which, since 2013, combines that collection with the complete contents of the 710 digitized legal cases, as well the collection of documents about BNM that had been held by the World Council of Churches and the Peace and Justice Commission of the Archdiocese of São Paulo.
At this point, it is important to honor those, known and anonymous, who made Brasil: Nunca Mais a reality. According to Archbishop Paulo Evaristo Arns, nearly 35 people worked on the project. We have managed, at this point, to uncover the names of the following participants, other than Arns, the Reverend Jaime Wright, and those others already mentioned above: Madre Cristina (Célia Sodré Dória), Sonia Hipólito, Leda Corazza, Ana Maria Camargo, Carlos Lichtsztejn, Raul Carvalho, Cândido Pinto de Melo, Vanya Santana e Mario Simas.