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The government of Brazil has announced an agreement to recognize its responsibility in the murder of Vladimir Herzog, a journalist and dissident who was killed during the country’s dictatorship period.
On Thursday, the government accepted a state of responsibility and a remuneration package for the Herzog family, amounting to 3 million Brazilian reais, or $ 544,800.
The regulation also said the decision of a federal court earlier this year to grant the widow of Herzog, Clarice Herzog, the retroactive payments of a pension that she should have received after the death of her husband, amounting to around $ 6,000 per month.
In a press release registered by the Associated Press news agency, the son of Herzog, Ivo Herzog, applauded the government’s decision to accept responsibility.
“These apologies are not simply symbolic,” said IVO. “It is an act of the state which makes us believe that the current Brazilian state does not think like the Brazilian state of that time.”
He added that the history of his family represented hundreds, even thousands, others who had their relatives killed during the dictatorship period from 1964 to 1985.
The government recognizes its reprehensible acts, he explained, was a fight of several decades.
“It was a struggle not only of the Herzog family, but of all the families of the murderers and the disappearance,” said IVO, who now directs a non -profit organization of human rights named his father, the Vladimir Herzog Institute.
Vladimir Herzog was 38 years old at the time of his death in 1975, halfway through the dictatorship period.
The Brazilian army had overturned leftist president Joao Goulart a decade earlier and installed a government which became known for human rights violations, including arbitrary arrest and torture of dissidents, students, politicians, Aboriginal people and any other person considered a threat.
Many went into exile. Some have been killed or simply disappeared without trace. The number of deaths is estimated at around 500, although some experts place this figure at 10,000 or more.
Herzog was an eminent journalist, and at the start, he too did the exile in the United Kingdom. But he returned to Brazil to serve as a editor -in -chief of a public television station, TV Cultura. It was in this role that, on October 24, 1975, Herzog was summoned by the authorities in an army barracks.
There, military officials indicated that he would be invited to testify to his political ties. Herzog voluntarily left to offer his declaration. But he never returned home.
The soldiers then said that Herzog’s death was a suicide, and he released a photo staged from his body suspended with a rope.
But a rabbi that later examined Herzog’s body found signs of torture. Herzog’s funerals, directed with complete religious rites, have turned into a calculation moment for the Brazilian dictatorship, and the staging photography has become a symbol of its abuses.
His son Ivo was only nine years old at the time. Earlier this year, he spoke to Al Jazeera About the release of a film entitled I’m Still Here which highlighted another murder committed under the dictatorship: that of Rubens Paiva, a politician.
Like Herzog, Paiva voluntarily left to testify at the request of military officials and has never been revised alive again. His body has never been found. It took decades for the Paiva family to receive a death certificate that recognized the role of the army in his death.
Ivo praised the film I am still there to make injustices aware of the dictatorship. He also told Al Jazeera that he hoped that the Brazilian government recognizes the damage it had made to his family and to modify the 1979 amnesty law who had protected many military officials to face responsibility.
“What are they waiting for?” That everyone connected to this period would die? ” Herzog told journalist Eleonore Hughes. “Brazil has a policy of forgetting, and we have evolved very little.”
Thursday, Jorge Messias, federal legal advisor of Brazil, led the agreement with the Herzog family via a step forward.
“Today, we are witnessing something unprecedented: the Brazilian state officially honoring the memory of Vladimir Herzog,” he said.
He also compared the 1964 coup in modern circumstances of Brazilian politics. On January 8, 2023, thousands of supporters of the far -right president, Jair Bolsonaro, stormed government buildings in the Brazilian capital, after the 2022 elections saw their candidate defeated.
The current president, the left chief Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, compared this incident to a coup. Bowlsonaro testified this month Before the court for accusations, he helped orchestrate an effort to cancel the election results.
“During the 2022 elections, we kept ourselves at a crossroads: either to reaffirm democracy, or to head towards the closure of the Brazilian state, with all the horrors that we have experienced for 21 years,” said Messias, referring to the horrors of the dictatorship.
