The Senate wants access to recordings of sessions of the Superior Military Court (STM) that dealt with torture practiced at the time of the military dictatorship.
The request was formalized yesterday (18), by means of a letter, by the president of the Human Rights Commission (CDH) of the House, Senator Humberto Costa (PT-PE).
The request was motivated by the publication of excerpts from these audios by journalist Miriam Leitão, from the newspaper The globe. According to the report, the unpublished recordings were recorded in STM sessions between 1975 and 1985.
“The recordings record reports of cases of torture during the military dictatorship. Miriam Leitão says that the audios are voices from the dark time of the military dictatorship that were rescued by historian Carlos Fico, head of the History of Brazil at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro [UFRJ]”, emphasizes Costa in the document sent to the president of the STM, Minister General Luis Carlos Gomes Mattos.
In one of the excerpts of the recordings, the then minister of the STM Waldemar Torres da Costa discussed the issue during a session that would have taken place in 1976. He would have said that “when torture is alleged and, sometimes, impossible to be proved, but attributed to police authorities, I confess that I begin to believe in these tortures because there is already a precedent”.
* With information from the Senate Agency
