From Brasilia
Since the early 70s the Brazilian dictator Emilio Garrastazú Medici – often praised by Jair Bolsonaro – had the complicity of the Argentine military regime to carry out the silent hunt for exiles who acted in the democratic resistance.
One of the first coordinated actions occurred in the winter of 1971 when elements of the federal police kidnapped Edmur Pericles Camargo, a Brazilian militant at the Ezeiza airport to which the services of various countries followed in the footsteps. Since then he has been missing.
Fifty years after this crime against humanity, this Thursday Jair Krischke, the top researcher on the Condor Plan in Brazil, and Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, will denounce the case before the federal court of Lomas de Zamora.
“I am very confident that our lawsuit will prosper, I have great expectations that the Argentine justice will clarify these imprescriptible crimes and do what the justice of my country did not do, which has not criminally prosecuted any repressor of the dictatorship,” says the indefatigable Krischke, after having fought court battles in his country and abroad.
“Brazil suffered a terrible, very long dictatorship of 21 years, which in addition to remaining unpunished until today is taken as a model by Bolsonaro and the military that surround him,” says Krischke in this interview with Page I12.
Ezeiza
“On June 16, 1971 Edmur (Pericles Camargo) was inside a Lan Chile plane, it was flight 317 coming from Santiago.
At that time, Lan Chile was a state airline. It was more or less four in the afternoon when Argentine policemen entered the plane and recognized Edmur who was seated. Edmur’s vision was not very good, when he was imprisoned he was brutally tortured and lost practically all sight in one eye. “
“The police officers detained him without a warrant and forcibly removed him from the plane,” says Krischke, head of the Movement for Justice and Human Rights (MJDH) in his country.
“They put him in a vehicle and took him to Aeroparque where that June 16 a plane from the Brazilian Air Force arrived and on June 17 very early, before six in the morning, smuggled him to the military air base of the Galeao, in Rio de Janeiro “.
“Everything we are talking about here is very well documented,” Krischke guarantees.
In the judicial complaint scheduled for this Thursday, secret papers obtained in Brazil by the MJDH and in Argentina by the Provincial Commission for Memory, chaired by Pérez Esquivel and whose secretary is Roberto Cipriano, who also signs as plaintiff, will be attached.
Letters to Goulart
“They called Edmur ´Gauchao´, I met him personally in the 60s, he was a robust man, a very good humor and action guy, he was deported in January 1971 from Brazil to Chile where Salvador Allende already ruled, who had given host to many other persecuted who ran the risk of being eliminated in Brazil “, recalls Krischke.
“The military had no choice but to send him to Chile along with 69 other political prisoners in exchange for the release of the Swiss ambassador to Brazil, Giovanni Enrico Bucher, kidnapped by a guerrilla group under the command of former army captain Carlos Lamarca.”
The capture of the Swiss diplomat in Rio de Janeiro in December 1970 had the flavor of humiliation for the general-president Garrastazú Médici.
It was the longest captivity of a person kidnapped during the dictatorship and the person responsible for the action was a dissident military man, Lamarca, who would later be assassinated.
With the coup of 1964, the conservative pro-American wing had consolidated in the army against a minority, albeit important, current of nationalist officers and non-commissioned officers defending President Joao Goulart.
In 1964, shortly after Joao “Jango” Goulart was overthrown, Goulart settled in Montevideo where a legion of exiles lived, such as the democratic Colonel Jefferson Cardim Osorio, kidnapped in 1970 in Buenos Aires in another Argentine-Brazilian operation, with Uruguayan support.
Around the ousted president were more or less moderate democrats along with left-wing groups and even members of the armed resistance, such as Edmur Pericles Camargo himself.
For those factions, among which differences were not lacking, Goulart was a figure with sufficient weight to lead a process of democratic reconstruction forged in what was called a “Broad Front”.
That Front, armed in Montevideo, came to count on the support of right-wing politicians who regretted having supported the coup.
“When Edmur (Pericles Camargo) was kidnapped in Buenos Aires, he was only making one stopover because he was going to continue his trip to Montevideo to deliver three letters to Goulart sent by opponents of the dictatorship who were in Chile, who wanted to be articulated with what what was happening in Uruguay “, Krischke says.
Pull the thread
Jair Krischke argues that if the Argentine justice succeeds in clarifying the crime against Camargo, a step will be taken towards the deconstruction of the web of complicities between the military, intelligence services and diplomats participating in the South American repression apparatus that emerged in those years and that “has accomplices who want to keep everything in the dark until today. “
It is possible that elements will emerge that allow to reveal “how much still remains to be known about the Condor Plan, because after researching the subject for many years I am convinced that the Condor was an idea that arose in Brazil, but since nothing was investigated in my country, the Brazilian Condor is a lesser known Condor. “
“El Cóndor formally emerged in 1975 in Chile but we have this case of Edmur in 1971 and other more or less contemporary ones that show us that the network was already working before.”
The Condor was not just repression
The Condor is usually reduced to its repressive aspect, since this facet is completed with its function as an instrument at the service of the Brazilian strategy of destabilizing democratic governments and encouraging the establishment of dictatorships inspired by the doctrine of national security.
Since they arrived at the Planalto in 1964, the Brazilian generals contributed money, information and repressive techniques to the seditious military that would later take power in Uruguay, Chile and Bolivia, as evidenced by hundreds of declassified materials.
Bolsonaro
Krischke understands that the judicial process in Argentina could have repercussions in his country and affect the image of Bolsonaro, whose biography is tied to the dictatorship.
“I think this trial may be bad news for Bolsonaro and for his policy of falsifying history by making people believe that the dictatorship was a time of calm and prosperity, that the economy was growing in Brazil and they lived in the best of worlds” .
Krischke hopes that a “work of clarification from outside to inside Brazil” can be done, and brings as an example the process on the Condor Plan carried out in the Italian justice, with which he collaborated, and where there were several Brazilian repressors prosecuted. Despite the fact that none were convicted.
“If the case advances in the Lomas de Zamora court in Brazil, some will wonder why the military amnesty law has not yet been repealed.”
Asked about the possibility of the case being prosecuted in Brazil, Krischke responds: “I don’t think that will happen in Brazil, but this may go to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, or to other international forums where the image of Brazil and of Bolsonaro are quite bad, remember that Bolsonaro already has several presentations before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and that he was denounced before the International Criminal Court. “
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