Brasil: Nunca Mais

(BNM)

   / BRAZIL: NEVER AGAIN

   A top-secret project of the Archdiocese of São Paulo to photocopy documents stored in the archive of the Supreme Military Court in Brasília. The documents contained the proceedings of cases tried in military tribunals during Brazil’s dictatorship and included sworn testimony of the use of torture to extract confessions from suspected subversives. The project was conceived in August 1979 by lawyers defending political prisoners—lawyers who, because of a recently passed amnesty law, had access to the archives and could check out individual files for 24 hours. They brought the idea to Jaime Wright, a Presbyterian minister and human-rights activist whose brother Paulo had been disappeared by the dictatorship. Wright brought the idea in turn to Paulo Evaristo Cardinal Arns, the archbishop of São Paulo. The Cardinal approved the project, agreed to sponsor it, and sought additional funding from the World Council of Churches (WCC). The WCC would eventually provide more than $350,000 in secret funds.

   In early 1980, 12 BNM team lawyers began checking out files from the archive and taking them to a rented office building, where team members ran leased photocopiers 10 hours a day, seven days a week. Although the goal was modest—to copy a sampling of the files—the team was never discovered. In three years, it managed to copy the entire archive—more than a million pages on 707 complete trials involving 7,000 defendants. The archive was microfilmed, and the microfilm rolls were smuggled out of the country. The story of the BNM project is detailed in Lawrence Weschler’s book A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990).

   The million pages of material, once analyzed, yielded 6,946 pages in 12 bound volumes. The volumes include more than 120 lists and statistical tables, among them a list of 444 torturers. In July 1985, after the return to civilian rule, the archdiocese published a summary of the documents in a book titled Brasil: Nunca mais. By the end of the month, after the book was the subject of a three-page article in the magazine Veja, it reached the country’s best-seller list. An English- language edition was published in 1986 under the title Torture in Brazil. In his preface to the Brazilian edition, Cardinal Arns urged the government to sign and ratify the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. On 23 September 1985, President José Sarney signed the Convention.