RIO DE JANEIRO — The National Truth Commission that probed human rights abuses committed by Brazil's former military dictatorship drew a direct link from regime-era kidnappings and killings to the brutality of today's police force.
Brazil's police are among world's deadliest, with officers often implicated in everything from extortion and kidnappings, to torture and summary executions.
Between 2009 and 2013, police killed 11,197 people in Brazil, according to a study released last month by the violence watchdog group Brazilian Public Security Forum — roughly the same amount of people killed by U.S. police in the past three decades.
In an exhaustive report capping a nearly three-year-long investigation into the 1964-85 dictatorship, the truth commission said the abuses committed then by government agents "are not foreign to the reality of contemporary Brazil" and blamed impunity for regime figures for today's police brutality.
A 1979 amnesty law prevents prosecutions of dictatorship-era political crimes, meaning no one has been punished for what the commission's report calls the "systemic practice of illegal and arbitrary detentions, as well as executions, forced disappearances and the hiding of bodies by officials of the Brazilian state."
"It is the understanding of the National Truth Commission that this situation results in large part from the fact that serious violations of human rights that were verified in the past were not adequately condemned, nor were those responsible punished, thus creating the conditions for its continuation," the report said.
Among its 29 recommendations, the report called for the demilitarization of the military police — state forces that are responsible for carrying out patrols and day-to-day policing and are the target of the lion's share of citizens' complaints. Created under the dictatorship, the military police are officially a branch of the Armed Forces, and officers have the status of soldiers. A constitutional amendment would be needed to demilitarize the force.
The report also calls for legal changes to how police are allowed to classify deaths of civilians, most of which officers label as "suspect resisting arrest" to indicate officers were under attack. Security experts and activists have long criticized this classification, saying it's used to cover up summary executions.
The recommendations have reignited debate over the military police's place in society that last flared up in 2013, following the July disappearance of Amarildo de Souza, a Rio de Janeiro day laborer last seen being taken to a police station in the Rocinha slum.
While police initially attempted to link Souza with drug trafficking gangs, investigators say he died while being tortured by officers who later dumped his body. More than two dozen officers have been charged in his death.
Mauricio Santoro, a specialist on human rights issues at Amnesty International's Brazil chapter, hailed the truth commission's recommendation on police reform as among the most important parts of the nearly 2,000-page-long report.
"The recommendations are excellent," he said. "The commission did not only a great job in investigating the crimes of the dictatorship but also underscored how those crimes have a daily impact on society's fear and feelings of insecurity and threat vis a vis our violent and inefficient police force."
