The Araguaia Guerrilla War (1972–1974): Armed Resistance to the Brazilian Dictatorship)

719035 research-article2017

LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X17719035Latin American PerspectivesTeles / The Araguaia Guerrila War

The Araguaia Guerrilla War (1972–1974) Armed Resistance to the Brazilian Dictatorship by Janaína de Almeida Teles Translated by Andre Pagliarini The Araguaia guerrilla war (1972–1974) was an attempt to reconcile armed struggle and political awareness that became a sort of “guerrilla focus” with roots in the peasant population, which assumed a decisive role in the resistance to military repression. This period was characterized by the centralization of operations of information and repression, consolidating the tactic of “political disappearance” in Brazil. The military occupation terrorized the population to mitigate any multiplier effect of the insurgency, and its success reverberated throughout the continent. At the same time, denunciations of its human rights abuses helped to erode the dictatorship.

A guerrilha do Araguaia (1972–1974) representou um esforço para reconciliar a luta armada e a consciência política que se tornou uma espécie de foco de guerrilha com raízes na população campesina, que por sua vez desempenhou papel decisivo na resistência à opressão militar. Esse período caracterizou-se pela centralização das operações de informação e repressão, consolidando a tática de “desaparecimento político” no Brasil. A ocupação militar aterrorizou a população com o propósito de reduzir a possibilidade de insurgência e nesse sentido alcançou sucesso que reverberou por todo continente. Contudo, denúncias das violações de direitos humanos contribuíram para a erosão da ditadura.

Keywords: Military dictatorship, Araguaia guerrillas, Political disappearances, Memory, Human rights

The Brazilian dictatorship (1964–1985) was characterized by a strategy of selective repression that oscillated between demonstrative displays and cover-ups of state violence, reflecting the regime’s desire to legitimize itself even as it sought to sow fear. In contrast to the Argentine case, systematic disappearances and killings under torture were carried out in conjunction with the “legalized” imprisonment of thousands of people all over Brazil. In Argentina, the image of the disappeared person and its institutional counterpart, the extermination camps, ceased to be merely forms of repression, becoming instead the repressive modality of power.

In the camps the armed forces disappeared dissidents with surgical precision, a tactic deemed necessary to save the nation from “subversion” and establish an Janaína de Almeida Teles is a researcher in the postdoctoral program in social history at the University of São Paulo and received a Fapesp scholarship in 2012-2015. She is the author of Os herdeiros da memória: Os testemunhos e as lutas dos familiares de mortos e desaparecidos políticos no Brasil (2017). Andre Pagliarini is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history at Brown University.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue XXX, Vol. XX No. XXX, Month 201X, 1–23 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17719035 © 2017 Latin American Perspectives

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ordered, controlled, and conservative society (Calveiro, 2006: 27–28). Whereas the Argentine dictatorship acted as a “disappearing power” (13, 29–30), in Brazil a “torturing power”1 predominated.

Surgical interventions were the order of the day, the result of a reorganization of the state and the repressive apparatus that assigned the armed forces the task of coordination and political policing (Alves, 2005: 207). By maintaining a public sphere that ostensibly preserved some of the democratic institutions, including an operating congress, a moderate opposition party, and a functioning judicial system (however tainted by the “state of exception”), the regime ensured the semblance of normalcy and legitimacy.2 This configuration proved central to the institutionalization of many of its practices, which in turn stemmed from a combination of old and new forms of political repression. In this way, an administrative structure that combined laws predating the military coup with countless new legislative acts took shape and became the defining characteristic of the legality of exception (see Pereira, 2010).

The repressive apparatus in Brazil gradually became more violent and centralized after the decision to eradicate the leadership of various dissident groups and the armed resistance on the extreme left.3 The political persecution reflected an efficient application of clandestine and illegal forms of repression in addition to practices legitimized by the laws of exception. Most political prisoners endured torture that was carried out primarily in jails made legal and official through the workings of the military justice system. This process played an important part in dissuading and demoralizing any political opposition.

Planning for a system of intelligence and repression began in 1964 with the creation of the Serviço Nacional de Informações (National Information Service—SNI). After 1967, the rearrangement of the various intelligence-gathering departments of the armed forces transformed them into “joint organisms” melding intelligence-gathering and repressive operations (Fico, 2001: 63, 91–92). The promulgation of Institutional Act 5 in December 1968 accelerated the formation of a network of clandestine units that eventually became known as Destacamentos de Operações de Informações–Centros de Operações de Defesa Interna (Intelligence Operations Units–Operations Centers for Internal Defense—DOI-CODI). These units were established in July 1970 after the success of Operation Bandeirantes, initiated in São Paulo the year before with funding from businessmen, bankers, and multinational corporations including Ford and Volkswagen (Gaspari, 2002: 63–64). They reflected the influence of the French doctrine of the revolutionary war, introduced to Brazil in 1959, and of the operational protection detachments charged with repressing the National Liberation Front in Algeria (Martins Filho, 2009; 2012).4 As the regime sought to confront the opposition more effectively after 1968, the army was given command of security operations (Gaspari, 2002: 176). DOICODI involved members of the navy, air force, local political and social police forces, the federal police, and the local branch of the SNI coordinated by the army (Fico, 2001: 122), which claimed operational autonomy (Fico, 2004: 83).

Their juridical basis was the National Security Law, which allowed for political prisoners to be held incommunicado for up to 10 days and detained for 40 days during questioning (Arquidiocese, 1989: 175). During this period, torture was rampant in interrogations and as a means of establishing political control. The

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system was so efficient that it was later exported to countries like Chile and Uruguay (Fico, 2001: 135). The various methods of political repression used by the military regime, including clandestine extermination, military justice, and even criminal justice,5 demanded the establishment of a sophisticated bureaucracy with strong ties between civilians and the military. This expanded the powers of the executive, making it possible to delegate responsibilities and arbitrate disputes inside and outside the state apparatus. It also enabled the selective application of coercive power (Teles, 2011). Nevertheless, the diversity of active civilian and military groups provoked frequent disputes for control of political operations (Martins Filho, 2004: 114).

The consolidation of the DOI-CODI in 1971 marked a strategic shift in the regime’s modus operandi. Clandestine centers of torture and extermination were set up nationwide, among them the notorious Casa da Morte (House of Death) in Petrópolis, controlled by the Centro de Informações do Exército (Army Intelligence Center—CIE). Up until that point, the tendency had been to assassinate dissidents (usually under torture), release obituaries attributing the deaths to shootouts, suicides, or car accidents, and bury the remains in public cemeteries as indigents with fake names and causes of death. In 1974 this practice was replaced by “forced disappearances,” which by their nature did not require explanations from the government (Teles, 2005). Fifty-four militants from various organizations vanished without a trace in that year, and only two of them were officially deemed deceased. The regime had no interest, at that point, in divulging the existence of a communist-sponsored guerrilla campaign in southeastern Pará, which might stoke the “multiplier effect of propaganda” (Reserve Colonel Jarbas Passarinho, quoted in Doria et al., 1978: 23–24).

This process gathered steam during the regime’s confrontation with the guerrillas in Araguaia and culminated in 1974, when Ernesto Geisel (1974–1979) assumed the presidency. In August of that year Geisel began a “slow, gradual, and secure” relaxation of the political repression, earning for himself the status of a “moderate” (Teles, 2005). This political relaxation sought to create new mechanisms capable of ensuring the legitimacy and stability of the national security state. Thus began the third step of the regime’s institutionalization (Alves, 2005). Geisel deepened the development of repressive policies more palatable to the general public, which was questioning the legitimacy of the military government in the face of human rights campaigns and the sputtering “economic miracle.”

With the strengthening of the repressive apparatus, the government implemented other restrictive measures such as blitz operations (Alves, 2005: 193– 194). These consisted of occupying a given area and detaining broad swaths of the civilian population, frequently employing intimidation and physical violence. During the 1970 congressional election cycle, a national blitz dubbed Operation Cage led to the arrest of 10,000 suspects, including several opposition candidates from the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement—MDB) (Alves, 2005). Repressive operations on a large scale were also carried out in rural areas. At the training camp of the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (Popular Revolutionary Vanguard—VPR) guerrillas in the Ribeira Valley in the state of São Paulo in 1970, nine insurgents were surrounded by about 10,000 soldiers (Alves, 2005: 194). The largest and most

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significant such operation was the Araguaia war, which was notable for both the level of violence against the insurgents and the government’s actions against the local population.

Preparations for the Guerrilla Campaign The Araguaia guerrillas were organized by the Partido Comunista do Brasil (Communist Party of Brazil—PCdoB), which had been established in 1962 after a break with the Soviet-aligned Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist Party—PCB). Disillusioned with the conciliatory tone of the PCB after the death of Joseph Stalin, the small band that formed the PCdoB embraced the Chinese model of revolution, which held that revolution began in rural areas. Members believed that an alliance between the urban proletariat and that of the “backward countryside” was fundamental for securing social change and a modern agrarian sector (Ridenti, 1993). Social revolution, they argued, should be carried out in two stages. The guerrilla movement would unite the nation’s progressives, defeat the dictatorship, and create a “popular government” tasked with overcoming obstacles to the capitalist development of Brazil, thereby satisfying the democratic and bourgeois demands of the first phase of the revolutionary process (Ridenti, 1993: 31–32). They criticized the foquismo employed in the Cuban Revolution and in urban guerrilla warfare, however, defending instead the idea that rural insurgencies should be carried out by a political party as opposed to autonomous groups (Ridenti, 1993: 227).

The first combatants arrived in southeastern Pará between 1966 and 1967 seeking to incite a “prolonged popular war” inspired by the Maoist Chinese Revolution to combat the dictatorship and reform the large private estates (latifúndios) that characterized the agrarian system. Some, such as Osvaldo Orlando da Costa, had received military training in China as part of the first cohort sent by the PCdoB, which left Rio de Janeiro on March 31, 1964, the day of the military coup in Brazil. Another group was trained in China in 1966, but beginning in 1967 relations between the PCdoB and China began to fray, with disagreements becoming public in 1970 (Amazonas, 1981: 86–99). Most of the guerrillas arrived in the Araguaia region after 1969, with the passage of Institutional Act 5. In that year the administration of General Emilio Garrastazu Médici (1969–1973) invested heavily in infrastructure projects in southeastern Pará to foster mining operations, agribusiness, and logging in the area. Work on the Trans-Amazonian Highway between Estreito and Marabá began in September 1970. Approximately US$150 million were spent on it and the BelémBrasília. Mining companies in the region saw an increase of over 100 percent in the production of iron, manganese, nickel, chromate, zinc, uranium, and other minerals and also benefited from a 20 percent tax cut (Alves, 2005: 195–197).

The region was inhabited by indigenous peoples and peasants, migrants from various regions of the country, especially the impoverished Northeast.

The land speculation that resulted from the infrastructure projects of the Superintendency for the Development of the Amazon caused violent clashes with the local population, including on Indian reservations. Indigenous policy was militarized and treated as a matter of national security, especially after the

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creation of the National Indian Foundation in 1967. With the National Integration Plan instituted in 1970, violence against indigenous populations increased exponentially.6 Corporations that had been granted land by the National Security Council relied on the repressive forces of the state to expel peasants who had established themselves in the region more than 10 years earlier and possessed legal rights as landowners (Alves, 2005: 197). The area of guerrilla activity measured approximately 30,000 square kilometers between Marabá and the village of São Geraldo, across the Araguaia River from Xambioá in Goiás (now Tocantins) (MPF, 2002).

The guerrillas consisted of three units identified by the letters A, B, and C, with a total of 23 members. They sought to align themselves with the local population to carry out a discrete political project (Criméia A. S. de Almeida, interview, São Paulo, October 17, 2010; Morais and Silva, 2005: 251). Their efforts focused on building hospitals, pharmacies, shops, and schools. Open political debate was impossible given that most of the militants sent to the region were wanted by the authorities in major urban centers, generally because of their ties with the proscribed student movement. Most of their time was spent getting to know and mapping the region, adapting to the difficult life in the jungle, studying Marxism, and learning the management of weapons and guerrilla tactics (Criméia A. S. de Almeida, interview, São Paulo, October 17, 2010). Unit A operated in the São Domingos region, near Marabá. Unit B set up between Santa Isabel and Palestina, villages near São Geraldo. Unit C was active to the south near Pau Preto. In 1972 the three units had a total of 73 illequipped and poorly armed combatants commanded by a seven-member military committee that included two members of the PCdoB executive committee.

Preparations for the war extended over a long period under difficult conditions. A significant proportion of the militants had spent little time in the region and were not experienced enough to carry out armed operations or even survive in the wilderness. The construction of stores of medicine and food deep in the jungle, considered imperative for the survival of the guerrillas after the start of armed confrontations, remained incomplete, and the lack of a comprehensive analysis of strategic areas and military targets negatively impacted the planning of operations. The group’s strategy was based on attacking sites far from its headquarters, and this required support networks in nearby urban centers, where the insurgents directly involved in the operations would hide before and after a strike, and establishing refuge areas in the jungle. Finally, the guerrillas attached special significance to organizing means of communication with the leadership of the PCdoB, located primarily in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (Criméia A. S. de Almeida, interview, São Paulo, March 15, 2004).

Repressive Operations The army attacked the PCdoB militants in April 1972. According to the testimony of several officials and declassified military documents, it had been using experienced agents stationed in the region to conduct intelligence surveys there since at least 1969.7 While disputes over the leadership of operations were intense, a complex collaborative web emerged during the Araguaia guerrilla

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war involving the CIE, the DOI-CODI, and high-ranking military officers and agents within the intelligence and national security sectors. In November 1970 the military conducted a counterinsurgency campaign dubbed Operation Carajás in southeastern Pará, northeastern Goiás, and southwestern Maranhão.

The goal of the operation, which had heavy military support including napalm, helicopters, and paratroopers, was to inhibit the concentration of leftist militants and gather intelligence (Morais and Silva, 2005: 23).

In April 1971 two militants affiliated with the VPR, Dênis Casemiro and Bartolomeu Toledo, were arrested by detective Sérgio Paranhos Fleury of the Department of Political and Social Order (the political police force created in 1924) near where the Araguaia guerrilla war would eventually take place. They were discovered by the police at a farm they had acquired off the Belém-Brasília Highway near Imperatriz. Dênis was brought to police headquarters and tortured for almost a month before being executed on May 18. No official record of his death was made by the relevant authorities. Fleury participated in other important cases in conjunction with the DOI-CODI and the CIE, such as the infiltration of the VPR by “Cabo Anselmo” in 1970 (Teles, 2011: 138–141) and the investigation leading to the assassination of former army captain Carlos Lamarca in Bahia between August and September 1971 (Almeida et al., 2009: 249–251). Notwithstanding internal governmental disputes, the operations leading to Lamarca’s death, among others, were commanded by Major Milton de Albuquerque Cerqueira (head of the army’s Second Division in Bahia and of the DOI-CODI there) with Fleury’s active collaboration (Almeida et al., 2009: 273–281; José and Miranda, 2004). Two years later, Cerqueira went on to lead the fight against the Araguaia guerrillas (Carvalho, 2004: 191). DOI-CODI contributed intelligence and counterinsurgency to the operations.

In 1969 a member of the CIE in Rio de Janeiro, Colonel Lício Augusto Maciel, arrived in Porto Franco seeking intelligence on the PCdoB militants in the region (Carvalho, 2004). The colonel’s mission included undercover work on the Belém-Brasília Highway and on the installation of television and telecommunication networks for the Empresa Brasileira de Telecomunicações (Brazilian Telecommunications Company). He worked closely with General Antônio Bandeira de Melo, who subsequently assumed command of the Araguaia guerrilla war (Nossa, 2012: 51). In August 1971 soldiers of the Eleventh Military Region of the Planalto Military Command under Bandeira and the CIE conducted an intervention dubbed Operation Mesopotamia in cities close to where the fight against the Araguaia guerrilla would begin in 1972—Marabá, Imperatriz, Tocantinópolis, and Porto Franco—and arrested 31 militants and sympathizers of the Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária-Palmares (Armed Revolutionary Vanguard–Palmares—VAR-Palmares) and the Partido Revolucionário dos Trabalhadores (Revolutionary Workers’ Party—PRT). In that operation, three ranches near Imperatriz intended for guerrilla training and as a support base for VAR-Palmares were dismantled by the authorities.

Operation Mesopotamia also resulted in the death of Epaminondas Gomes de Oliveira, a local leader of the PCdoB. He died on August 20 at a military encampment near Imperatriz after being tortured (Almeida et al., 2009: 268– 269). According to Order of Operations 01-SPC/71, Operation Macedonia, a six-month-long intelligence-gathering survey that began in March, had preceded Operation Mesopotamia and made the above arrests possible.

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Other operations in early 1972 led to the death or disappearance of four militants affiliated with the Movimento de Libertação Popular (Movement of Popular Liberation), an offshoot of Carlos Marighella’s Ação Libertadora Nacional (National Liberation Action) in Goiás (Almeida et al., 2009: 305–307, 319–323). Jeová Assis Gomes and Arno Preis were killed in January and February of that year in cities at the northern end of the state in a mission involving undercover agents of which Maciel was also a part (Carvalho, 2004).

A series of intelligence-gathering and repressive operations was carried out early in 1972 in the region where the PCdoB was active. The party had been in a state of alert since the second half of 1971 after desertions by a couple living in Unit C’s area, Pedro and Teresa Cristina Albuquerque, and a member of Unit A, Lúcia Regina Martins de Souza. According to Maciel, the army had learned of the guerrillas’ preparations through Regina. Her father had told the military what she had told him, and his tip was passed on to the CIE in Rio de Janeiro in December 1971 (Studart, 2006: 93–94).8 In March 1972 Brigadier General Darcy Jardim de Matos, commander of the Eighth Military Region, organized Operation Peixe I, an investigative squad made up of members of the army, the navy, and the air force. In that operation, seven agents disguised as civilians went to São João do Araguaia, near Marabá (the site of a ranch held by Unit A called Faveira, where Regina had lived) but found it abandoned. Around this time the armed forces conducted what was purported to be a civic-social action in the Xambioá region (Studart, 2006: 101), alongside government agencies and military police forces from Goiás, Mato Grosso, and Pará, the air force, and the Rondon Project (run by the Ministry of the Interior), providing medical and educational assistance, identification cards, and leisure activities (Morais and Silva, 2005). Military intelligence officers arrived in the area disguised as employees of state agencies (Studart, 2006). During this period Colonel Paulo Malhães of the CIE in Rio de Janeiro, noted for having set up the structure of the Casa da Morte in Petrópolis, was sent to the region to serve in the campaign against the guerrillas (Octávio et al., 2012).

The military intervention, initiated in April 1972, was notable for the large scale of combat operations and the amount of manpower and matériel employed. Intelligence operations were also very extensive. The campaigns involved more than 7,200 men from the three branches of the military (Morais and Silva, 2005: 236), including specialists in modern armaments and logistics technology and intelligence agents. In the second week of April, the army arrested some residents around the Faveira ranch, setting in motion Operation Peixe II, which involved a squad positioned in Tocaia, at Kilometer 72 of the Trans-Amazonian Highway near Unit A, and was led by Jardim de Matos and Lieutenant Colonel Raul Augusto Borges (commander of the Second Division of the Eighth Military Region). No guerrillas were arrested. At the same time, the army commander Orlando Geisel sent more men from the CIE of the Federal District, the Third Infantry Brigade, and the Planalto Military Command. On April 11 the military marched toward the Caianos River south of São Geraldo in Unit C’s territory, where Pedro Albuquerque lived. Operation Cigana was led by Lieutenant Colonel Sérgio Torres (head ot the CIE Operations Unit) and included DOI-CODI agents and the Third Infantry Brigade led by Major Othon do Rego Monteiro Filho (Morais and Silva, 2005: 91–92, 115). Once again, the

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mission failed to locate any guerrillas. The military committee had relocated this unit deeper in the jungle in December of the previous year (Morais and Silva, 2005: 238).

The next day, a platoon from the Second Jungle Infantry Battalion began Operation Peixe III, which had been approved by Jardim de Matos and signed off on by Colonel Alair de Almeida Pitta (head of the Third Division of the Eighth Military Region) (Morais and Silva, 2005: 55, 66–69, 77–84). It advanced in the direction of the ranch known as Chega com Jeito, south of the village of Bom Jesus, where a few guerrillas from Unit A lived. It called for the platoon to surround and neutralize and/or destroy the “target” (Morais and Silva, 2005: 77) but resulted in no arrests.

On April 13 DOI-CODI agents from the Third Infantry Battalion arrived in Xambioá with the prisoner Amaro Francisco Lins, identified as a farmhand on the ranch of the guerrilla Paulo Rodrigues, in the Caianos area. The military later discovered that its prisoner was a PCdoB militant. The next day the military apprehended Eduardo José Monteiro Teixeira on a bus during a blitz in Bacaba. Teixeira was a PCdoB militant from Bahia on his way to join one of the guerrilla units. On the same day another militant, Danilo Carneiro, was arrested in a blitz at the same bus station. He had been living in the area for a little over a year and had received permission from the PCdoB leadership to leave once the fighting began. Both men were beaten and sent to Marabá and Belém, where they were tortured and after a few days taken to Brasília (Danilo Carneiro, interview, June 24 and 25, 2010). Also on April 14, another operation, Operation Xambioá, was organized in the area where Unit C was active, centered on Pau Preto. No guerrillas were found, but the military was able to seize arms and munitions, a workshop, clothes, backpacks, and stockpiles of medicine and food. Large quantities of supplies were also found at the house of another group of militants in Mutum (Morais and Silva, 2005: 120–121). Mateiros (professional hunters hired or coerced to serve as guides) (Criméia A. S. de Almeida, interview, February 5, 2005) and soldiers of the CIE looked for guerrillas in some houses in the Sobra de Terra area without success.

On April 18 two more militants arrived in Xambioá to join a group of guerrillas from Unit C in Esperancinha (Morais and Silva, 2005: 127). Rioco Kayano, another militant who was attempting to join the guerrillas, was arrested in Marabá. At least two more peasants, João José dos Santos and Pedro Onça, were arrested around that time as well, and the ferryman Baiano was taken to Brasília, where he was tortured by Monteiro Filho himself (Morais and Silva, 2005: 139). Unit B’s region was attacked next. On April 18 José Genoino Neto was apprehended on the road after having attempted to alert the Unit C guerrillas about the military’s operation. After being beaten he was taken to Brasília, where he was tortured and identified as a student leader. A week later, the house he had been living in in the Gameleira River region was attacked. There were no guerrillas on the scene, but the house was razed and stores of corn and rice, fruit-bearing trees, and crops destroyed. These measures were adopted in all other operations (Morais and Silva, 2005: 120–121).

The military initially targeted the guerrillas’ homes. The guerrillas had planned for this possibility: around three months before the military’s campaign began, PCdoB militants had begun living in encampments near their

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original lodgings (Criméia A. S. de Almeida, interview, São Paulo, February 5, 2005). The guerrillas of Unit A went to the heads of the local rivers, about a four-day walk into the jungle. Unit B headed into the jungle north of Castanhal do Alexandre, and Unit C settled in the region known as Pique do Antoninho (Morais and Silva, 2005: 237, 254, 627). Despite the hardships in these refuge areas, where days were spent drenched with rain and eating raw meat, most quickly adapted to the situation. Each militant was allowed only two days away from the refuge zone, and efforts were made to conceal their trails. Fires were lit only at night (there were no active patrols during this period) and only by the designated cook. Lookouts were posted about 200 meters away from the encampments (Criméia A. S. de Almeida, interview, São Paulo, February 5, 2005). Some dedicated themselves to training and accelerated marches (Morais and Silva, 2005). After about a month, the militants reestablished communication with the local population, which collaborated with information and food (Arroyo, 1982b).

In May 1972 the army began a new operation aimed at placing undercover members of the military in the midst of the local population in order to identify and locate the guerrillas. Replicating a previous strategy, the military placed agents in the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform—INCRA) and other state agencies charged with administering social welfare initiatives in the region.

Members of the armed forces penetrated not only the areas of militants’ homes but also cities on the periphery of combat areas through civic-social actions.

The main cities used as military bases were Marabá, Xambioá, and Araguatins (Morais and Silva, 2005: 147, 330–333).

On May 8, Bergson Gurjão Faria was machine-gunned during an ambush.

This was the first casualty for the guerrillas. His body was taken to Xambioá, hung from a tree, and kicked by a unit of paratroopers (Almeida et al., 2009: 343). The ambush was the result of a reward offered in exchange for information—a constant risk for the militants. The military offered a cash reward of at least 1,000 cruzeiros (enough money to buy a small plot of land (Gaspari, 2002: 419) for every guerrilla killed or captured as a result of a civilian tip (Arroyo, 1982b). Unit B staged a counterattack on the same day, conducting an ambush in Grota Seca, in the Gameleira River area that killed Corporal Rosa and injured a sergeant.

On June 15, Maria Lúcia Petit, a militant in Unit C, was fatally hit in another ambush as she went to pick up supplies at the house of a local resident. Some days later, another member of the same unit, Kleber Lemos da Silva, was found sick in the jungle by a bate-pau (a hired gun and guide for the army). After being shot, he was taken on June 26 to Abóbora, where locals saw him being tortured and dragged around by a donkey. Three days later he was dead. At that point, the military was taking prisoners but disappearing corpses. Petit’s family, for instance, was not notified of her burial in the Xambioá cemetery (Almeida et al., 2009: 353–355).

The heads of the Pará and Amazon military commands, the Third Infantry Battalion, and the Eighth Military Region gathered at the Xambioá base to assess the first intervention. The armed forces had failed several times, and the four generals decided to divide the responsibility for operations. The Pará

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command was charged with monitoring and suppressing the guerrillas in Unit C, south of Serra das Andorinhas. The Amazon command was to focus on the northern areas (Morais and Silva, 2005: 221). At the same time, the INCRA began documenting plots of land to obtain information about their holders, while the Department of Roads and Highways began building roads to facilitate the dispatch of troops (Morais and Silva, 2005: 307, 342). Thus began a transformation of the region’s landscape premised on the military’s strategy of occupation.

The military’s second large-scale push produced negligible results. Beginning on September 18, 1972, the operation to encircle the guerrillas was cut short on October 8. Battalions reinforced with paratroopers, marines, intelligence agents, and military police failed to quash the guerrillas (Morais and Silva, 2005: 364).

Five militants were killed, leaving 53 active ones in the region. The army had opted for small units of 6–16 men acting with relative autonomy (Morais and Silva, 2005: 312, 343). These combat units operated as occupation forces, setting up 56 bases in the jungle (slightly more than half of the 108 initially planned).

Napalm bombs were widely used to eliminate foliage, but this too failed to produce significant results. The Araguaia guerrillas were able to evade the military regime’s censors in late September when the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo (September 24, 1972) reported on the army’s activities in southeastern Pará. Two days later the news appeared in the New York Times (Gaspari, 2002: 428). In the course of its operations, the military concluded that the guerrillas were prepared to extend their influence over the local population and therefore tactical adjustments and the installation of a vast intelligence-gathering infrastructure were called for. As a result, the command, planning, and execution of operations to identify and locate militants was centralized in the CIE. The Long Ceasefire The stalemate in the conflict in the Araguaia region resulted from a tactical shift by the armed forces that proved decisive. The military’s secret service maintained its intelligence agents throughout the ceasefire (Morais and Silva, 2005: 393). At the end of 1972, the Center for Aeronautical Security Information mapped out the area of guerrilla activity (though the navy’s intelligence center was also active in the region), and in February 1973 it produced a list of the movements and political activities of the militants and the populations of the areas occupied by Units B and C, including a list of residents suspected of collaborating with the guerrillas.9 Meanwhile, the militants sought to deepen their political engagement, continuing their work with the local population, aided by the distribution of printed materials in May. During the ceasefire, their main vehicle for articulating their intentions was the manifesto União pela Liberdade e pelos Direitos do Povo (Union for Freedom and the Rights of the People), produced on the military committee’s little mimeograph. The manifesto proposed fighting grileiros (land grabbers) as well as the dictatorship, emphasizing the defense of what they called “real democracy.” It presented a 27-point program that called for the regulation of landholding and the development of infrastructure to organize

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the output and labor of small farmers and rural workers. The program included an attempt to address the grievances of residents (ULDP, 1982 [1973]: 86–90) and perform the difficult task of communicating with a largely illiterate local population. In their communiqués and letters the guerrillas harshly criticized the miners, loggers, large corporations, and multinational conglomerates that had appropriated the properties of small local landowners with the support of the military regime. The agenda glossed over the guerrillas’ ties to the PCdoB, calling instead for a broad front to combat the dictatorship (Arroyo, 1982b: 23).

During the latter half of 1972, the military committee managed to reestablish contact with the PCdoB high command through a militant in Unit A who succeeded in penetrating the military’s encirclement at the end of August. The pregnant Criméia de Almeida took on the task, as she had at other times before the start of the armed conflict. In October she made a connection with the support network in Goiania that allowed her to retrieve funds and encrypted information from São Paulo. In December she was able to obtain updated information on the progress of the guerrilla war from the interior of Piauí (Criméia A. S. de Almeida, interview, São Paulo, February 5, 2005). Militants foresaw a new military push and resumed organizing depots and weapons caches, updating and improving maps of the region, preparing new escape routes, and scouting ambush and hideout locations. Security measures were strengthened, turning visits to local residents into military operations. Militants continued to help with work in the fields in exchange for food and held meetings of up to 50 people (Arroyo, 1982b: 23–24).

After resuming contact with Unit C in January 1973, the military committee sought to maintain its offensive posture but was unable to carry out large-scale operations. In March the guerrillas arrested, tried, and executed a gunman near Santa Cruz, confiscating weapons and army and grileiro documents. Another gunman was executed in the Palestina area. In August the guerrillas punished a farmer for collaborating with the army, commandeering some of his property as retribution. Finally, in September they were able to take a military police station located at the junction of the Trans-Amazonian and the São Domingos Highway. The operation yielded six rifles, a revolver, ammunition, boots, and uniforms (Arroyo, 1982b: 24).

The military began planning its next offensive in November 1972 as it continued building roads in the region (Morais and Silva, 2005: 307, 342) and installing garrisons in various towns. Soon there were three new roads linking Metade (in the west) to Brejo Grande and Santa Cruz, cutting through territories occupied by guerrillas from Units A and B (Morais and Silva, 2005: 188– 189) and facilitating transit between São Domingos and São Geraldo (Arroyo, 1982b: 22). “Wanted” signs with photos of guerrillas were distributed along with letters from those being held exhorting their comrades to turn themselves in (Gaspari, 2002: 423). In December 1972, Glênio de Sá of Unit B was arrested in the area, becoming the last guerrilla taken into custody to survive the ordeal.

Detainees were transferred to various torture centers. Danilo Carneiro, for instance, was tortured for approximately eight months, mostly in Brasília but also in the DOI-CODI of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In the Federal District he was systematically tortured by Fleury under direct orders from Bandeira (Danilo Carneiro, interview, June 24 and 25, 2010).10

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Intelligence-gathering operations in the cities met with considerable success, definitively cutting off contact between the guerrillas and the PCdoB high command after the torture and killing of four party leaders (Lincoln Cordeiro Oest, Carlos Nicolau Danielli, and Luiz Guilardini, and Lincoln Bichalho Roque [Almeida et al., 2009: 390–391, 398–400, 409–410]) and the arrest of Criméia de Almeida and militants in various states. All of this made the transfer of funds and reinforcements to the militants in Araguaia impossible (Pomar, 1980: 41; 2003). In April 1973 the CIE finished planning an unprecedented new intelligence operation. The military substantially rethought its strategy, aiming to take to another level the French teachings with regard to information networks and mobility in the area.11 In the following month Operation Sucuri, in which members of the military and civilians penetrated the entire area, began.12 The INCRA, the Department of Roads and Highways, and the Campaign to Eradicate Malaria provided logistical assistance and manpower as well as forged identity documents. The army purchased land for housing soldiers disguised as landowners and bars and other small shops in strategic villages to cover the tracks of its agents (Morais and Silva, 2005: 403–405). In five months the military investigated the guerrillas’ support network and produced a dossier with more than 400 names. It learned that at least 26 peasants had joined the guerrillas and 194 had provided material support through a network involving a total of 258 people (Nossa, 2012: 132). The guerrillas had established 13 hubs, each with 3–5 members responsible for intelligence gathering, propaganda, and food supply (Arroyo, 1982b). The breadth of this network and the intensity of support led the head of the guerrillas, Maurício Grabois, to assert that, unlike Che Guevara’s band of revolutionaries, those in Araguaia were “not left isolated” (Grabois, 1972).

The guerrilla leadership met in August 1973 and decided, among other things, to dispatch Unit B to an area previously reserved for Unit C, but it committed the strategic error of underestimating the spread of military infiltration (Arroyo, 1982b: 24–25) at a point when communication with the party leadership was being cut off, supplies (clothes, boots, ammunition, etc.) were running low, and the area was swarming with secret agents. This misjudgment reflected the assessment that a total encirclement of the region was unlikely, as was combat in the deep recesses of the jungle, since, theoretically, the armed forces did not have troops trained for that kind of warfare (Arroyo, 1982a: 25). Furthermore, the guerrilla leadership believed that the armed forces would not undertake a lengthy operation given the impending rainy season (Arroyo, 1982b: 34).

Although it was guided by the principle of self-preservation (“conserve strength and survive”), it did not plot an escape route to a safe area or establish bases of support outside its area of immediate action or military surveillance (Arroyo, 1982a: 24–25; 1982b: 33–35).

Surrounding towns such as Luciara and São Felix were suffering from the military’s repressive tactics (Fico, 2001: 194–195). By not officially recognizing the guerrillas, the military sought to avoid any news coverage and potential “multiplier effects.” The worst-case scenario was that the area would become a kind of “liberated zone.” According to President Médici, “It was necessary to keep the operations secret so that they could be successful” (Scartezini, 1991: 36). According to then-captain Sebastião Rodrigues de Moura, also known as

Teles / THE ARAGUAIA GUERRILLA WAR 13

Major Curió, an advocate of military repression, “The orders from above were to leave no trace” in order to avoid prolonged campaigns that could take root as had happened in other Latin American countries (Nossa, 2009).

Extermination Camps and Repression of the Population The third and final phase of counterinsurgency, between October 1973 and the close of 1974, was marked by severe repression of the residents of the area.

After a year of planning and intelligence gathering, the military kicked off Operation Marajoara on October 7, 1973. This campaign involved specialized troops and was divided into two stages: apprehension and detention of large segments of the population so as to dismantle the guerrillas’ support networks and a meticulous sweep of the area to locate guerrillas and their supply depots.

The operation employed small combat units instead of regular forces. There were around 300 soldiers from the Pará and Amazon commands, the CIE, and the paratroopers’ brigade (Morais and Silva, 2005: 449), supported by marines, airplanes and helicopters from the air force, and the Twenty-third Battalion in Marabá (numbering 400 soldiers) (Gaspari, 2002). This time around, aliases were employed en masse. The military police of Pará and Goiás were active on the roads and other routes of travel and in the prisons.

Soldiers of the Eighth and Twelfth Military Regions (120 in total) sent for the operation attended a workshop on the jungle warfare conducted by Jungle and Antiguerrilla Operations Command of the Amazon Military Command in Manaus (Jiménez, 2007). Created in 1964, this training center became a reference point for many military figures and Latin American officials (Robin, 2005: 364–366, 384), among them the French general Paul Aussaresses, who played a crucial role in Algeria during the 1960s.13 The center advocated the national security doctrine, in which the “enemy within,” the instigator of “revolutionary insurgency,” was to be dealt with using every available resource, thus legitimating the abolition of civil liberties (Martins Filho, 2009). This imprecise and inconsistent notion served as a pretext for the detention of large numbers of civilians on military bases, which became veritable concentration camps.

Interning civilians and noncivilians alike in concentration camps had been relatively common in Brazil during the first half of the twentieth century.

Internment was used against those deeemed “undesirable” or a “threat” to the established order, such as urban workers, the poor, and the homeless. During Getúlio Vargas’s dictatorship, the Estado Novo (1937–1945), dissidents were tried by military courts, and internment and forced exile were imposed on people who for the most part faced no formal charges (Pinheiro, 1991: 13–14, 104). In 1942 camps were also used to hold German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants as “vassals of the Axis” (Perazzo, 2009: 33). In the repression of the Araguaia guerrilla war, camps spread from north to south.

In Marabá there were three facilities used by the military, and at least one, the headquarters of Department of Roads and Highways (the Casa Azul), was used as a concentration camp. INCRA headquarters and the military police prison were used for interrogations and holding suspected collaborators. In Bacaba, on what was formerly a construction site of the Mendes Júnior

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Construction Company, a camp was set up with a landing strip, an extensive detention area, housing for soldiers, and rooms for torture and interrogation (MPF, 2002). Another camp with a landing strip and a large detention area was established in Xambioá. There were also small bases in several locations, among them Oito Barracas (outside São Domingos), São Raimundo (near the Suruí Indian reservation), Araguaína, and Araguatins, and bases were built on private land deep in the jungle. The military bases, at least in Bacaba and Xambioá, held garrisons from the military police, the army, the navy, and the air force.

The camps at Bacaba and Xambioá had sites used as lodgings and depots and offices used by the intelligence service for interrogations. Bacaba had two distinct detention centers, one holding guerrillas and those still being submitted to interrogation and the other holding peasants who had been interrogated or had collaborated with the guerrillas in other ways, for instance, as guides (MPF, 2002). At the Xambioá camp prisoners were held in pens surrounded by barbed wire (Sinézio Martins Ribeiro, interview, Xambioá, July 18, 2001).

The armed forces pursued large-scale arrests, terrorizing the local peasant population. In the region of São Domingos, Brejo Grande, and Palestina around 300 people were arrested (Emannuel Wambergue, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, Marabá, July 2, 2001; Antonio Rodriguez da Silva, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 4, 2001). Many peasants and small business owners were beaten and tortured, and some were killed or mutilated by military armaments left in the jungle (Lauro Rodrigues Santos, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 4, 2001).

Other residents closer to the guerrillas or more familiar with the jungle were brutally tortured to force them to serve as guides or provide information.

Reports mention cases of prisoners tied up and left on top of anthills, suspended from helicopters, kept in rooms with chemical agents, forced to dig their own graves, and kept for days without food (João Vitório da Silva, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 4, 2001; Luiz Martins dos Santos, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, Tabocão, July 5, 2001). Many prisoners reported that screams were commonly heard in the camps. In Marabá, motors were turned on during torture sessions to drown out the cries of the victims. Testimonies help flesh out the procedures of the armed forces in the prisons and during interrogations and the kinds of torture employed. Peasants were yelled at, beat with rifles, punched, and kicked in the head. Some were handcuffed and taken, usually on foot, to concentration camps, while others were stuffed into sacks, unable to move or see where they were being taken (Margarida Ferreira Felix, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 2, 2001).

Many people were kidnapped and detained in Marabá and other cities. One resident noted that in Araguaía there were 25 jail cells with more than 50 people in each (José Rufino Pinheiro, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 5, 2001). The only men who were not arrested were those who escaped or who agreed to collaborate with the army (José Francisco Dionísio, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 6, 2001). Women were left alone to tend to their families and crops, although many went to the cities out of fear of being harassed or injured. Some women were arrested and tortured, while others were used as prison labor in the military encampments. Houses, plantations, and fruit-bearing trees were all destroyed so that the guerrillas would have

Teles / THE ARAGUAIA GUERRILLA WAR 15

neither shelter nor food (Margarida Ferreira Felix, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 2, 2001; João Vitório da Silva, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 5, 2001).

Some peasants reported being taken to the Bacaba camp after INCRA headquarters in Marabá and to Araguaína after that, ending up in the military police’s barracks. Others reported being hung over a pit and tortured at INCRA headquarters in Marabá (Manoel Leal [Vanu] Lima, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 12, 2001; Pedro Moraes Silva, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 4, 2001). Many attested to the existence of another deep pit, called “Vietnam,” used for detention or torture at the Xambioá camp (Sebastião Gomes Silva, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, Xambioá, July 12, 2001). Those residing near São Domingos were kidnapped and taken first to the Bacaba camp and then to Marabá, usually under cover of night on a flatbed truck. The most violent torture sessions took place at Bacaba. From Marabá detainees were transferred to other locations, but many were sent back to Bacaba even after having been released (Manoel Leal [Vanu] Lima, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 12, 2001). Some reported having been taken as far as Belém, Araguaína, and Brasília (Sinvaldo de Souza Gomes, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 3, 2001).

Many local residents experienced severe trauma as a result of their imprisonment and the torment meted out to them while in police custody. Some went insane or were left physically deformed. Frederico Barros da Silva, a guerrilla sympathizer, for example, had offered food to the militants, and he was arrested and taken to the camp at Bacaba and tortured with electric shock and beating.

He was held for over six months in Marabá and Araguaína. His house was torched and his land confiscated. He never fully recovered and was deemed of unsound mind, held by the army in a mental institution in Belém for two years (Pedro Moraes Silva, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 4, 2001; for similar accounts about the experiences of others, see the testimony of José Moraes Silva [July 3], Adalgiza Moraes Silva [July 6], and Maria Nazaré Ferreira Brito [July 6], São Domingos, 2001). Others died as a result of the lingering effects of torture (SEDH and CEMDP, 2007: 264). A number of peasants were mistaken for guerrillas and killed in the jungle, while others disappeared after being arrested. The number of peasants killed by the military remains unknown.

All the arrests were made without any formal legal or juridical oversight and therefore technically qualified as kidnappings. There was, however, a measure of control over those taken into custody in the form of an intake system involving photographing the prisoners when they arrived at the camps. The length of detention varied from a few days to more than six months. The widespread violence and use of torture in the concentration camps terrorized the local population, facilitating the military’s efforts to instill control and discipline.

The Encirclement and Extermination of the Guerrillas Fifty-six militants remained, six of them local peasants (see Arroyo, 1982b: 24), now concentrated in the area originally reserved for Units A and B.

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Confronted by mass arrests and heavy patrol movements, they received fresh support from small peasant families who took up residence in encampments deep in the jungle where they were hard to locate (Teles, 2001). Thus the guerrillas gained support even as their reach and mobility were reduced. The army had arrived at the farm of Antônio Alfredo Lima, a peasant member of the guerrillas, on the first day of its offensive, but Unit A had decided to stay in the area awaiting the next meeting with the military committee on October 20. A week later, as it was preparing food for storage, a militant group was attacked at Lima’s farm, resulting in the deaths of four combatants: André Grabois (Zé Carlos, the commander), João Gualberto (Zebão), and Lima himself, all of whom died at the scene in an ambush organized by Maciel, and Divino Ferreira de Souza (Nunes), who was wounded and tortured to death in the Casa Azul (Almeida et al., 2009: 470–475). Ten days later Sônia (Lúcia Maria de Souza) was ambushed by an army patrol. Wounded by gunfire along a creek near Grota da Borracheira (Arroyo, 1982b), she shot Maciel and Curió in the face and the arm, respectively, before her body was riddled with bullets. Her death achieved a degree of celebrity for her having gravely injured two officers and for her medical work. At some point in November, the guerrilla leadership met to assess the situation. The deaths of only five militants and the start of the rainy season had led them to underestimate the military campaign. They decided to combine forces in a single unit, hoping to increase their own offensive power, but logistical problems delayed this union (Arroyo, 1982b).

As the military presence in the jungle, especially in the guerrillas’ refuge areas, intensified, it was decided to disperse the families camped out in the jungle (Rosilda Sousa Santos, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 5, 2001). The imprisonment of more peasant sympathizers further disrupted the guerrillas’ information network. By early December 1973 another six militants were dead, at least three of them decapitated (Sinézio Martins Ribeiro, interview, Xambioá, July 18, 2001). The military had implemented another new tactic, giving more autonomy to the two bases located deep in the jungle (Gaspari, 2002: 445). A sophisticated radio communication system (triangulated by helicopters and airplanes) increased its ability to locate and ambush the guerrillas. Notorious agents of repression were sent in during this period, among them Paulo Malhães and Romeu Tuma (Merlino and Amaral, 2011). The military command was centered at the Casa Azul, which came under the purview of Lieutenant Colonel Flávio de Marco14 of the CIE. The command of the Xambioá base was assumed by Cerqueira, who set up his own headquarters in the jungle at the São Raimundo base (Studart, 2006: 230–231).15 Amid mounting difficulties, the guerrilla high command was able to meet on December 20. Finally recognizing the degree of the military’s commitment, it issued what would be its final communiqué two days later. The letter denounced the repression of the local population and the decision of the armed forces to take no prisoners. It paid homage to the dead combatants and reaffirmed its commitment to breaking out of the military’s encirclement. Finally, it called for solidarity in stopping the military incursion, sounding an optimistic note regarding the growing discontent among the peasants and their support for the armed struggle (FOGUEIRA, 1982 [1973]: 91–92). It scheduled a meeting of all remaining combatants for December 25, 1973, to evaluate the

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situation. Some of the guerrillas, 23 in all, had their own meeting, and another 15 converged on a hilltop in the Palestina area (formerly Unit B’s, where some supply depots remained). The groups met separately because of the desertion of a peasant named Josias, who had provided much valuable information (Arroyo, 1982b: 27–28). Concentrations of people like this left traces that could not easily be camouflaged, and patrols discovered the location of the meeting.

Maurício Grabois, the leader, and three other guerrillas were killed in an ambush on the Grotão dos Caboclos hill (Arroyo, 1982b: 28) by troops under Cerqueira (Nossa, 2012: 182–183). The guerrillas at the base of the hill were able to escape (Arroyo, 1982b: 28). Twenty-five of the militants managed to meet on December 29 in Unit A’s refuge area. Given the gravity of the situation, they decided to subdivide into groups of five to increase their mobility and try to resume contact after redoubling their security measures and regrouping with those who had dispersed. Meetings scheduled up until May of the next year would serve as reference points (Arroyo, 1982b: 29) in an attempt to escape the military’s encirclement.

According to Curió, there were armed engagements up to the halfway point of the third campaign, and after that “there was a pursuit of trails.” By the end of March 1974 the majority of the guerrillas had been killed or captured. The armed forces arrested and executed 41 guerrillas, corresponding to 61 percent of the total casualties. during this phase of operations (Nossa, 2012: 16), and 54 supply depots were destroyed (D’Araújo, Soares, and Cartro, 1994: 49).

Between April and October there were 14 active guerrillas (Almeida et al., 2009), and about 100 men from the CIE and the special forces remained in the area (Gaspari, 2002: 458). Two teams, Zebra and Jiboia, under the command of CIE head Carlos Sérgio Torres were assembled to exterminate the insurgency (Studart, 2006: 259–260). In this period local residents witnessed the imprisonment of 21 militants16 who were tortured for information about the meetings scheduled for every 10–15 days in the jungle. Many were terrorized into joining and collaborating with the search for other guerrillas (Adão Rodrigues Lima and Salviana Xavier Lima, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 3, 2001; Almeida et al., 2009). The military offered to spare the lives of those who would collaborate with them, and Antonio de Pádua Costa (nicknamed Piauí) did so but was executed a few months later. The internment camps used for the local population became extermination camps for the guerrillas. Rosalindo Souza’s head was displayed for several days in the Xambioá concentration camp (Sinézio Martins Ribeiro, interview, Xambioá, July 18, 2001).

The decapitated body of Osvaldão was suspended from a helicopter on exhibit (Almeida et al., 2009: 573). Walkíria Afonso da Costa (Walk) was seen being tortured by Curió for information on other militants in October at the Xambioá base (Morais and Silva, 2005). A curfew was imposed, and some residents were required to present themselves periodically at the camps, especially in Bacaba.

This routine was initially practiced at five-to-six-day intervals but was gradually extended to monthly, bimonthly, and then semiannually. Many small farmers continued working—some voluntarily, others after threats or torture—as guides for the military, a service for which most received remuneration.17 What little information is available regarding the last of the guerrillas to be arrested suggests that some of them were captured in relatively remote

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locations trying to escape the military encirclement. Dina (Dinalva Oliveira Teixeira) and Tuca (Luisa Augusta Garlippe), for instance, were informed on by a mateiro and then ambushed in July near a bridge across the Sororó River near Marabá (Nossa, 2012: 209–211).18 Doca (Daniel Callado), who had managed to cross the Araguaia River in a canoe, was arrested near the Perdidos River in Goiás in June (Almeida et al., 2009: 579–581). It was not, however, impossible to escape the military encirclement. In January Angelo Arroyo was able to leave the area with the help of a comrade and make it to São Paulo, where he distributed his Diário da guerrilha (Arroyo, 1982b: 15).19 Peasants who collaborated with the military received housing and land, especially near Brejo Grande (Nossa, 2012: 227–228). Vanu and other guides acted as undercover agents and received compensation from the military at least until 2001. According to army documents found by the Federal Public Ministry in Marabá, this assistance was coordinated by Operation Guardian Angel (Manoel Leal [Vanu] Lima, testimony before the Federal Public Ministry, São Domingos, July 12, 2001; Teles, 2001: 15–20).

As far as the major cities or the military justice system were concerned, the Araguaia guerrilla war did not exist. The militants arrested were held incommunicado for several months. Most of the survivors were never charged, among them Danilo Carneiro, who was detained for over a year (Danilo Carneiro, interview, June 24 and 25, 2010), and Criméia de Almeida, who was detained and tortured while pregnant and gave birth behind bars.20 Those who were tried, such as José Genoíno Neto, were charged only with activism in a proscribed political party, the PCdoB (Coelho, 2007: 199–237). Thus the dictatorship was able, through terror and the legal regime of exception, to contain its most extreme opposition.21 Conclusion The Araguaia guerrilla war brought a moral element to the armed struggle against the dictatorship, making plain the magnitude, impact, and violence of confrontations at that time. It represented a determined effort to reconcile armed resistance with the political awakening of the masses and became a sort of guerrilla focus with roots in a peasant population that played a decisive role in the resistance to the regime’s repressive tactics. The strategies of the national security apparatus assumed what was to be their decisive form and consolidated the tactic of political disappearance. Concentration camps in the jungle amplified the intimidation directed at guerrillas and local residents, who were terrorized as a general strategy aimed at mitigating the multiplier effect of the insurgency. At the same time, the military occupation served a strategic purpose for the regime’s development plans for the region, an area of great economic value and potential, which required surveillance and control of the local population.

The success of the military repression reverberated throughout the armed forces and the rest of the continent. Soldiers who had fought in the Araguaia guerrilla war were sent to advise other Latin American dictatorships and contribute to Operation Condor.22 At the same time, denunciations of human rights

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abuses in southeastern Pará made their way into the press and became a central component of the campaigns of social movements that emerged in defense of political prisoners, the exiled, and their families during the 1970s. These denunciations echoed across national organizations and international ones, helping to erode support for the dictatorship. The lack of an investigation of the violence of the Araguaia campaign led the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to condemn the Brazilian government in 2010.23 The National Truth Commission did not, however, obtain new information about the guerrilla war. After more than six years, Brazil still has not fulfilled the main requirements of the court’s decision. The Agaguaia guerrilla war remains the object of intense dispute (Teles, 2014), giving rise to demands for truth and justice throughout the democratic period.

Notes 1. Jean Amèry (2004: 85, 93) has used similar language to describe Nazi Germany.

2. The official parties of the military regime (the Aliança Renovadora Nacional) and the contained opposition (the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro) were created in 1965, and in the same year Institutional Act 2 extended the purview of military justice to civilians prosecuted under the National Security Law. 3. There are 257 documented deaths and 169 disappearances attributed to the military regime (Almeida et al., 2009). In addition, the state is directly or indirectly responsible for the death of at least 1,188 peasants and 8,350 indigenous people during this period (CPT, 1985; CNV, 2014: 199).

4. In the 1960s, General Paul Aussaresses and others were sent to the United States to teach this doctrine to the military of that country and others in Latin America (Robin, 2005).

5. The numbers underscore the selective nature of the repressive judicial system: of the 17,420 people questioned, 7,367 (42.3 percent) were charged juridically. Among the defendants, 2,828 (38.3 percent) were found guilty, including 1,948 (26.4 percent) who received less than five-year sentences; those involved in armed struggle received much harsher sentences (Arquidiocese, 1989: 11–13).

6. The opening of the Trans-Amazonian Highway affected 29 indigenous groups, among them 11 isolated communities. The construction of the Itaipu and Tucuruí hydroelectric dams and the rapid concentration of landownership drove out hundreds of communities and led to thousands of deaths. The state promoted the elimination of indigenous groups, the plunder of their resources, the exploitation of their labor, and the expropriation of their lands (CNV, 2014).

7. See the statement by Col. Lício Maciel (March 4, 2010) in the civil lawsuit No. 2003.01.00.041033-5/DF (1982) of the families of the disappeared of the Araguaia guerrilla war.

8. Initially the party had attributed the leak to Pedro Albuquerque. Arrested in Fortaleza in March 1972, he was tortured repeatedly and confirmed the intelligence on the guerrillas that the army already had. He was then forced to identity the ranch on which he lived in Pará (Campos Filho, 1997: 105).

9. See Atividades do PCdoB em Xambioá (Doc. Info. 0008, CISA-ESC RCD, February 27, 1973). https://www.marxists.org/portugues/tematica/livros/diversos/araguaia_05.pdf (accessed April 15, 2012).

10. He led São Paulo’s notorious death squad and helped train officials in Uruguay in 1971 at the behest of Dan Mitrione of the CIA, who in turn had trained agents in Brazil between 1963 and 1967 (Globo.com, 2014).

11. Note the similarity between the truce accepted by the army in Araguaia and the proposal of Bonnet (1963, cited by Martins Filho, 2009: 193–199).

12. This operation was coordinated by Major Gilberto Airton Zenkner and commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Sérgio Torres of the CIE in the Federal District. Curió served as an adjunct to the coordinator. Curió was active in the intelligence sector as of the 1960s and was an adjunct to the Pará Military Command’s commander Olavo Vianna Moog. In the third campaign

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against the guerrillas he coordinated an intelligence and extermination group (Studart, 2006: 233).

Afterward he took part in operations in Uruguay, Argentina, Peru, and Paraguay (Nossa, 2012: 238–239).

13. The general was a French military aide in Brazil from October 1973 to October 1975 and taught a course in coercive interrogation and revolutionary warfare at the Center for Instruction in Jungle Warfare (Duarte-Plon, 2016: 63). Other Frenchmen there were Captain Bernard Legrand and a certain Colonel Thiebault. According to Manuel Contreras, chief of the Chilean intelligence service under Pinochet, Chilean officers were sent to Brazil every two months for training at the SNI’s intelligence school (Robin, 2005: 364–367, 384). The course lasted seven weeks and covered jungle warfare, ambushes, surprise attacks, patrols, and jungle survival (Legrand, 1976).

14. According to Curió, Lieutenant Colonel Leo Frederico Cinelli had unlimited powers at the Casa Azul (Nossa, 2012: 22).

15. There are no documents available on the final phase of the guerrilla war, and therefore the details of the operations remain unknown.

16. Testimonies suggest that the main military bases were used as clandestine cemeteries (MPF, 2002).

17. Payments ranged from 3,000 to 5,000 cruzeiros according to the importance of the fighter (Gaspari, 2002: 458).

18. According to Curió, Dina was shot by Lieutenant Colonel José Teixeira Brant (active at the Casa da Morte and in Chile).

19. Arroyo was assassinated along with other PCdoB leaders in an ambush in São Paulo in December 1976.

20. There are indications that eight children of militants were “appropriated” by soldiers. A DNA test confirmed that Lia Cecília (adopted by a police officer) was in fact the child of a guerrilla named Antonio Theodoro de Castro (Figueiredo, 2011). Curió asserts that Osvaldão had a son with a peasant woman and the child was adopted (Nossa, 2012: 111). Dina was pregnant during her incarceration (Almeida et al., 2009: 582).

21. In the Perdidos revolt of 1976, settlers in the area of Cainos resisted an attempt by the military police to drive 300 families from their lands, killing two policemen and wounding others and resulting in the imprisonment of many of them as well as a priest and a seminarian (Campos Filho, 2012: 184–209; Nossa, 2012: 224).

22. Two veterans of the Araguaia military campaign represented Brazil as observers of the meeting inaugurating the effort in Santiago, Chile, in 1975: Colonel Flávio de Marco and Major Thaumaturgo Sotero Vaz. The latter was a paratrooper sent to Pará in 1972, having received training in jungle warfare at the School of the Americas in 1962, and in 1972 he assumed command of the Center for Instruction in Jungle Warfare.

23. In the 21,319 pages of SNI documents handed over to the court in 2008 (Corte, 2010: 73, 106), no information was discovered about when, how, and where the guerrillas were imprisoned or died, where they were buried, or where their remains were moved in the cleanup operation conducted by the military who led and participated in these operations.

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22 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

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2011 “Memórias dos cárceres da ditadura: as lutas e os testemunhos dos presos políticos no Brasil.” Ph.D. diss., USP. 2014 “Os segredos e os mitos sobre a Guerrilha do Araguaia (1972-1974).” História Unisinos 18 (3): 464–480.

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