Brazilians who tortured future president face civil suit

Sao Paulo, Agency
Federal prosecutors in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo launched a civil case Thursday against four retired military personnel accused of killing six people and torturing 20 others, including President-elect Dilma Rousseff, under the 1964-1985 military regime.

If convicted, Homero Cesar Machado, Innocencio Fabricio de Mattos Beltrão, Mauricio Lopes Lima and João Thomaz could lose their pensions and be ordered to pay into a reparations fund for victims of the dictatorship.

The prosecution is investigating crimes committed under the aegis of Operation Bandeirante, the army's 1969-1970 campaign of repression.

Prosecutors believe that the accused are responsible for six murders as part of that operation, including that of dissident Virgilio Gomes da Silva, considered the leader of the armed band that kidnapped and held hostage the U.S. ambassador, Charles Burke Elbrick, for two days in September 1969.

Among the torture victims cited in the case is Dilma Rousseff, who was jailed for more than two years for her particiation in armed groups resisting the dictatorship.

Rousseff, who was elected president of Brazil in last Sunday's elections, belonged to several armed opposition groups.

The president-elect, who will succeed Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Jan. 1, acknowledges having belonged to those groups, but says she never took part in any armed attacks.

Prosecutors say Operation Bandeirante served the army as an experiment to unify in a single unit the work of repression and torture of dissidents, which up until then was distributed among various divisions of the army and police.

The experience gained in this operation laid the groundwork for the Doi-Codi unit, which centralized operations of repression from 1970 until democracy was established in 1985.