SÃO PAULO — On September 30, 1975, my father didn’t arrive at 6 p.m., as he did every day, to pick me up from the Bela Vista nursery school, on Rua Humaitá, the area of São Paulo known as Bixiga. I had just turned two years old. About 600 meters away, Edwaldo Alves Silva was kidnapped by the forces of the military dictatorship that ruled in Brazil from 1964 to 1985.
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My father is now in his 80s, but I only I learned about these events in March 2024. I was researching torture sites for a report for Agência Pública and found a statement written by my father in May 1976 for a panel of military judges, part of the collection of the Brasil: Nunca Mais Digital project. It was his appeal to the Supreme Military Court (STM), challenging his conviction for “subversive practices.” He was framed under the National Security Law (LSN) in force at the time.
The subject of torture was never taboo in my house. But the few times I questioned my father directly, I realized that it was a delicate subject that he preferred not to broach.
“I’ll tell you just one thing, they had drowning, which was sticking your head in the water until you almost drowned. The first few times, I fought to get my head out of the water, to breathe. In the end, I fought for them not to take my head out of the water so that the ordeal would end once and for all,” my father said on one occasion, ending the conversation.
I knew, of course, about the family’s history of resistance, from their militancy in the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) until the early 1980s. In fact, I was always proud of and influenced by their fight for democracy and social justice. I was aware of his imprisonment; I have memories of my visits to him in prison, but I didn’t know the details of his torture.
I even got my hands on the book Brasil: nunca mais (Brazil: Never Again), which contains three paragraphs extracted from the same impressive statement. But the file is actually 11 pages long.
I realized that he was subtle, and perhaps complacent with his daughter. Then the fragments that I had heard from my mother, some family members and even friends who studied the “years of lead” of the military regime, all started coming together like a jigsaw puzzle, once I had the document in my hands.
Communism, loud radio and the dragon chair
On that late September afternoon, my father, then 31, was approached by armed men who put a black hood on his head before putting him in a car, “probably a Volkswagen,” he said.
He was thrown into the back seat with a man squeezing his neck. They traveled about 35 km to the Parelheiros neighborhood, in the south of São Paulo. He was entering one of the most violent spaces created during the military dictatorship: Fazenda 31 de Março.
“A radio turned up loudly drowned out my screams. My clothes were ripped off and I was hung up naked on a barrel,” he said.
I took my first break. I needed to breathe. I went to check: it was still page three: “They applied electric shocks all over my body […]; I received very strong electric shocks in my mouth, nose and ears when electric wires were inserted into them.” The description refers to the first of 37 days of constant torture.
Only one other person is known to have left Fazenda 31 de Março alive.
At the time of his arrest, Operation Radar (1974 to 1976) was at its height and its aim was to dismantle or, as documents from the time describe it, “neutralize” the PCB. In São Paulo, at least 11 party members were targeted by the operation.
Clandestine spaces for torture and murder, such as Fazenda 31 de Março, were very opportune for the dictatorial regime’s “information operations.” The property was given to the military for clandestine activities by businessman Joaquim Rodrigues Fagundes, who was later decorated by the Army with an ironically named distinction: the Peacemaker’s Medal. There was no need to worry about the veneer of legality that was attempted to be camouflaged.
“To give you an idea of my state, my first impression was that I was hearing my own screams. But as soon as I came back to reality, I realized that other people, just like me, were victims of that real hell,” my father said.
According to the National Truth Commission’s 2014 report, apart from my father, only one other person, Affonso Celso Nogueira Monteiro, a lawyer and former state representative from Rio de Janeiro, is known to have left Fazenda 31 de Março alive.
Me in the cell next door?
In the intervals between beatings and shocks, so that the torturers could rest, my father would go back to the pau de arara, a torture method in which the victim is bound by the ankles and wrists, with the biceps under a pole and knees over it. In the meantime, he described how an interrogator tried to make his involvement with the PCB seem more substantial and to compromise more people.
“In order to frighten and confuse me, they said that the screams I heard were my wife’s when she saw my 2-year-old daughter being tortured. During the non-stop torture, in a state of total physical and mental despair, I really began to believe that my wife and daughter were being held by those men,” he wrote.
I can’t imagine any greater cruelty to a father. When I called to inform him that I had found the testimony and to ask for his consent to share it, the possibility that I was really being tortured was his first memory. “It was one of the worst moments I ever had in that place,” he told me over the phone.
I was safe, in fact. From the beginning, my mother, Zélia Pizarro, realized what had happened and asked one of her brothers for help. We left for Belo Horizonte in the early hours of the morning. But we eventually returned to São Paulo because she knew that reporting the disappearance as soon as possible could save her husband’s life. To do this, she sought help from Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, who was Metropolitan Archbishop of São Paulo.
In sickness, health and and dictatorship
My parents met at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), when they were hired to work on the 1970 census. My mother, a girl from a traditional family in Minas Gerais, said she was charmed by her colleague, who was intelligent, full of stories and a little pretentious.
My father had just come back from a trip to the Soviet Union, heartbroken because he had left a beautiful Danish girlfriend there. My parents married in 1972. About a year later, I was born.
My mother wouldn’t allow herself to “shed a single tear” until she found my father.
They quickly learned to deal with the party’s activities. As the persecution intensified, my mother used to say that everything was “timed”. If her husband didn’t arrive on time, she had clear instructions on how to proceed.
When he disappeared, my mother did everything to find him. She contacted protection and human rights bodies, the Church, friends, family and lawyers. She even confided in me that she wouldn’t allow herself to “shed a single tear” until she found him.
She was an armed fortress, holding down the house, her baby daughter, defying the power of the state for her husband. They ended up separating in 1981, but in their own way they remained friends until her death in 2020 as a result of COVID-19.
Fragments of a “hidden” past
At the age of 14, I entered high school at the traditional Colégio Estadual Central in Belo Horizonte, which the likes of writer Fernando Sabino and former president Dilma Rousseff also attended.
In 1988, in the early years of re-democratization, the structure of the school was still authoritarian and militarized. Teachers boasted in the classroom that they were members of the military, or retired members of the National Intelligence Service (SNI).
I ended up getting involved in the student movement, in the creation of a student wall newspaper and in the group of students committed to reopening the union, which had been deactivated by the repression. That was the last straw for my mother. One Saturday, she told me what she and my father had been through between 1975 and 1977. While I know today that her version was partly censored, it made an impression on me at the time.
Her intentions were good, but her strategy was terrible. For my teenage self, the story only encouraged me to get more involved in militancy.
Hell part 2: the “enemy” is still the same
After six days, fed only once “with a plate of thin soup” and quenching his thirst when he was brought to consciousness with jets of cold water, my father was given clothes again. He was to be transferred to the Information Operations Detachment of the São Paulo Internal Defense Operations Center (DOI-Codi/SP).
He says in his testimony that, blindfolded and lying on the floor of the car that was transporting him, he varied between the conviction that he would be killed and the hope that the ordeal would end. He was doubly wrong.
As soon as he entered the back shed at 921 Rua Tutoia, in Vila Mariana, he was stripped naked and introduced to the dragon’s chair. In it, the prisoner is tied up and given shocks to various parts of his body at the same time. That was his routine for 31 days. I can’t find better words than his about the period:
“You hear screams of terror 24 hours a day, the cries of men and women. I saw 70-year-olds brutally beaten. Parents and children, wives and husbands and siblings being tortured in front of each other, being forced to torture each other. Some compare that organ to hell. I would say that this word cannot express all the horror felt by those who had the misfortune to enter that house as prisoners.”
After more than 50 days, my father’s detention came to an end and my mother was able to cry out her heart when her husband left the DOI-Codi. But because he was considered a subversive, he was placed under the National Security Law and sent to Hipódromo, a prison in Brás with political and common prisoners. He was only offered parole on Jan. 21, 1977.
My father returned to work, always linked to the planning and implementation of public policies. In 1989, he joined the Workers’ Party (PT) and took part in the two PT administrations in the municipality of Santos.
First memories
Antônio Bernardino dos Santos, the “subversive” who distributed leaflets against the military regime and the Voz Operária newspaper, a PCB publication, was also a victim of violence very similar to my father’s, but he was already 65 years old at the time. He was introduced to me, when I was still very young, as Grampa Bernardino. I always considered him as such and, I believe, I was loved as a granddaughter.
Another was Emílio Bonfante Demaria, who I knew as Bonfante and who took me to see the Municipal Theater in São Paulo when his ballerina daughter performed on that stage. Bonfante was a commander in the Brazilian Navy and a reference in maritime unionism. He lived until February 1999.
It was in this makeshift family that I grew up. Made up of idealists, politicians, journalists, men and women, living proof of how powerful clichés are: in hard times, they followed the path of tenderness.
My earliest memories are from Hipódromo prison.
My father, Bernardino and Bonfante Demaria were in the Hipódromo prison together. My mother made a point of taking me (I was 2 or 3 at the time) along on her visits. I don’t know if there’s a psychoanalytic explanation for this, but my earliest memories are from there.
My memories are, believe me, very happy. It was the day I could see my father, who always welcomed me with a huge smile. It was the day I could sleep on a wooden stool on his lap and play in the red-tiled courtyard. I also remember seeing my mother being searched by female agents and that, in the meantime, I should “keep very quiet”.
In prison, my father learned leather pyrography and made handicrafts to give to friends and family. When I turned 3, he gave me a poem as a present. Perhaps it was an attempt, seeing the power of life in his young daughter, to renew his own hope, as he was exhausted and almost annihilated by an institutionalized apparatus of terror and violence.
One of the passages in the poem says: “You caused pain, but you were the pain that sanctifies, the living pain that creates, that brings joy to the people, my Ludmila.” I still have the piece in leather, in a rectangular frame and, like the story that united me even more with my father’s, marked with fire.
