The Army Command refused to withdraw in one (MG), as requested by the Federal in .
In a proposal sent to the Prosecutor’s Office, the Force agreed to remove the reference to the name “Brigada 31 de Março” from the website and a sign of the 4th Light Mountain Infantry Brigade. However, he refused to revoke the 1974 decree, published during the , which made the reverence official at the time.
The Prosecutor’s Office rejected the conciliation proposal and decided to maintain the public civil action, proposed after reverting to the date in the unit. The mention of March 31 remains on the plaque and on the unit’s website.
The brigade is installed in the location of , from where, in, General Olympio Mourão Filho, then head of the unit based in Juiz de Fora, mobilized his troops towards Rio de Janeiro to depose President João Goulart, known as Jango.
In the proposal sent in September to the Prosecutor’s Office, the Army also agrees to remove from the website the mention of the “decisive and courageous role [da brigada] at the outbreak of the democratic revolution”, a term still used by some military personnel to refer to the coup.
The document, signed by General Márcio Nunes Ribeiro, chief of staff of the Army Commander, Tomás Paiva, does not refer to the events of 1964 as a coup, but only as “the beginning of the military government”.
The term appears in the item in which the Army refuses to create a memory space in the unit about its participation in the military coup. The Force suggested, in return, the installation on the street or in a museum in the city of “a plaque without political-ideological connotations, which highlights the historical fact of the displacement of troops from Juiz de Fora, enabling the beginning of the military government of 1964”.
The proposal was conditional on “the transcribed content being previously submitted for approval by the Brazilian Army”.
The document also rejects that the unit’s soldiers take a course on the “illicit nature of the 1964 military coup” and the conclusions of the National Truth Commission about the period.
“There is no need to create any new course for members of the 4th Motorized Light Infantry Brigade, given that issues related to human rights are included in the training of its staff”, says the text of the proposal.
The MPF rejected the Army’s proposal because it attempted to maintain the validity of the ordinance that formalizes the tribute to the date of the coup. The Prosecutor’s Office cited as a basis a recent judgment of the (Federal Supreme Court) which found the action to be unconstitutional.
“It is noteworthy that the STF’s conclusion refers to the praise of the military coup through the publication of the ‘Order of the Day Allusive to March 31, 1964’ by the Ministry of Defense on 3/30/2020; the same premises and foundations, with much more reason, they must apply to the present case, in which the date of the military coup is also mentioned to pay homage, but in a permanent and not ephemeral way”, wrote prosecutor Thiago Cunha de Almeida.
The action was proposed in April and had been on hold since June for conciliation negotiations. On the 5th, Almeida announced the rejection of the Army’s proposal, which reopened the process.
“It is not possible to have a consensual solution that provides, as a starting point, the maintenance of the name ‘Brigada 31 de Março’ by the Union, contrary to the precedent set by the Federal Supreme Court with general repercussion, even if mitigated by the prohibition of its presentation to the public external to the military unit”, stated the prosecutor.
