Chief delegate of the 36th Police District (Vila Mariana), Marcelo Palhares stated that he would never connive with torture and violence by the police.
The police station he commands operates at the address where the DOI-Codi in São Paulo is located, the main center for torture and repression of opponents of the dictatorship. Among those killed after torture at the site was journalist Vladimir Herzog.
Founded as Oban (Operação Bandeirante) in 1969 on an experimental basis and later renamed with the acronym for Information Operations Detachment – Internal Defense Operations Center, DOI-Codi was the dictatorship’s intelligence and repression body, headed by the Army and which also brought together police officers.
Until 1974, dozens of political prisoners were killed there and thousands were tortured. Today, the police station shares space with deactivated buildings in the complex, which house educational visits and archaeological excavations, in a part of the land that could become a memorial.
Palhares spoke with Sheet on the afternoon of last Thursday (23), two days before the 50th anniversary of Herzog’s death. The report did not schedule the interview. He arrived suddenly at the scene and asked to speak to the police chief, who immediately welcomed the reporter.
The head of the 36th DP avoided commenting on Herzog’s episode: “I was a child at that time [tem hoje 60 anos]. I have to stick to my work: I’m not a historian, I’m a police chief.”
At another point in the interview, he added: “Of course I know the story, but I cannot condone violence, with methods such as torture. I can never condone that.”
Palhares praised the work of the São Paulo Civil Police. “It’s one of the best structured in the world, with a great technological apparatus. If you have it, why violence? It should only be used in response, when it comes from there to here, from the criminal.”
When asked about , the delegate replied: “I speak for the Civil Police.”
Regarding the Public Ministry’s action to transform the complex into a memorial, Palhares defended the maintenance of the police station on site. He repeated the phrase several times in the interview: “Good people like police stations, anyone who is afraid of police stations is a criminal.”
Initially, an agreement between the Public Ministry and the Government of São Paulo would include the transfer of the other buildings in the complex to the memorial, and the police station would continue to operate normally there.
Palhares said that coexistence with researchers linked to human rights who work at the complex “doesn’t hinder anything; we maintain an attitude of respect and so do they.”
Researchers who work at the site said the same about the good coexistence. In the case of Palhares, a sign of this harmony was seen in a cup with the Núcleo Memória logo – the organization that coordinates educational visits to the former DOI-Codi – on the delegate’s table.
The 36th DP has undergone some renovations since the end of the last century. As in other districts, today there is no longer a prison on site. “It doesn’t even look like a police station that appears in a soap opera. It’s not unpleasant, there’s no cell. Even the smell of a police station was bad, but that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Palhares.
