On the morning of October 25, 1975, a Saturday, the journalist voluntarily presented himself at the São Paulo headquarters of DOI-Codi, on Tutóia Street, between the neighborhoods of Paraíso and Vila Mariana, to give a statement — the day before, agents of the dictatorship had gone to his house to take him, but he managed to postpone the summons.
Hours later, on the afternoon of the same Saturday, Herzog was dead, after suffering torture sessions.
The DOI-Codi headquarters in São Paulo was the dictatorship’s main center of repression. There, thousands of political prisoners were tortured, of which dozens were killed — the final report of the Truth Commission, based on an Army document, records 50 victims.
DOI-Codi is the acronym for Information Operations Detachment – Internal Defense Operations Center, the intelligence and repression body headed by the Army (but which also brought together the police and the other Armed Forces, Navy and Air Force).
During the most violent period of the dictatorship, DOI-Codi in São Paulo was commanded by the then major, from 1970 to 1974. Ustra, who would become a nefarious symbol of that period (or a hero for apologists of the military regime, such as former president Jair Bolsonaro), was succeeded in the position by lieutenant colonel Audir Maciel, head of the center until 1976 — he would fall after the murders of Herzog and the worker Manoel Fiel Filho.
At that time, the Tutóia street complex — whose back faces Tomás Carvalhal and Coronel Paulino Carlos streets — housed a small police station, but was mainly focused on repression. Fifty years later, the site is at the center of a dispute over memory, with the Public Ministry and human rights organizations seeking to transform it into a memorial, in conflict with the government of São Paulo, owner of the space.
Meanwhile, the complex is experiencing an unusual situation: a police station continues to operate there (the 36th DP) and, right next door, on the same land, other buildings in the center host educational visits and training workshops and pass by in search of answers about its past.
This Saturday, the exact date of the 50th anniversary of Herzog’s death, there will be a special mediated visit in memory of the event, organized by the Núcleo Memória organization, which regularly carries out the activity.
Next week, the second stage of excavations begins, forensic archeology work conducted by the universities Unifesp, Unicamp and UFMG.
In 2014, the complex was . In 2021, the state Public Ministry, through the then Human Rights Prosecutor Eduardo Valerio (now prosecutor), filed a public civil action requesting the “transfer of all or part of the property” from the Public Security Secretariat complex to the State Secretariat of Culture and the elaboration of a museum project to create a memory space.
That same year, Public Finance judge José Eduardo Rocha conducted a conciliation hearing within the complex, when former political prisoners even entered the police station’s rooms, at the end of which it was agreed to suspend the action in search of an agreement, which to this day has not been reached.
In an interview in 2023, the Secretary of Culture, Economy and Creative Industry of the Tarcísio de Freitas (Republican) administration, Marília Marton, said she did not see the need to create a memorial at the site, citing a lack of resources and that the State already has one of this type, the .
When asked to justify its position, the secretariat did not respond specifically to the questions, only reiterating that “the State already has public equipment dedicated to preserving and disseminating the memory of the resistance and human rights violations that occurred during the military regime.”
Prosecutor Valerio counters: “If the State was capable of creating several torture centers, let it be capable of creating several memory centers.”
“The Germans are very fond of this issue, the concentration camps there became centers of memory, because the strength of the place has a very intense educational capacity.”
According to Valerio, the Department of Culture signaled that it would transfer the buildings in the back if any institution took over the management of the space. In April, Unicamp (State University of Campinas) became the sponsor of the memorial.
There are a total of four buildings in the complex: the main one, from the 36th DP (with entrance from Rua Tutoia, nº 921), and three further down, two of which are deactivated (which have been occupied for research and educational activities) and a third (with entrance from Tomás Carvalhal) which belongs to the DHPP (State Department of Homicide and Personal Protection), of the Civil Police.
According to testimonies and historical documents, there were torture rooms both in the current police station building — which has undergone renovations since then and today no longer has cells — and in one of the rear ones.
Edson Teles was 4 years old when he was taken by Ustra, along with his sister Janaína (then 6) to see his parents, César and Amelinha, with marks of torture at the scene. Today a professor of political philosophy at Unifesp and vice-coordinator of the university’s CAAF (Center for Forensic Anthropology and Archeology), he sees the situation as a symbol of post-dictatorship democracy.
“You don’t deny that there was a dictatorship, but at all times you create ways to give ambiguous definitions of what it would have been: you maintain a police space, where people were tortured and killed, and you hand over the funds from that space, possibly to a place of memory”, he states.
In one, he told about a visit he made to the police station with his mother, in which she identified, in the room now dedicated to the DP’s “dead archive”, the place where he witnessed the last breaths of Carlos Nicolau Danielli, who died after torture.
“I think it’s very serious”, adds Teles, “because the Brazilian State continues to torture and kill in violation of the law. And for you to build a place of memory sharing space with a police station in the dictatorship’s largest torture center, with a police force that to this day has no mechanisms to control violence, is very complicated.”
He considers that, “from the point of view of those who are in this fight”, the pragmatic solution is to take the space “and start denouncing, opening up and denouncing that at the police station opposite he was also tortured”.
This last point is shared by two researchers central to the process. “The ideal would be the entire space dedicated to the memorial. But between what we want and the ideal, there is reality. So, if it is possible to install it in these two buildings, even if the police station remains, I see an opportunity to think about the democratization of our police forces”, says Deborah Neves, coordinator of the DOI-Codi Memorial Working Group.
A doctor in history and researcher at the site since 2010, Deborah says that the group has always had a “very good relationship with the Civil Police, with authorization for both mediated visits and excavations”, and talks about building partnerships aimed at training in human rights for the police forces, a recommendation from the Truth Commission.
Aline Carvalho, PhD in social history and coordinator of the Paulo Duarte Public Archeology Laboratory at Unicamp, agrees with her colleague. “The existence of the police station is not incompatible with the existence of a memorial. Maintaining the police station can be a point of questioning about State violence yesterday and today, thinking about police training in the past, present and future.”
“So it’s another field in which we can suddenly act. Think how beautiful it would be if this memorial couldn’t provide training courses talking about human rights for these police.”
