The São Paulo court rejected a public civil action brought by the Public Ministry, which said in plenary that the dictatorship should have “killed more”.
In April 2024, during a session in which the Chamber approved a motion to repudiate the atrocities committed by the military regime, the councilor justified his vote with the following statement:
“We will no longer allow the left to continue writing history in Brazil. In 1964, the military prevented an ongoing communist coup. Who knows, if the military government had killed more communists, more terrorists, we would have avoided what is happening in Brazil today.”
Prosecutor João Marcos Costa de Paiva said in the action that the councilor, in addition to historical revisionism, “apologized for the deaths perpetrated by the State during the period of the civic-military dictatorship of 1964-1985.”
According to the prosecutor, by defending the killing of Brazilian communists, the “councilman reduced the size of the position he holds and indiscriminately inferiorized a wide range of people, solely because of their political convictions.”
The Public Prosecutor’s Office asked in the action that the parliamentarian be ordered to publicly recant and pay compensation for collective moral damages.
In the defense presented to the Court, the councilor said that he used harsh words because he was against the motion and had only one minute to take a position, but maintained that his speech was misinterpreted.
He also told the court that his words, “mistaken or not”, are protected by parliamentary immunity provided for in the Constitution.
“The people cannot be properly represented if their parliamentarians, official representatives of their voice, feel inhibited and cannot express themselves without the fear of being silenced or having their guarantees violated due to mere ideological disagreements with what was said”, he stated.
The Court agreed with the arguments in first and second instance decisions.
According to judge Silvério da Silva, as the statements were made during the Chamber session and were directly related to the exercise of the mandate, “such manifestations are covered by the prerogative of the inviolability of opinions, words and votes”, provided for in the Constitution.
In a decision taken at the end of April, the judge stated that possible abuses of parliamentary prerogatives must be investigated through a process initiated by the Legislature itself.
The Chamber imposed a verbal warning on the councilor.
Self-defense
When contacted by the Panel, the councilor said in a note that he repudiates death and political violence for purely ideological reasons. “Whether a right-winger did it against a peaceful communist or in cases like where a radical leftist murdered him because he disagreed with his opinions.”
The councilor stated that, “in the context of the armed conflict between the Brazilian State and communist terrorist groups between 1964 and the 1980s”, he defended the “right to legitimate defense of civilians and military personnel against attacks by these extremist groups”.
“Killing communists and terrorists who wanted to implement a dictatorship of the proletariat in our country was, therefore, an act of self-defense in the face of attacks that killed countless young people, including soldier Mário Kozel Filho”, he stated.
“Note that I spoke of ‘communists and terrorists’ in my statement protected by the constitutional prerogative of parliamentary inviolability,” he said
“I do not defend and repudiate any political violence under ideological motivation. In my expressed opinion, therefore, communists who, for example, did not join armed terrorist groups during the period, should not be targets of a self-defense reaction; even less so are current communists, registered under political parties and who, today, act in the political arena legally in our current legal system”, he stated.
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
