Judge Márcio José de Moraes, who sentenced her for the murder of Vladimir Herzog, highlighted the role of women in confronting the regime and in seeking for Justice to recognize the crimes committed in the period of exception (1964-1985).
Moraes participated in a debate this Monday morning (10), at the USP Law School, and was sentenced during the . The meeting was in memory of the 50th anniversary of Herzog’s death, completed in October this year, and also served as an act in defense of democracy.
In his speech, Moraes also called for the nomination of a woman to the (Federal Supreme Court) in front of – the Union’s attorney general – for the seat of Luis Roberto Barroso, retired since last month.
“How can you have a supreme court, in which you have the real hope of being a bulwark of resistance, in which there will not be an equal female gaze?”, asked the judge. If Messias is nominated by President Lula (PT) and approved by the Senate, Minister Cármen Lúcia will be among the 11 names on the court.
The criticism was preceded by the reminder that it was only possible to condemn the dictatorship, even during the exceptional regime, because Clarice Herzog, the journalist’s widow, wanted to sue the State. He also cited the case of Eunice Paiva, wife of former deputy Rubens Paiva, who had been tortured, killed and never had her body found.
“There was a national tragedy, undoubtedly, with dead and missing people. What is the voice that echoes this tragedy?”
Clarice was mentioned by almost everyone present. In April 1976, six months after her husband’s murder, she filed a lawsuit in Federal Court to hold the government responsible for the arrest, torture and death of Vlado, as Herzog was known.
Vlado was killed on October 25, 1975, in São Paulo, after suffering intense torture sessions. The dictatorship announced that he had committed suicide and the version was openly contested by Herzog’s family and friends.
His eldest son, Ivo Herzog, who chairs the board of the institute that bears his father’s name, dedicated the event to his mother, Clarice.
“How can a 34-year-old widow think about suing the oppressive State within the four lines, as they say?”, said Ivo, using the expression of the former president (PL), sentenced to 27 years in prison for an attempted coup, who says he always acted “within the four lines of the Constitution”.
Márcio Moraes was just two months into his career when, in October 1978, he condemned the Union for the crime against Vlado. He took over the case because the judge in charge of the court where he worked was about to retire and was prevented by the regime from continuing with the case — the dictatorship considered that a judge at the end of his career would have more freedom to condemn the State.
Received a standing ovation at the USP event, Moraes recalled being afraid of suffering an attack when condemning the dictatorship with AI-5 (Institutional Act nº 5, the harshest of the regime) in full operation. The act would cease to be in force in January 1979, and even though he was advised to wait, he chose to publish the sentence three months earlier, because he saw that the sentence “had to be a cry of resistance from the Judiciary”.
“I wanted to be a surgeon, I wasn’t going to throw stones at the regime, I was going to throw bricks at it,” he said.
STF, democracy and elections
One of the lawyers who represented Clarice in the process, Samuel MacDowell Figueiredo praised Moraes’ sentence, but regretted that it was “only partially fulfilled”, as it determined that those responsible for torturing and killing Herzog were identified and held accountable, something that never happened.
For him, the situation worsened when the STF “interpreted the Amnesty Law [de 1979] like a shield that protected torturers and murderers”.
The law in question granted pardons to soldiers who committed crimes during the dictatorship. The revision of the text, which has been stopped by the STF for more than ten years, has been a frequent request from family members of victims of the regime, .
“Torture by its nature is not a political crime, it is a crime against human dignity, against the foundations that the State raises, against the very idea of civilization,” said MacDowell.
Mediator of the debate, the journalist from Sheet Patrícia Campos Mello highlighted the need to promote events that remember what the exception regime was.
“It is important that we never let revisionism prosper, it is important that we remember exactly what the military dictatorship was. We came close to a very difficult situation of almost falling into the abyss of authoritarianism recently and we have elections next year in a very conflicted political environment. And more important than ever, remember what the dictatorship was”, she stated.
President of -SP, Leonardo Sica criticized accusations, made mainly by Bolsonarists when attacking STF decisions, that the country is experiencing a crisis.
“We are not experiencing anything worse than the dictatorship and, by saying that, we are trivializing what the dictatorship was and that there is something to be lost [que é a democracia].”
The event was promoted by the Vladimir Herzog Institute together with the Arns Commission, OAB and USP. Also participating were former Minister of Justice José Carlos Dias; the lawyer and former federal deputy Luiz Eduardo Greenhalgh; Celso Campilongo, director of the Faculty of Law at USP; historians Mário Sérgio Moraes and Maria Aparecida Aquino; journalists Juca Kfouri and Clotilde Perez; and Argentine jurist Luis Moreno Ocampo, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
