How did Vladimir Herzog die?

Who he was

Vladimir Herzog was born in 1937 in what was then Yugoslavia, into a Jewish family that fled the Second World War and settled in Brazil when he was a boy. By 1975 he was 38 and head of news at TV Cultura, São Paulo’s public television station. Brazil was then under a military dictatorship, and General Ernesto Geisel had promised a slow easing of its controls. In São Paulo, the army’s intelligence and interrogation center, the DOI-Codi, was still at work.

Saturday, October 25, 1975

Herzog was called to give a statement, and on Saturday morning he went to the DOI-Codi on his own. By the afternoon he was dead, killed in the custody of the army. The army announced that he had killed himself in his cell and released a photograph presented as proof. Few people believed it.

A rabbi’s decision

Rabbi Henry Sobel was told about the marks on the body, and he made a decision: Herzog would not be buried as a suicide. Jewish custom buried those who took their own lives in a separate section of the cemetery. Herzog was buried in the ordinary way, and the burial itself told the city that his community did not accept the official story.

On October 31, São Paulo’s cathedral, the Sé, held an ecumenical service for him, led by Cardinal Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, Rabbi Sobel and the Presbyterian minister Jaime Wright. The police set up roadblocks around the city, and more than 8,000 people came anyway. It was the first great public act against the dictatorship since 1968.

The second death

Three months later, in January 1976, the metalworker Manoel Fiel Filho died in the same DOI-Codi, and the official version was the same. This time President Geisel dismissed the commander of the Second Army. It was a message to the hard-liners who resisted his easing: he, not they, would set the pace.

What the courts decided

Herzog’s family sued. On October 27, 1978, while the dictatorship still ruled, a federal judge declared the federal government responsible for Herzog’s illegal detention and his death. It was a ruling against the regime from inside the regime. In 2013 the family received a new death certificate that no longer recorded suicide, and in 2018 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned Brazil over the case. Herzog is one of the 434 dead and disappeared confirmed by Brazil’s National Truth Commission in 2014.

Where you hear his name

His name lives on in the Prêmio Vladimir Herzog, a Brazilian journalism award for amnesty and human rights. The generals who ran the country in those years, and Geisel’s role in the opening, are on Who were the presidents of Brazil’s military dictatorship?.