How many people were killed during Brazil’s military dictatorship?

Who did the counting

The Comissão Nacional da Verdade, Brazil’s National Truth Commission, was set up by law in 2011 to examine the grave human rights violations committed between 1946 and 1988, a span that covers the military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985. It handed in its final report, in three volumes, on December 10, 2014, and it took care to present its numbers as a floor.

The central figure is 434: people killed or disappeared for political reasons by agents of the state. Of these, 210 were never found, and their families still have no grave to visit. Those are the cases the commission could confirm. It said plainly that the true number is higher.

Who they were

The dead were students, factory workers, peasants, priests, journalists such as Vladimir Herzog, and even officers who had opposed the coup. Many died in custody, at the army’s DOI-Codi centers and at dozens of other addresses across the country, where prisoners were tortured to give up names. Others died in the field. Between 1972 and 1974, on the Araguaia River in southern Pará, the army wiped out a rural guerrilla force organized by the Communist Party of Brazil. Most of the guerrillas were killed, and many of their families are still searching for the bodies.

The Indigenous count

A separate estimate covers Indigenous peoples. The commission found at least 8,350 Indigenous deaths between 1946 and 1988 caused by the action or neglect of the state. Two cautions matter here. The period is longer than the dictatorship, and the figure comes from only ten peoples. It is a minimum, not a total.

“State policy”

For decades the official line was that abuses were the isolated excesses of a few agents. The commission rejected that explanation outright. Its conclusion, in volume I:

Under the military dictatorship, the repression and elimination of political opponents became state policy, conceived and carried out on the basis of decisions issued by the presidency of the Republic and the military ministries.

The evidence had been gathering for a long time. In secret, Cardinal Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns and the Presbyterian minister Jaime Wright ran a project called Brasil: Nunca Mais (Brazil: Never Again), which copied 707 cases from the Superior Military Court, more than a million pages. Many prisoners had described their torture to the military judges, and those statements sat in the regime’s own files. The book came out in 1985.

Deaths on the other side

The commission’s count covers victims of state agents. The armed left killed people too. Before dawn on June 26, 1968, a car bomb planted by the VPR, an armed left-wing group, exploded at the Second Army headquarters in São Paulo and killed the sentry, Private Mário Kozel Filho. He was 18. Such deaths are not part of the 434, because the commission’s brief was the violence of the state. The wider story of the regime shows how both kinds of violence grew after 1968.