'I fought for years to correct my dad's death certificate - but still haven't buried him' [View all]

4 days ago

Sofia Ferreira Santos
BBC News



Tessa Moura Lacerda
Tessa Moura Lacerda is a philosophy professor at the University of São Paulo

​​"Have we really done it?" Tessa Moura Lacerda asked her mother, in disbelief, as they stood outside a government office on a rainy August morning in 2019.

​​In their hands, a document they fought for years to hold - her father's death certificate, now correctly stating his cause of death.

​​It read: "unnatural, violent death caused by the State to a missing person [...] in the dictatorial regime established in 1964".

​​Tessa's father, Gildo Macedo Lacerda, died under torture in 1973 at just 24, during the most brutal years of Brazil's military dictatorship.

Over more than two decades, at least 434 people were killed or disappeared, with thousands more detained and tortured, a national truth commission found.​​​

More:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8npx2r8y8o

(You may recall that President Lula da Silva's first Vice President, from his first term, years ago, Dilma Rousseff, was, herself a political prisoner, and tortured extensively by the dictatorship.



Dilma Rousseff appears before a military court in Rio de Janeiro in 1970, while her military accusers hide their faces.
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