Part of a shadowy urban guerrilla group at the time of her capture in 1970,
she spent three years behind bars,
where interrogators repeatedly tortured her with electric shocks
to her feet and ears, and forced her into the pau de arara, or parrot’s perch,
in which victims are suspended upside down naked, from a stick,
That former guerrilla is now Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff.
As a truth commission begins examining the military’s crackdown
on the population during a dictatorship that lasted two decades,
Brazilians are riveted by chilling details emerging
about the painful pasts of both their country and their president.
The schisms of that era, which stretched from 1964 to 1985, live on here.
Retired military officials, including Maur?cio Lopes Lima, 76,
have questioned the evidence linking the military to abuses.
Rights groups, meanwhile, are hounding Mr. Lopes Lima and others
accused of torture, encircling their residences in cities across Brazil.
“A torturer of the dictatorship lives here,”
Mr. Lopes Lima’s apartment building in the seaside resort city of Guaruj?,
part of a street-theater protest.
While a 1979 amnesty still shields military officials from prosecution for abuses,
the commission, which began in May and has a two-year mandate,
is nevertheless stirring up ghosts. The dictatorship killed an estimated 400 people;
torture victims are thought to number in the thousands.
who was 22 when the abuse began and is now 64,
is among the most prominent of hundreds of decades-old cases
The president is not the region’s only political leader to rise to power
after being imprisoned and tortured,
As a young medical student, Chile’s former president, Michelle Bachelet,
survived a harrowing stretch of detention and torture after a 1973 military coup.
And Uruguay’s president, Jos? Mujica, a former leader of the Tupamaro guerrilla organization, underwent torture during nearly a decade and half of imprisonment.