Commission says dead torturer supported Argentinean dictatorship

“I found out there were a lot of Argentineans flying around in Rio de Janeiro, enjoying themselves in the city. Some were UN political exiles, some weren’t. So I had them all photographed. ‘I don’t know who they are, I don’t want you to know who they are. I just want their photographs’,” the colonel is reported to have said in a text released Friday (May 30) by the Commission during a monthly meeting held to discuss his activities.

In his testimony, Malhães says the Argentinean military used his photographs to identify all the people missing, and that he informed them of their location. “I became extremely famous in Argentina for that. I was even given a medal,” he says.

In an earlier testimony, given in February, Malhães had already confessed to the Commission  that he created and monitored an clandestine torture center in the city of Petrópolis, in Rio de Janeiro, known as Casa da Morte (Portuguese for “house of death”). Among those who were killed, whose bodies were never found, is Deputy Rubens Paiva, who went missing in 1971.

According to the Commission, Malhães considered the Casa da Morte a backdoor laboratory outside military facilities. In the colonel’s view, this made the work of the military freer and psychologically violent . “It was designed to be calm, quiet and inconspicuous. It was the owner’s son who [later on] reported the Casa, in Petrópolis. Otherwise, no one would have heard about it,” Malhães reveals.

In his testimony, the colonel further acknowledges that the Army had a specific technique for concealing corpses consisting of removing all of the prisoners’ teeth, as well as the tips of their fingers, and cutting their bellies before putting them in impermeable bags and throwing them into a river somewhere in Rio de Janeiro’s highlands, where Petrópolis is located. This would prevent the bodies from being found and identified.

The torturer also revealed that he had become friends with former President Emílio Garrastazu Médici (1969-1974): “Médici usually sent for me, and I would visit the palace. I’ve had lunch next to him. He would ask me: ‘So, what’s the matter?’, and I would answer, ‘You want me to settle it? I can settle it.’ ‘Alright, Malhães, go ahead and do it then,” he says.

The Rio de Janeiro police believe Malhães was killed by burglars who broke into his house in search of money and weapons, but Truth Commission Chairman Wadih Damous regards the case as one of witness elimination.

Translated by Fabrício Ferreira