Federal judge orders lifetime pension for Vladimir Herzog’s widow
Federal judge Anderson Santos da Silva, of a federal court in Brasília, has ordered a lifetime monthly payment of BRL 34,577.89 to Clarice Herzog, the widow of journalist Vladimir Herzog, who was murdered by agents of the military dictatorship in October 1975.
The amount is to be paid as economic reparation for the possible recognition of Herzog as the benefitiary of political amnesty. Such recognition has not yet taken place, despite the fact that the journalist was persecuted, according to the proceedings conducted by the Special Commission on Political Deaths and Missing Persons and the National Truth Commission.
Herzog’s murder at the hands of agents of state repression, which was even simulated as a suicide, was also recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) in 2018, when Brazil was condemned for failing to clarify the circumstances of the journalist’s death.
“In short, given the overwhelming evidence regarding the arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial execution of Vladimir Herzog, the plaintiff’s request for recognition of his status as the beneficiary of political amnesty, with its legal consequences, is legally plausible,” the judge in charge of the case wrote.
The judge justified the urgency of the decision for financial reparations in monthly installments for life by the fact that the journalist’s widow is 83 years old and suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. He set a deadline for the federal government to contest the ruling.
Clarice Herzog’s defense also requested more than BRL 2 million in retroactive payments for the last five years, but this request has not yet been considered by the judge. He said that even the amount of the monthly pension could be re-evaluated after the case has been properly investigated.
In a statement, the Vladimir Herzog Institute and the journalist’s family celebrated the injunction, pointing out that it “comes at the 50th anniversary of this crime and Clarice’s tireless fight for justice for Vlado.”
There is no definite deadline for the final judgment on the case, which is being heard by a federal regional court.
Vladimir Herzog
Murdered in a cell on the premises of the Information Operations Detachment - Internal Defense Operations Center (formerly named Doi-Codi), an agency of repression and torture at the time of the military regime, Herzog's death certificate was forged as a “suicide,” a hoax that would be debunked years later.
Herzog had been arrested for his links to the Brazilian Communist Party, the PCB. He was tortured and killed, and the official allegation was that he had hanged himself with a belt in his cell. Forged photos were published. However, in 1978 the Brazilian courts decided that the state should be condemned for the crime.
Vlado Herzog was born in 1937 in Croatia (then Yugoslavia), lived in Italy, and came to Brazil in 1942. He became a naturalized Brazilian citizen, changed his name to Vladimir, lived in São Paulo and began working as a journalist in 1959. He worked for media outlets such as the BBC when he lived in London, the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, and TV Cultura, where he was director of news at the time of his death.
He also taught television journalism at the Armando Álvares Machado Foundation (FAAP) and USP’s School of Communications and Arts.
