Military records indicate that Brazilian president-elect Dilma Rousseff once oversaw a cache of weapons and ammunition for militants who opposed Brazil’s 1964 to 1985 military regime, a major newspaper reported on Saturday.
The cache included Mauser rifles, machine guns, revolvers, dynamite and boxes of ammunition allegedly stolen from an army barracks in the Sao Paulo suburb of Sao Caetano do Sul in June 1969, the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper said, citing files released by the Supreme Military Court.
Much of the information in the files comes from the interrogation of dissidents arrested and tortured during the dictatorship.
Rousseff herself was captured and tortured for her membership in the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard, though she has denied participating in violence and says she opposed such actions.
Rousseff’s alleged role as a safekeeper for the arsenal is described in a report detailing the 1970 interrogation of a fellow -militant who was tortured while under custody, the paper reported.
The weapons allegedly were discovered in an apartment on the outskirts of Sao Paulo that served as a group safe house.
No one answered the telephone at the Supreme Military Court to verify the report’s accuracy and the president-elect had no immediate comment on the report, presidential spokeswoman Monica Gugliano said.
Rousseff joined the anti--dictatorship Vanguard group in 1967 as a 19-year-old economics student. For three years she helped lead that organization, instructed comrades on Marxist theory and wrote for an underground newspaper.
After three years underground, Rousseff was captured in 1970 by Brazil’s military police and was considered a big enough catch that a military prosecutor labeled her the “Joan of Arc” of the guerrilla movement. She was tossed into the Tiradentes prison and tortured.
After being released in 1973, Rousseff moved to southern Brazil, where she reunited with her now ex-husband, Carlos Araujo, who also had been imprisoned as a militant.
Earlier this month, prosecutors filed a lawsuit seeking damages against four dictatorship-era agents accused of killings and kidnappings, including a former army captain linked to Rousseff’s torture.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency