The Amnesty Commission of the Brazilian Government denied this Thursday the request for compensation requested by former president Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) for having been a victim of political persecution during the dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985.
Rousseff, who was arrested and tortured for her links with an opposition group to the dictatorship, requested the payment of a pension of 10,700 reais (about 2,140 dollars) per month as compensation for having lost her job in a public company after having suffered political persecution. .
The Amnesty Commission, created by the Government in 2002 to attend to the pecuniary requests of the victims of the dictatorship, rejected the request on the grounds that Rousseff had already benefited from an amnesty and compensation for the same reason by the Rio regional government. Grande do Sul.
The twelve members of the commission, in a unanimous decision, concluded that the leader of the leftist Workers’ Party (PT) is already recognized as a victim of the dictatorship in four different states, one of which, Rio Grande do Sul, granted her a compensation for the economic losses suffered.
The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, celebrated the decision in his weekly broadcast on social networks and even mocked the former president.
"Maybe later, when some leftist comes back to power, which I hope they don’t, you’ll get another pension."declared the president ironically.
In the appeal she filed nearly 20 years ago, Rousseff alleged that her arrest prevented her from returning to the Faculty of Economics that she was studying at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFGM) and forced her to resign from her position at the Foundation for Economics and Statistics. from Rio Grande do Sul.
The resignation, according to his lawyers, was a demand of the National Information Service, one of the repressive organs of the dictatorship.
But the members of the Federal Government’s Amnesty Commission considered that the reasons cited by Rousseff to request compensation are the same ones already recognized by the Government of Rio Grande do Sul to grant her amnesty status.
The rapporteur of the Rousseff process in the commission, counselor José Augusto Machado, assured that the former president’s request was unfeasible because all her demands had already been met.
"The applicant is already recognized as a political amnesty in four states. You are not entitled to this new economic compensation, even due to the impossibility of accumulating compensation"said.
Machado also recalled that the socialist leader was reinstated as an official of the Rio Grande do Sul Foundation for Economics and Statistics in 1990.
Another of the counselors, Adriana Vieira, provoked protests from the defense for affirming that Rousseff was part of an organization that took up arms against the dictatorship.
"She was arrested and tried for being in the armed struggle, for belonging to a group that acted illegally. It was not for political reasons that she was persecuted. It was her choice to belong to an armed organization responsible for terrorist acts"Army General Luis Eduardo Rocha Paiva, another of the counselors, added, also rejecting compensation.
The Amnesty Commission, created in 2002 by then President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, another victim of the dictatorship, is currently linked to the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights.
Since 2019, with the coming to power of the far-right Bolsonaro, a defender of the dictatorship, the Commission, in which the military gained more participation, has increased the demands to meet amnesty requests and even raised the possibility of suspending its activities.