The government of Brazil has announced an agreement to acknowledge its responsibility in the murder of Vladimir Herzog, a journalist and dissident who was killed during the country’s dictatorship period.
On Thursday, the government agreed to a statement of liability and a compensation package for Herzog’s family, amounting to 3 million Brazilian reais, or $544,800.
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The settlement also affirmed the decision of a federal court earlier this year to grant Herzog’s widow, Clarice Herzog, retroactive payments of a pension she should have received after her husband’s death, amounting to about $6,000 per month.
In a statement recorded by The Associated Press news agency, Herzog’s son, Ivo Herzog, applauded the government’s decision to accept responsibility.
“This apology is not merely symbolic,” Ivo said. “It is an act by the state that makes us believe the current Brazilian state doesn’t think like the Brazilian state of that time.”
He added that his family’s story represented hundreds, if not thousands, of others who had their loved ones killed during the dictatorship period from 1964 to 1985.
Having the government acknowledge its wrongdoing, he explained, has been a decades-long fight.
“This has been a struggle not only of the Herzog family, but of all the families of the murdered and disappeared,” said Ivo, who now runs a human rights nonprofit named for his father, the Vladimir Herzog Institute.
Vladimir Herzog was 38 years old at the time of his death in 1975, midway through the dictatorship period.
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The Brazilian army had overthrown left-wing President Joao Goulart a decade earlier and installed a government that became known for human rights abuses, including the arbitrary arrest and torture of dissidents, students, politicians, Indigenous people and anyone else deemed to be a threat.
Many went into exile. Some were killed or simply disappeared without a trace. The number of deaths is estimated to be about 500, though some experts place that figure at 10,000 or higher.
Herzog was a prominent journalist, and initially, he too went into exile in the United Kingdom. But he returned to Brazil to serve as the news editor for a public television station, TV Cultura. It was in that role that, on October 24, 1975, Herzog was summoned by authorities to an army barrack.
There, military officials indicated he would be asked to testify about his political connections. Herzog voluntarily left to offer his statement. But he never returned home.
The military later claimed Herzog’s death was a suicide, and it released a staged photo of his body hanging from a rope.
But a rabbi who later examined Herzog’s body found signs of torture. Herzog’s funeral, conducted with full religious rites, turned into a moment of reckoning for the Brazilian dictatorship, and the staged photograph became a symbol of its abuses.
His son Ivo was only nine years old at the time. Earlier this year, he spoke to Al Jazeera about the release of a film called I’m Still Here that highlighted another murder committed under the dictatorship: that of Rubens Paiva, a politician.
Like Herzog, Paiva voluntarily left to give testimony at the request of military officials and was never seen alive again. His body was never found. It took decades for Paiva’s family to receive a death certificate that acknowledged the military’s role in his death.
Ivo praised the film I’m Still Here for raising awareness about the injustices of the dictatorship. He also told Al Jazeera that he hoped for the Brazilian government to acknowledge the harm it had done to his family and to amend the 1979 Amnesty Law that shielded many military officials from facing accountability.
“What are they waiting for? For everyone connected to that period to die?” Herzog told journalist Eleonore Hughes. “Brazil has a politics of forgetfulness, and we have evolved very, very little.”
On Thursday, Jorge Messias, Brazil’s federal legal counsellor, framed the agreement with the Herzog family as a step forward.
“Today, we are witnessing something unprecedented: The Brazilian state formally honouring the memory of Vladimir Herzog,” he said.
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He also compared the 1964 coup d’etat with the modern circumstances of Brazilian politics. On January 8, 2023, thousands of supporters of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro stormed government buildings in Brazil’s capital, after the 2022 election saw their candidate defeated.
The current president, left-wing leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has compared that incident to a coup. Bolsonaro testified this month in court over charges he helped orchestrate an effort to overturn the election result.
“In the 2022 election, we stood at a crossroads: Either to reaffirm democracy or move toward the closure of the Brazilian state, with all the horrors we lived through for 21 years,” Messias said, referencing the horrors of the dictatorship.
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