Brazil to launch website on dictatorship abuses

SAO PAULO – A website with more than 900,000 minutes of dissident trials proving abuses by Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship will go online this week, officials said Thursday.

The documents were drawn from 710 trials conducted by the Higher Military Tribunal and are complemented by pictures, videos and other material, the federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

The digital initiative, to go online Friday, is based on the original “Brazil Never Again” project launched in the early 1980’s by the Sao Paulo archdiocese and the World Council of Churches.

Also included in that project are documents collected in Switzerland and the United States, which have been digitized and repatriated since 2011.

Brazil officially recognizes 400 dead and missing during the military dictatorship, compared with 30,000 in neighboring Argentina and 3,200 in Chile.

President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president and a former urban guerrilla, was tortured and jailed nearly three years by the military regime.

Last year, her government set up a truth commission tasked with investigating human violations during that period.