{"id":83029,"date":"2016-11-21T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T12:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=83029"},"modified":"2016-11-24T10:52:08","modified_gmt":"2016-11-24T10:52:08","slug":"volkswagen-is-charged-with-aiding-brazilian-dictatorship-in-torturing-workers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/11\/volkswagen-is-charged-with-aiding-brazilian-dictatorship-in-torturing-workers\/","title":{"rendered":"Volkswagen Charged with Aiding Brazilian Dictatorship in Torturing Workers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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16 Nov 2016 – <\/em>Late last month in Brazil a group of labor unions and human rights activists associated with the National Truth Commission (Comiss\u00e3o Nacional de Verdade (CNV) presented a charge to the Ministerio P\u00fablico Federal (the Public Prosecutors Office) denouncing the Volkswagen corporation for having collaborated with the military in the persecution and torture of their own workers during the 21-year US-backed dictatorship (1964-1985). The CNV was created by a 2012 law to investigate human rights abuses in the country.<\/p>\n

The April 1964 coup launched by the Brazilian military, with the help and direction of the US embassy, the CIA and the Johnson administration, overthrew the democratically elected government of the nationalist-reformist Jo\u00e3o Goulart and set the model for the US-backed reign of terror in Chile (1973), Argentina (1976) and elsewhere in the hemisphere.<\/p>\n

Under Argentina\u2019s military junta, Ford Motor Company was similarly charged with having fingered militant workers in its factories, which were run like a police state and provided facilities for the secret police to interrogate and torture autoworkers.<\/p>\n

The trigger for the charges against VW in Brazil were the documents collected by the CNV workgroup \u201cDictatorship and Repression of Workers and the Union Movement,\u201d which establish that Volkswagen Brasil elaborated so-called \u201cdirty lists\u201d of militant workers in their factories for the Department of Social and Political Order (Departamento de Ordem Pol\u00edtica e Social, DOPS), the country\u2019s feared secret police. These lists, according to the charges, included workers\u2019 full names, their addresses and the departments in which they worked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are almost 200 \u2018occurrence reports\u2019 made by the [VW] security and sent to the DOPS,\u201d according to a report in the Brazilian daily Estad\u00e3o.<\/em> \u201cIn these, there are reports of workers being surprised by the Military Police (MP) while picketing and instead of being sent to a Police Station, being taken to an MP office or to a VW factory in S\u00e3o Bernardo do Campo [in the State of S\u00e3o Paulo] in order to be identified and interrogated. There are reports of beatings and torture of workers linked to the communist parties inside the factory.\u201d<\/p>\n

S\u00e3o Bernardo do Campo is, along with Santo Andr\u00e9 and S\u00e3o Caetano do Sul, an industrial region known as the ABC Paulista where auto companies like VW, Ford, General Motors and Mercedes-Benz have operated since the late 1950s. The region eventually became the birthplace of the Workers Party and the platform for future president Luiz Inacio \u2018Lula\u2019 Da Silva, who was a prominent union leader in the early 1980s during the last years of the dictatorship. The region in recent years has been an epicenter of the country\u2019s deep economic crisis, reflected in mass layoffs and wage cuts.<\/p>\n

In 1980, when Lula led a 41-day strike for a 15 percent wage rise, the DOPS received a list of 436 workers from plants that belonged to VW, Mercedes-Benz and the steelmaker Villares. While there are also reports that these latter two companies (and others) collaborated with the regime, VW is the first one to be charged, to officially accept the charges and to negotiate for judicial reparations.<\/p>\n

The journal Carta Capital<\/em> recounts the fate of the now retired worker L\u00facio Ant\u00f4nio Bellantini, who in 1972 at the age of 28 was detained and delivered to VW\u2019s security chief, Adhemar Rudge, an ex-army colonel. \u201cAt the time, I distributed the journal Workers Voice<\/em> and discussed politics with people with the intention of taking them to the union and to fight against the dictatorship and for democracy. That was my crime,\u201d he declared.<\/p>\n

He was tortured for over a month by the DOPS, which were trying to force him to identify people he knew in the labor movement and the PCB (Communist Party of Brazil). \u201cWhat I want now is that VW build a memorial and tell the role it played in this period of repression. The struggle is for history to be recorded and taught to children, so it can never be repeated,\u201d declared Bellantini.<\/p>\n

The CNV report states that Rudge was brought in as VW Brasil\u2019s head of security in order to replace a former Nazi: the Austrian Franz Paul Stangel, who was deported in 1967 after three extradition requests. Rudge remained at the post until 1991.<\/p>\n

The Volkswagen headquarters in Germany made a statement that in response to the charges it would select an independent German historian to review its own history in Brazil, as it has done in Europe itself in relation to the company\u2019s collaboration with the Nazi regime.<\/p>\n

However, predictably, there have never been any substantive consequences stemming from charges brought before the Workers Party-created CNV. Thousands of former assassins and torturers of the dictatorship remain free thanks to an impunity law maintained by every government since the end of military rule in the mid-1980s.<\/p>\n

What is more, the current government of President Michel Temer (brought to power through the impeachment of the Workers Party president Dilma Rousseff) is even less likely to disrupt friendly ties with foreign transnationals over crimes committed under the dictatorship as it seeks to do the bidding of both the national bourgeoisie and international finance capital in making the working class pay for the capitalist crisis.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 wsws.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1980, when Lula led a 41-day strike for a 15 percent wage rise, the political police unit DOPS received a list of 436 workers from plants that belonged to VW, Mercedes-Benz and the steelmaker Villares. While there are also reports that these latter two companies (and others) collaborated with the regime, VW is the first one to be charged, to officially accept the charges and to negotiate for judicial reparations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}