Bestselling writer Paulo Coelho remembers his torture under Brazil's military dictatorship
One of the bestselling authors in the world, Coelho recently shared on his X profile his remembrance of the day he was captured and taken by the repressive regime in 1974,
‘I scream, but I know no one is listening, because they are also screaming’
Originally published on Global Voices
Braziian writer Paulo Coelho. Image by nrkbeta on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
On a May day in 1974, Paulo Coelho, then a journalist known for co-writing rock'n roll songs with Raul Seixas, had his apartment raided in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At first, he was taken and interrogated by the DOPS — the Department of Political and Social Order. When he thought he was being released, he was taken by another organization, the DOI-CODI — in English, Department of Information Operations – Center for Internal Defense Operations, an organ linked to the Brazilian Army and part of the repressive apparatus under the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985.
This July 21, Coelho shared on his X (formerly Twitter) profile his own account about this episode. According to a report by the National Truth Commission (CNV), the Army's papers do not mention for how long the writer was detained, but it quotes Coelho's biography, written by Fernando Morais, to say he was taken on the dawn of May 28, but was likely back home by May 31.
Coelho is one of the most translated and bestselling authors in the world, with The Alchemist and other of his works estimated to have sold over 350 million books worldwide.
On his social media, he often posts his political opinions and has been a critic of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL, Liberal Party), a former military, who also became known for defending the dictatorship legacy and celebrating torturers.
The Truth Commission, which published a final report in 2014, pointed to 377 people responsible for human rights violations in Brazil and counted 434 people dead or disappeared by the State. The violations suffered by Coelho are mentioned in the second volume of the report.
Also according to the CNV, Coelho was put into a cell called ”the fridge,” where the prisoner is kept naked and under lower temperatures.
His then-girlfriend, the artist Adalgisa Rios, who was responsible for the art of Seixas’ album Krig-Há, Bandolo!, was also arrested on the occasion. Rios, as reported by the Commission, was identified as a militant of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) and the leftist organization Popular Action (Ação Popular — AP), and as someone who took part in protests such as March of the One Hundred Thousand, against the dictatorship in June 1968, and in another one, following the assassination of 18-year-old student Edson Luís.
Coelho doesn't mention Rios on this recent text shared on social media.
1974: A group of armed men breaks into my apartment. They start going through drawers and cabinets — but I don’t know what they’re looking for, I’m just a rock songwriter. One of them, more gentle, asks that I accompany them “just to clarify some things.”
The neighbor sees…— Paulo Coelho (@paulocoelho) July 21, 2024
Coelho says the neighbor was responsible for warning his family after he was taken from his apartment. ”Everyone knew what Brazil was living at the time, even if it wasn’t covered in the newspapers.”
A few years earlier, in 1968, the military regime instated the Institutional Act Number 5 — AI-5, as it became infamously known — the Act that suspended civil rights, opening the most repressive years of the dictatorship, with arrests and torture for critics of the regime. In 1972, the regime began to operate to dismantle the Araguaia Guerrilla, an attempt by the Communist Party of Brazil (PC do B) to form a rural armed movement against the dictatorship. Dozens were tortured, executed and over 50 people are still considered disappeared.
I fall into a kind of catatonic state: I don’t feel afraid, I don’t feel anything. I know the stories of others who have disappeared; I will disappear, and the last thing I will see is a hotel. The man picks me up, puts me on the floor of his car and tells me to put on a hood. The car drives around for maybe half an hour. They must be choosing a place to execute me — but I still don’t feel anything, I’ve accepted my destiny.
I’m dragged out and beaten as I’m pushed down what appears to be a corridor. I scream, but I know no one is listening, because they are also screaming. You're fighting against your country. You're going to die slowly, but you're going to suffer a lot first. Paradoxically, my instinct for survival begins to kick in little by little.
Coelho recalls being undressed, having a hood put over his head, going through beatings, having ”a machine with electrodes that are then attached to his genitals,” and asked questions about people he never heard of. He says he offered to sign and confess anything the torturers wanted him to but was ignored as the torture sessions continued.
I’m taken to a small room, painted completely black, with a very strong air-conditioner. They turn off the light. Only darkness, cold and a siren that plays incessantly. I begin to go mad. I have visions of horses. I knock on the door of the “fridge” (I found out later that was what they called it), but no one opens it. I faint. I wake up and faint again and again, and at one point I think: better to get beaten than to stay in here.
After being released, Coelho says his friends and acquaintances wouldn't pick up his calls, since it was ”risky to be seen with a former prisoner.” ”I may have left prison, but prison stays with me,” he writes. He got a job later on, thanks to musician Roberto Menescal and journalist Hildegard Angel — her brother Stuart Angel Jones was killed by the dictatorship and is a political disappeared, the regime is also suspected of involvement in the car crash that killed her mother, fashion designer Zuzu Angel.
Coelho didn't explain what motivated him to relate his story now, but he also shares:
Decades later, the archives of the dictatorship are made public, and my biographer Fernando Morais gets all the material. I ask why I was arrested: an informant accused you, he says. Do you want to know who ? I don’t. It won’t change the past.
Remembering the past, however, still feels like a long way off for Brazilians. This 2024, events commemorating the 60th anniversary of the military coup that marked the beginning of two decades of military ruling were suspended or withheld by the federal government. Even with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as president, who was himself arrested by the regime as a striking union leader in 1980, working on memory and justice for the violations of that period is still a hard struggle in the country.
There are denialist narratives which dispute how repressive the Brazilian military dictatorship was compared to the number of deaths and disappeared in neighboring countries, such as Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, around the same period. And military and conservatives who still celebrate the false premise that the coup saved the country from a communist path with President João Goulart.
In 1979, Brazil passed an Amnesty Law, sanctioned by the last military president, João Baptista Figueiredo, extending the amnesty and pardoning of political prisoners, militants to state officers directly involved in crimes against humanity. The law was never reviewed, and Brazil never punished torturers from that period.
In 2011, with Dilma Rousseff as president, who was herself involved in the armed guerrilla struggle against the dictatorship, arrested and tortured, the National Truth Commission was created. Their report was launched in 2014, after a period of public hearings throughout the country — states had their own local commissions, too — and included 29 recommendations for reparations. The military was always resistant to the initiative.
On July 4, Lula announced the reinstatement of the Commission of Political Death and Disappeared, which had been eliminated by the Bolsonaro government in 2022.