MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Brazilian government promises to declassify military documents

The Brazilian government said this week it would comply with a court ruling to open military archives on a guerrilla group which operated in the Amazon's Araguaia region and was annihilated by the then-dictatorship in the early 1970s.

"A court decision cannot be disputed, only complied with," Brazilian Defence Minister and Vice President Jose Alencar said Tuesday.

The Brazilian government's decision comes a year after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva faced with a similar ruling to open secret archives on the so-called Araguaia guerrillas, appealed to a higher court to overturn the decision.

At that time, human rights organizations and several members of the president's Workers Party (PT) accused the Socialist leader of not following the lead of other South American countries who were declassifying past dictatorships crimes and of not fulfilling campaign promises.

The new ruling, handed down last week by the Federal Regional Court of Brasilia, allows families of guerrillas who died in Araguaia access to official documents where supposedly they can find out what happened to the rebels and where they were buried. At least 58 of the almost 80 members of the Araguaia guerrilla movement, organized by the then-outlawed Communist Party of Brazil, died or disappeared in the Amazon region during clashes with the military regime's forces between 1972 and 1974.

Close to 12,000 soldiers participated in three different military operations in which the subversive group was completely wiped out. Many guerrillas apparently died after been captured, though their bodies have never been found.

One of the few surviving guerrillas is Jose Genoino, a close political ally of the president Lula da Silva. "All families have the right to know what happened with these people" Mr. Alencar said Tuesday. Last year, when the government appealed the court ruling to open the archives on the Araguaia guerrillas, then-Defence Minister Jose Viegas claimed the documents had already been legally destroyed. Presidential Security Advisor General Jorge Armando Felix said the government would organize the documents before deciding how to declassify them.