Fifty Years After Herzog’s Death, Brazil Confronts a Dictatorship’s Scars

Overview

• O Globo’s archive details how the staged “suicide” photo—feet on the floor and no belt on prison garb—revealed that Vladimir Herzog was tortured to death inside São Paulo’s DOI-Codi on October 25, 1975.
• Commemorations this week include a Roda Viva interview with his son Ivo Herzog on Monday, a new TV Cultura documentary premiering at the São Paulo International Film Festival and airing on the channel, and public tributes at the Brazilian Press Association on Friday in Rio and at the Cathedral da Sé on Saturday in São Paulo.
• Herzog, a 38-year-old TV Cultura news director summoned over alleged PCB ties, arrived voluntarily to testify and was killed during interrogations as hard-line officers targeted communists during the Geisel-era abertura.
• Rabbi Henry Sobel rejected a suicide burial after seeing torture marks and later joined Cardinal Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns and Pastor James Wright in an ecumenical service that drew more than 8,000 people.
• Accountability advances came in 1978 with a ruling holding the state responsible, in 2012 with a corrected death certificate citing death by torture, and in 2018 with an Inter-American Court condemnation, as new commentary warns that enduring impunity sustains currents that praise torturers.