Deception as a method
Anthropologist investigates the institutionalization of torture following the execution of Jewish militants by the military dictatorship
Faking suicides to cover up political assassinations was a common practice during the civil-military dictatorship established in Brazil with the 1964 coup. Impacted by their losses, the families of victims who allegedly took their own lives still felt pressured to take part in a farce, after all, the signs of torture present on the bodies left no doubt about the real cause of death. In his thesis “From Zweig to Herzog: On state violence, suicide and religion”, defended at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) at Unicamp, anthropologist David Reichhardt investigates homicides committed by military personnel during the exceptional regime, in light of Jewish traditions involving burial.
The study, which discusses torture as a method of action by the repressive apparatus, was part of the Heritage and Memory research line of the Postgraduate Program in Social Sciences at IFCH and was supported by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes). Under the guidance of the institute's professor Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Reichhardt examined the murders of Jews Vladimir Herzog, Chael Charles Schreier, Ana Maria Nacinovic, Ana Rosa Kucinski and Iara Iavelberg, committed by military personnel between 1969 and 1975. The anthropologist also included in his investigation the (real) suicide of Austrian intellectual Stefan Zweig, also of Jewish origin.
His work combined event ethnography and comparative anthropology, including consultations of documents from the archives of the São Paulo State Collection and interviews with family members, Jewish authorities and community members, such as Rabbi Henry Sobel, Clarice Herzog, Ivo Herzog, wife and son of Vladimir Herzog, respectively, and Samuel Iavelberg, brother of Iara Iavelberg. Reichhardt also conducted part of the research in Buenos Aires (Argentina), looking for evidence of similar cases committed by the dictatorship there.
The anthropologist chose to focus on the stories of Jews who were victims of the regime of exception after noting the scarcity of academic studies with this focus. However, he states that the purpose of the thesis is to discuss the institutionalization of torture by the State. “I did some groundwork to support future research. Including on what has happened since the 2016 coup,” he points out. Two central aspects led him to adopt Jewish traditions about death – and more specifically suicide – as a perspective. According to Judaism, when a person dies, their body must be washed and purified in order to be buried. When bathing the victim’s body, their family members detected evidence of violence and torture and, in this way, discovered the farce set up by the government.
The requirement that burials be carried out according to ancient Hebrew rites reserved for suicide created a stalemate. “According to Sobel, the Jews did not want to attract the attention of the dictatorship, but these rules inevitably put them in the eye of the storm,” says Reichhardt. Traditionally, and based on the principle that life is the greatest gift a person can receive, the Jewish religion considered suicide a crime, and those who killed themselves had to be buried in a cemetery in a section exclusively for suicides. Even the preparation of the body followed its own rules.
The traditional view fell by the wayside around the 1940s, as the IFCH professor explains. “With the Second World War and the Holocaust, rabbis around the world decided that the issue of suicide, from a religious point of view, had been settled due to confinement in concentration camps, political persecution and other forms of submission and violence,” says the anthropologist.
To prove that these rules had also been overcome in the Jewish community in Brazil, Reichhardt researched the death of Zweig, a Jewish intellectual who moved to the country in the 1930s and committed suicide in 1942. “Neither the liberals, nor the Orthodox, nor the government wanted to bury him as a suicide. On the contrary, he was buried with public honors. Leaders and personalities, such as Gabriela Mistral, Nobel Prize winner in Literature and a good friend of his, spoke [at the wake]. Therefore, this idea of suicide as a major problem for Jews no longer existed: it was a reinvention of the Brazilian dictatorship,” says the thesis advisor.
In general, even though Brazil was living under a regime marked by censorship, torture and disrespect for civil rights, homicides committed by military agents, when discovered, tarnished the government's image. In this sense, fake suicide became part of a policy of systematizing violence. “Recently released documents from the US intelligence agency, the CIA, confirmed Ernesto Geisel's [one of the military officers who commanded the dictatorship] knowledge of everything that happened. This dismantled the argument that there was an ultra-radical wing of the Army,” Reichhardt analyzes.
The case of Schreier, who died in 1969, inaugurated the debate on the subject. The anthropologist recounts that both the militant's family and the hospital refused to confirm his suicide, given the numerous signs of violence. “The Army messed up. The accounts of family members, who saw his tortured body before burial, were published on the cover of Veja magazine . This hit the President of the Republic, and he wasn't buried as a suicide,” says the researcher, revealing that, in that year, the State had begun its brutal offensive against armed groups, developing the main institutional strategies of torture.
Since then, the military began to take greater care to ensure that no other obvious cases of homicide would arise, and consequently, the bodies of Jews began to disappear – the bodies that did not disappear were buried as suicides, the researcher says. The murder of Nacinovic, who was killed in broad daylight, in the middle of the street, was an exception.
“Iavelberg’s death was witnessed indirectly, but her body remained at the Forensic Medical Institute [IML] for about a month and only appeared to attract her boyfriend, [Carlos] Lamarca. According to ancient Jewish law, she would never be considered a suicide – if she had killed herself – because she was under pressure.” Even so, she was buried as such. The disappearance of Kucinski’s body was confirmed by former police chief Claudio Guerra, who was convicted in 2023.
After Herzog's death, while the family insisted that his body not be buried in the suicide ward (reactivated in 1971, with the Iavelberg case), the military and the cemetery coordinated the opposite. “In the end, Vlado was buried in the suicide ward. However, Sobel went against the synagogue and the cemetery director and ensured that all the traditions of a normal and honorable burial were followed. As I was able to see in my research, what matters in Judaism is the way the body is buried, not the place. Therefore, Vlado was not buried as a suicide,” said Reichhardt. For the government, the institution maintained the opposite version. It was up to the Journalists' Union and the family to dismantle the farce. “The cemetery director threatened Clarice [Herzog, Vlado's wife] with a Dops [Department of Political and Social Order] card. They were left with a very bad impression about the synagogue and the idea that it was involved.”
Reichhardt also traveled to Buenos Aires in search of evidence of cases of Jews murdered by the dictatorship there, in order to compare them with the methods of action of the Brazilian regime. However, he found nothing. “While here the military tortured and killed, there they disappeared with the people: there were no bodies. Here the government returned them to society, in an extremely terrifying way. There was an exploitation of the taboo of suicide to humiliate the dead, their memory”, concludes the anthropologist.