NAVIOS-PRISÃO
Address: Baía de Guanabara, Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Theme: Repressive Structures
Translated from the Portuguese by Katy Blake Burch-Hudson
Shortly after the military coup in April 1964, the Armed Forces faced overcrowding in prisons and needed to quickly find a space that would hold political prisoners. Their solution was to use military and private ships as locations for prison for the opposition. The majority of prisoners were military personnel that were considered insubordinate and many were members of the Navy and the Air Force involved in offshore activities. Many of them had participated in insurgency movements that preceded the coup and did not support the decisions made by the higher military commanders. Among the prisoners there were also civilians taken as enemies of the recently installed regime, principally, leaders in shipping unions and leftist activists.
According to the National Truth Commission (CNV), the ships were adapted and transformed into clandestine detention centers. The space was divided into small cells and some of the compartments were used as solitary confinement cells or methods of punishment (boiler rooms, freezer rooms, fecal disposal sites). The transformation of the ships into prisons was also motivated by the need to isolate the prisoners, making it difficult for the incarcerated to access relatives, lawyers, and the press, while guaranteeing that the population remained far from these makeshift prisons.
The current President of the Democratic Movement of Amnesty and Citizenship (MODAC), Raimundo Porfirio Costa, told the CNV that the ships were not only used as prisons but also as screening locations. According to his report, when Raimundo was then a Navy Corporal in 1964, he was in charge of receiving the prisoners on the Bracuí Ship. There, they were signed in and then sent to the Princess Leopoldina Ship. The Commission did not find documents that corroborated this report, but during the research for The Ship Book, the Center of Historical Documentation of the Navy, verified that documents referring to March and April 1964 were missing.
Despite this scarcity of information, it is known that in its early years, the dictatorship used a fleet of prison-ships as part of its repressive system, one that functioned officially with public knowledge. This was demonstrated by the warning stamped in the pages of the Correio da Manhã newspaper, on April 8, 1964, issued by Admiral Zilmar Campos de Araripe Macedo to the members of yacht and regatta clubs:
The commercial Princess Leopoldina Ship anchored in Guanabara Bay, halfway to the lighthouses on Laje and Vilegagnon Islands, will now serve as a prison-ship. Access to this ship is strictly monitored and dependent on the pre-approval of naval authorities. In light of the situation articulated above, the anchor area of the ship in reference (characterized by a surrounding 500-meter radius) is considered a prohibited zone, any ship risks hostile retaliation, with firearms (Correio da Manhã, 8 abr. 1964, p. 12).
The Princess Leopoldina Ship belonged to the Coastal Navigation Company and was taken by the Navy to use as an improvised prison in the days following April 1, 1964. However, it was not the first prison ship. According to a report in the newspaper Última Hora (Última Hora, 9 abr. 1964, p. 2 e 21), this would be the third ship to perform this function: the Ary Parreiras and Raul Soars ships were already completely full (the capacity of the former was 1,000 prisoners). However, it is not known where these ships were moored.
There is little information about the conditions of the prison-ship Ary Parreira, however the sources are more thorough regarding the uses of the Raul Soares. Two books, present witness reports of those who were kept locked in the cells: Raul Soares: A Boat Tattooed on Us; in which Lidia Maria de Melo tells her father’s experience in the prison and Ship Prison: The Other Face of the Revolution, written and released by journalist Nelson Gatto in 1965. The latter was automatically censored and apprehended by the political police. In both cases, the prisoners denounced torture and degrading conditions. However, the reports reference the period in which the ship was under the command of Admiral Júlio Bierrenbach, in Santos. According to the CNV, the ship arrived in São Paulo on April 24, 1964, having then stayed in the waters of Rio only during the first days of the dictatorship.
News outlets emphasized the prisoners’ complete isolation. On May 8, 1964, the newspaper Último Hora reported: “Seclusion suspended: 17 officials visited by relatives” (Última Hora, 8 maio 1964, p. 3). No one, besides authorized officials and prisoners, could board the ships, so the family visits occurred on land, with the prisoners brought to a meeting point in the São João Fort in the Urca neighborhood. The press could not attend these events – only O Globo and Jornal do Brasil newspapers were permitted access – but the relatives told the newspaper, Última Hora that they had not been informed of the motivation behind the arrests or how long the incarcerations would last, and stated that their family had not yet been interrogated. The incarcerated also did not show interest in political circumstances or the state of their fellow prisoners, avoiding statements about the treatment they had received or the hygienic conditions of the premises. The paper was still able to obtain from an unofficial source that there were 500 prisoners on the Princess Leopoldina Ship, most of whom had no contact with the outside world. Later on, other “visits” occurred in similar fashion. In May 1964, the paper Última Hora announced that it was expected for the Leopoldina Ship to stop being used as a prison and would return to the Coastal Campaign. Because of this, the prisons were gradually transferred to other locations on land:
Of the 150 military personnel [on the ship], 60 have already been transferred onto land, some fully released, some released on parole and others transferred to prisons in Army quarters, such as CPOR, Fortaleza de Laje and Duque de Caixas Fort (Última Hora, 8 maio 1964, p. 3).
CNV research also shows that the Custódio de Mello Ship was also functioning as a prison-ship. Belonging to the Navy, with arms and the possibility to be used to transport troops, it was transformed into a prison between April 1964 and January 1965 (Última Hora, Forças Armadas Desmentem Borer: Não Mandaram Prender Etcheverry, 30 abr. 1964, p. 2). During that period, it stayed moored at the east pier of the Cobras Island in the Port of Rio de Janeiro. Its fifteen cabins were converted into cells and the majority of prisoners were sailors, many coming from the Princess Leopoldina Ship.