COMPLEXO PENITENCÁRIO FREI CANECA
Address: Rua Frei Caneca, 463, Estácio, Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Themes: Repressive Structures
Translated from the Portuguese by Lara Norgaard
The Frei Caneca Penitentiary Complex was used as a site for the detention of accused political prisoners that spoke out against the military dictatorship from its start. At the end of the 1970s, it became central stage for resistance and demands. There, political prisoners initiated the July 1979 National Hunger Strike for universal and unqualified amnesty.
The buildings that made up the then-Brazilian Correctional Facility were built in the middle of the nineteenth century under dom Pedro II. They were built in the modern prison model, which saw labor as key in the correction of “deviants” and had as its inspiration Jeremy Benthan’s panopticon, a structure that aimed to make prisoners feel under constant observation and control. The complex – one of the first penitentiaries in Latin America – was built with by slaves and freed men considered to be vagrants and beggars in the Catumbi region, close to the Barro Vermelho community, which would later come to be known as São Carlos. In the mid-1860s, the compound was made up of five penal institutions: the Correctional Facility (used for prison labor), the Detention Facility (used for incarcerated people awaiting trial), the Calabouço prison (used for enslaved people), a holding area for freed Africans, as well as the Institute for Artisan Minors (used for minors detained for vagrancy or bad behavior). The incarcerated people were largely black, low-income, and/or immigrants, mostly of Portuguese heritage.
During the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-1945), the site underwent reforms and came to be called the Central Penitentiary for the Federal District. After 1951, two new units were built – the Professor Lemos Brito and Milton Dias Moreira penitentiaries – and in 1960 the Hélio Gomes building was erected as an annex to the Detention Facility, which was also known as a provisional or passage building, as those in prison awaiting trial were held there. All together, the Frei Caneca Penitentiary Complex took up over 700,000 square feet. It gained notoriety as the building that held well known figured in Brazilian society, including Luis Carlos Prestes, Olga Benário, Nise da Silveira, Apolônio de Carvalho, Mario Lago, and Graciliano Ramos. All were detained during Gertúlio Vargas’s regime and accused of the same crime: attempting to establish communism in Brazil.
After 1964, the Frei Caneca Complex, and particularly the Professor Lemos Brito penitentiary, held members of social movements, union members, and insubordinate members of the armed forces, accused of opposing the coup d’état and then the military dictatorship, once established. At that time, members of the navy who had participated in the 1964 Navy Revolt could be found there, as well as those involved in the 1963 Brasília Air Force Base uprising (also known as the Sergeants’ Revolt). Three years later, more than 30 men would join them from the Caparaó Guerilla group (1966-1967), an armed movement in opposition to the military regime, made up of former members of the military. The guerilla movement acted in the Caparaó mountains between the states of Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais.
In 1969, the Armed Revolutionary Movement (MAR) was born inside the building, a result of integrating insurgent members of the military and people incarcerated for other crimes. Six political prisoners (Avelino Capitani, Marcos Antônio da Silva Lima, Antônio José Duarte, Antônio Prestes Paula, Benedito Alves de Campos, and José Adeildo Ramos) and three common detainees (André Borges, Roberto Cietto, and José Michel Godói) were leaders in a spectacular escape from the building on May 26, 1969. Once free, the group sought to implement the second phase of the plan, which involved the creation of a guerilla group in the Mar mountain range near Angra dos Reis. They were unable to achieve their goal. Some militants died and others were imprisoned once more. Roberto Cietto was held prisoner, tortured, and killed in September 1969 in the PIC building in the 1st Army Policy Battalion, which would later function as the Department of Information Operations – Center for Internal Defense Operations (DOI-CODI). In another case, Marcos Antônio da Silva Lima was killed in January 1970 in an operation organized by the Army Police of the 1st Military Region and the Department of Social and Political Order (DOPS/GB).
Also during the military dictatorship, the Hélio Gomes building in the Frei Caneca Complex served as a space for the guards of the political prisoners packed into the Cândido Mendes Penal Institute on Ilha Grande who would be sent to Rio de Janeiro to stand before the Military Court. Alex Polari, a former political prisoner, recounts his experience in the space in a poem published in the book Inventário de cicatrizes (1978), or Scar Inventory:
NIGHTS IN PP (H. Gomes Penitentiary)
Here I am, everyone, in the C-8, our cell, this
passage-point in the notorious
Hélio Gomes Penitentiary ex-PP,
Police Prison
surrounded by shivs,
vermin, goons,
guards and janitors.
On the top bunk of my rock-hard bed I read
weekly paper Opinião,
Latin American authors,
and now and again I catch a glimpse of TV.
I only wear Zobra briefs
and smoke infinite Hollywood
cigarettes
I drink endless cups
of Pelé coffee
and instead of handcuffs
I wear real Havaiana flip-flops.
I discuss the Party
the ills of monogamy
I retell shoot-outs and hook-ups
and soon, after check,
with wounds still open from the last visit to the
chapel
I will dream of angels
hung head down by wrists in celestial torture.
(Alverga, 1978, p.24)
After 1975, during the phase of the regime that was a so-called political opening, the Frei Caneca Complex would hold a significant number of political activists accused of having violated the National Security Law (1969). It was through this law that Brazil legalized life imprisonment and the death penalty. Those condemned for committing crimes outlined in the law, be they political or not, would undergo the same trial in the Military Courts and carry out the same sentence in prison and common cells. Prisoners from the Cândido Mendes Penal Institute on Ilha Grande, who had demanded to be transferred for some time, were also sent to Frei Caneca. The transfer took place in 1976 after prisoners organized a series of protests and hunger strikes. This gave the Frei Caneca Complex the reputation of a prison for political prisoners – an important step in the wider recognition of the existence of political prisoners in Brazil, something consistently negated by the military regime.
The nearly 60 political prisoners were kept in a defunct cafeteria in the Milton Dias Moreira building of the complex. The space had undergone reforms for this specific purpose, and the prisoners ironically referred to the area as the “Íris Cinema.” The space had thirty cells, each with a bathroom. Each housed two prisoners and remained open during the day. There was also a common area with a kitchen. There, the incarcerated people had regular access to newspapers and magazines. Frei Caneca’s proximity to the city center facilitated visits from family and lawyers, which allowed contact with the outside world. However, it took years of resistance from prison and many prior struggles to create awareness about the situation political prisoners were in. In the words of Gilney Viana and Perly Cipriano:
Political-ideological survival, essential to political prisoners, became dramatic. The simple and, for us, non-negotiable recognition of our status as political prisoners required years and years of resistance, effort, and a thousand daily struggles in front of each guard, policeman, soldier, military tribunal, commander, and prisoner director. We often had to put up a fight on three fronts: our physical survival (attacked through insufficient food and precarious access to medical services), respect for basic human rights (which were clearly violated through torture and, for the common incarcerated person, maltreatment), and respect for our rights as citizens, which was especially relevant to our condition as political prisoners (Cipriano e Viana, 2009, p.40).
More and more accusations of torture, murders, and forced disappearances were lodged against the military government in the 1970s. In 1978, the regime repealed the AI-5, which reinstated habeas corpus. Freedom and amnesty for political prisoners then became the major demands against dictatorship. The Women’s Movement for Amnesty and the Brazilian Committees for Amnesty joined with other actors, including international NGOs, to call for the return for exiled activists and for the freedom of political prisoners across Brazil.
It was in Frei Caneca that the amnesty movement gained most visibility. The first action related to the issue occurred in 1977 when political prisoners from the Milton Dias Moreira building joined a hunger strike in solidarity with the Talavera Bruce Women’s Prison in the Bangu region of Rio. The female prisoners denounced the maltreatment they constantly suffered and demanded their transfer to a special wing in Frei Caneca. Though there was support for the strike, it did not result in any changes, and the women were not moved.
The same strategy would be used again, but with greater consequence. In 1979, political prisoners were still held in the Frei Caneca Complex (amongst them: Paulo Roberto Jabur, Gilney Viana, Carlos Alberto Sales, Jesus Parede Soto, Jorge Santo Odria, Jorge Raimundo Junior, Antônio Preira Mattos, Perly Cipriano, Paulo Henrique Oliveira da Rocha Lins, Alex Polari, Nelson Rodrigues, Manoel Henrique Pereira, José Roberto Rezende, Helio da Silva, and José André Borges). On June 22, they began a hunger strike for widespread, general, and unrestricted amnesty. The strike lasted 32 days and took place with participation from prisoners in other states, as well as the support of entities including the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) [12], the National Congress of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), and artists and intellectuals such as Gilberto Gil, Luís Melodia, Jorge Mautner, Chico Buarque, Milton Nascimento, Oscar Niemeyer, Darcy Ribeiro, Ziraldo, and Antônio Houaiss. As such, the strike had broad coverage in national and international media. The goal was to pressure Brazil’s Congress to pass widespread general, and unrestricted amnesty rather than partial amnesty, which the government had proposed. As Gilney Viana and Perly Cirpriano outline, amnesty was a key issue for people imprisoned in the Frei Caneca Complex and the time. It involved:
[…] all of the arbitrary arrests, torture, unjust trials and convictions, political deadlock for our release on the part of the Military Court, the long years incarcerated in often degradating conditions that violated our rights as humans and citizens, and, especially in the case of political prisoners, our comrades murdered in torture chambers and, above all, the regime’s responsibility for those deaths. We wanted to make it clear that Amnesty was not a simple vote on a law, but that it was a comprehensive political process in which society questioned the military regime and showed that it wanted a democratic government (Cipriano e Viana, 2009, p. 66).
The hunger strike ended on August 22, 1979, which the Amnesty Law was approved by Congress. General João Batista Figueiredo then signed it into law on August 28 of the same year. But the struggle was far from over. The law excluded amnesty for political prisoners allegedly responsible for attempted murder and acts of terrorism. Anticipating the possibility of “related crimes,” the regime interpreted the law as amnesty for agents of the state who had perpetrated gross human rights violations. In this context, many activists could not return to Brazil from exile and prisoners involved in so-called “bloody crimes” were not immediately released. Some had to carry out their full sentences. Other sentences were revisited in light of changes to the National Security Law in 1978, which involved steps for the regime to allow conditional freedom, a status that for many lasted years. For some, it continued until the approval of the Federal Constitution in 1988.
After the release of political prisoners, the annex to the Milton Dias Moreira penitentiary in the Frei Caneca Complex came to hold common prisoners convicted under the National Security Law. William da Silva Lima was detained there and describes what the prison was like in 1983 in his book Quatrocentos contra um (Four-hundred Against One):
We’re in an annex in the Milton Dias Moreira prisoner in the complex on Frei Caneca St., built just a few years ago to hold political prisoners waiting for amnesty. They left, leaving open the spots we now hold. The new prison keeps us isolated. There are 34 of us and just one thing is certain: we’re not getting out any time soon, at least not legally speaking. Most of us have circled Rio de Janeiro prisons for more than 10 years now. Escape again so as not to rot – that’s all we have left (Lima, 1991, p.18).
Brazil’s government decided to close the Frei Caneca Complex in 2003 because of its state of disrepair and security issues in the area, such as regular rebellions and prison breaks, as well as constant shoot-outs in the São Carlos favela. What remained of the complex was knocked down on March 13, 2010, leaving just the portico – which the city government named as historical patrimony in 2006. Visual artist Carlos Vergara launched the book Liberdade – Freedom – at the Memorial of Resistance in São Paulo in 2012. The book is a collection of photographs of the demolition of the Frei Caneca Complex. That land was then used for a public housing project.