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Médici's action lends credence to the growing collection of torture stories. "They connected the electric-shock machine and had fun with me," said Sister Maurina Borges da Silveira, mother superior of an orphanage in southern Brazil, who was later flown to Mexico City in exchange for a Japanese diplomat kidnaped in March. Arrested on the charge of giving refuge to subversives, she was stripped naked and thrown into a cell with a man. "I had to remain locked up with him all night, bothered by his advances," she said. Chael Charles Schreier, a former medical student, was seized in a police raid on an underground hideout and interrogated by security police in Rio. Three days later, his body was returned to his family. The medical certificate attributed his death to severe abdominal blows.
With Brazilian inventiveness, the victims have devised grimly apt names for the various torture techniques. One of the most widely practiced is called the pau de arara, or parrot's perch. The victim's wrists are tied together and slipped over his knees. After a rod is inserted between his knees and arms, the prisoner is hoisted into the air, where he hangs helplessly, head down. Using electric coils, the torturers shock the victim on the genitals and anus.
The "dragon's throne" is a chair with a metal seat and back. After being strapped into the chair, the victim is subjected to electric shocks in graduated amounts, usually until he confesses or—passes out. Another technique is "the telephone," in which the torturer continuously slaps the prisoner on the ear with a cupped hand, often rupturing the eardrum. A failed dental student, now a Rio policeman, has refined still another technique. The "mad dentist," as he is known, straps a prisoner into his dentist's chair, drills until he hits a nerve and keeps probing until the victim agrees to cooperate. Then he fills the cavity, leaving no outward evidence.
Mangled Hand. Tales of Brazil's torture have evoked many protests abroad. Early this year the Vatican declared: "We must deplore those cases of police torture of which there has been so much talk." Most of Brazil's 245 bishops recently signed a petition demanding that the government "investigate the problem in depth." Archbishop Helder Cāmara of Recife and Olinda has been particularly outspoken. "In all conscience, I shall talk openly about torture in Brazil," he told French audiences last May. "I would be a criminal if I did not."
Recently, anti-Brazilian protesters in Paris displayed a papier-mâché Christ figure with a tube down its throat and wires attached to parts of its body.
The U.S. State Department has also expressed concern, partly because Brazil has received close to $1 billion in AID funds since the 1964 military takeover, some of it in the form of technical advice for Brazilian policemen.