Torture is still widely used in Brazil, despite pledges made last spring by the country's new President, General Ernesto Geisel, to halt the barbaric practice. According to a report compiled by Brazilian Roman Catholics, former victims and attorneys, at least 79 persons have died under torture in the past nine years and thousands of others have been subjected to beatings, electric shocks and other torments. Torture, said the report, has become "institutionalized" in Brazil, conducted mainly by military security forces. A recent victim was former United Methodist Missionary and TIME Stringer Fred B. Morris, 41, who was held without charges for 17 days by military officials in Recife. His report:
After a chance meeting on the street, my Brazilian friend Luis Soares de Lima, 27, and I were getting into my car when about a dozen men in jeans and sports shirts, armed with machine guns and .45-cal. automatics, surrounded us, covered our heads with hoods, forced us to the floor of a station wagon and roared off. The man in the front was speaking into a walkie-talkie, using the code word hospital, saying that the "operation was a success," and that we would be arriving in a few minutes. We did—at the Fourth Army headquarters in downtown Recife.
Luis and I were immediately separated. I was forced to remove my clothing, except for shorts, and was dragged off to a small cell and left alone. Having lived in Brazil for most of the past ten years, I had heard all the horror stories about torture, and I wondered whether my fate would be the same as Paulo Wright's; the son of U.S. missionaries, he was arrested more than a year ago, and has not been heard from since. To calm myself, I repeated, very deliberately, the 23rd Psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not
want...
Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for thou art
with me..
I felt a calm inner strength, which stayed with me. I needed it. After about 15 minutes, the cell door was flung open, my head again hooded, my hands manacled behind my back, and I was dragged off to a room that for me became a torture chamber. I again repeated the 23rd Psalm, as I was to do on every such trip for the next three days.
Still hooded, I was roughly pushed to the end of the room, and the questioning began. Several men were present. They wanted to know about Luis. They said he was a Communist, which I doubt. I said that we were friends, but that I knew nothing of his political activities. For my answer, I was kicked three times in the groin until I fell to the floor in pain. Questions continued: Where was Luis going? Why was he with me? My answers were met with fist blows to my chest, belly, kidneys and back.
More Shocks. The beatings went on for about half an hour. Then water was poured on the floor around me, a wire was fastened to the second toe of my right foot, and a spring-clip electrode to the nipple of my right breast, pinching so hard it cut the flesh. Trying to make me confess that I was a Communist, they resumed the questioning. Now my denials were met with shocks as well as fists. The voltage was successively increased, becoming so painful that I doubled over until I fell to the floor.