Hidden Terrors Part 3

excerpted from the book

Hidden Terrors

the truth about U.S. police operations in Latin America

by A.J. Langguth

Pantheon Books, 1978, paper

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While Burke Elbrick was serving out the end of his career, Fernando Gabeira was living underground, trying to organize an effective labor movement. He had eluded the police dragnet in Rio, reached Sao Paulo, and moved into a house with several workmen. One day in January of 1970, while he was at the corner bar for a Coca-Cola, police raided the house and arrested one of the workers.

As he drew near the house, Fernando saw that it was surrounded. When he tried to edge away, a policeman ran up and put a machine gun to his belly. "Move and I'11 shoot!"

Instead of freezing, Fernando reached out and pushed aside the gun barrel. Then he ran. More policemen caught up and surrounded him. He feinted from side to side. They opened fire, and Fernando took a bullet low in his back.

As he lay bleeding, he heard the policemen standing over him debate their next move. "Shall we finish him off or not?"

"No, we want to interrogate him. We'll take him to the hospital."

Fernando spent the next two months in a Sao Paulo military ward. The first night, intelligence agents came to his room. The military doctor protested: Fernando's condition was far too delicate. They ignored the doctor and began their questioning. They did not know Fernando's identity, only that he had been living with men committed to the resistance. The questions yielded little information, because Fernando was too weak to talk. Nonetheless, the agents continued to return at different hours, sometimes pulling their pistols and pretending that if he refused to talk, they would shoot him.

Fernando believed that they were injecting him with drugs to make him dizzy. He was also being fed intravenously through a tube running up through his nose. It was uncomfortable for him but evidently worse for an officer, Captain Homero. "When you speak, blood fills that tube," Homero complained. "I may be a torturer, but I'm not a doctor. It makes me sick to look at you."

When the police judged Fernando sufficiently improved, they took him to the OBAN jail in Sao Paulo. Because they were too eager to begin the torture, after one day of electric shocks they had to send him back to the hospital. He had begun to bleed from his penis; and during his stay in the hospital, he had lost thirty pounds from a body with no flesh to spare.

By the time he was returned to the police, they had learned Fernando's name and had stepped up the interrogation in hopes of rounding up the rest of Elbrick's kidnappers; and Fernando had discovered that the police had found the recordings the rebels had made with the ambassador. Although Elbrick's open contempt for the military government enraged them, the police destroyed the tapes because his sentiments could have proved damaging to the regime.

The torturers interspersed their shocks and beatings with a good deal of joking and horseplay among themselves. Lighter-skinned men would tease the mulattos: With your blunt features and dressed as badly as you are, you've got "cop" written all over you. You'll never be able to go out on undercover work. Or they would mock the United Nations declaration on human rights. "Time to apply the declaration again," they would say, tying a prisoner back on the parrot's perch and fastening the wires to his body.

To Fernando, it was a revelation that the men who tortured him were not monsters. Many wore their hair long. Off duty, they went to the same night spots he had known. Some even came to his cell to confide their troubles with women. But they had been trained to detest him. "You are a son of a whore!" a man would shout, while his face clenched with hatred. Then someone would call, "Dr. Paulo, telephone!" As he crossed the room and picked up the receiver, his face would open up again, and he would be smiling and smoothing his hair and murmuring endearments.

Nor could Fernando console himself that the men who applied the wires to his testicles were depraved. They seemed to practice sexual torture only because it was most efficient.

Fernando began to distinguish a hierarchy within OBAN, one that confirmed his Marxist view of society. The poorest men, often also the most courageous, were sent to the streets to make the arrests. The torturers were usually from the middle class. Some had pretentions to culture. Once Homero, the squeamish captain, came to Fernando's cell with a newspaper, ebullient and ready to talk. Fernando saw he was a man who, because he had tortured a prisoner, felt they had established an intimacy.

Homero held out the newspaper. "Would you like to read?"

Warily, Fernando held out his hand. This was strictly against the rules. "All right."

"There's nothing new or important in it," Homero said apologetically, "but this whole experience is incredibly boring for me. I never have anything to discuss with these other torturers. God!" he exclaimed, leaning against the bars. "What I'd really like to do is get away for a weekend in Santos."

Sometimes the middle-level officers, the ones entrusted with the torture, boasted to Fernando that they had been trained in the United States. One army officer had once reminisced in front of Fernando about going on a raid against a group of Brazilian rural guerrillas. Much to his disgust, the other men in his party had gone stomping loudly across the fields. "It was obvious," he said, "that they had not been trained in the United States."

The torturers found one sardonic way to honor their North American patrons. They would cut open a sardine can and force a prisoner to stand with the sharp edge of each half cutting into the soles of his bare feet. They would then put something heavy in his hand and make him raise it aloft. He had to hold that pose until he collapsed. The police called that torture the Statue of Liberty.

In most cases those men who had graduated from a U. S. military or police school were the analysts and intelligence specialists, and they were chary about appearing inside a torture cell. They were also the men Fernando feared most. They read transcripts of the interrogations and picked out contradictions, either within his own answers or among the responses of other prisoners from MR-8. They gave lists of trick questions to the torturers and outlines of what they wished to know before the day's torture could end.

Within the jail, prisoners compared notes, and some told of seeing U. S. markings on the field telephones and the electric generators used for electric shocks. But all of them attributed the new Brazilian efficiency to United States training. Before the U. S. advisers helped to centralize information, it had taken days to discover whether a new prisoner was a leader in the rebel movement. Now it took hours.

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The main question for Fernando, for Jean Marc, for every political prisoner, was whether or not to answer the interrogator's questions. Saying nothing-not a word- was called Turkish behavior. Most men freely admitted that such stoicism was beyond them. A woman, Angela Camargo Seixas, was one of those who adhered to it.

Much had happened in Angela's life since the day she helped to carry Edson Luis's corpse to the parliament building. The experience had made a public speaker of her. And she stopped smiling quite so easily. Her less political friends considered that a pity, for her smile had been wide, a little daft, and very endearing.

Angela spoke before the Communists and Popular Action, but she joined PCBR, the dissidents who in 1967 had followed Carlos Marighela out of the Brazilian Communist party. For a year or two, the group had been undecided about armed struggle; but by the time Angela became a member, PCBR was as far left as any other student movement in Brazil. Its hero was Che Guevara.

PCBR had both a military arm and a political one. The decision was not Angela's to make: she was assigned to the political side. The military members took the risks-stealing weapons, commandeering automobiles, robbing banks.

Then, in December 1969, the armed group of PCBR staged a bank robbery. One revolutionary was captured. A policeman had been shot during the raid, and the torture of that prisoner was unrelenting.

For the intelligence units, the man had been the best sort of catch. As chief of logistics, he knew the entire chain of command and every house where members took shelter. However, he did not know Angela, and her photograph had never appeared in the newspapers. Thus, it fell to her to arrange new rooms for the fugitive PCBR members, as well as quarters for an allied group called MR-26.

Angela heard of a flat in Copacabana, Rio's celebrated three-mile strand of white beach. Many years and songs ago, Copacabana had been fashionable. Now, although its shops and apartment houses were a bit shabby, it remained the most vital part of the city.

The police had received a tip about the apartment Angela was coming to inspect, and at 10 P.M. they were hiding behind the door when she came up the stairs with an immense black comrade named Marco Antonio. Even for Rio, a city proud of its indifference to race, the two formed a notable contrast, Angela being so slight, her skin so very pale.

As they reached the landing, there was another of those power failures that the cariocas, the residents of Rio, had been laughing about since the invention of the electric light. Throughout the district, everything went dark. The police may have suspected a ruse, for they burst from the apartment and began shooting. Marco Antonio returned their fire and wounded two policemen before he was shot in the head. Angela was struck low in her back. She passed out.

When she came to-it could have been only a few seconds later-the hall was still dark. The police were gone, perhaps to treat their wounds. Angela was alone on the stairs with Marco Antonio's unconscious body.

Then began a sequence of terror that most people know only in their nightmares. Marco Antonio was breathing, but when Angela tried to lift him, he was far too heavy and slipped from her arms. Instinct told her to hide. Along the landing she ran from door to door, knocking softly, knocking louder. Everyone had heard the gunshots. No one would open a door. She ran up a flight of stairs. Just as she reached the top, power was restored and the lights went on.

She thought, Maybe I can just walk away. From its hum, the elevator was running again. She pushed the down button and waited for it to reach her floor. The door opened. Two policemen got out. Angela pressed a handkerchief deep into her wound to stanch the bleeding.

Blithely she asked, "What was all that noise?"

"Go home," one officer told her. "Go back to your apartment."

"No," she said, "I must go to the street to use the telephone."

It was a plausible excuse even in an expensive apartment building. Customers in Brazil bought their telephones, often paying $1,000 or more, and even at that price, there were still long waiting lists.

Downstairs, one policeman was standing guard at the entrance. Angela slipped past him. She was on the street. She started walking faster. She was nearly out of danger when a voice called, "Stop her! No one can leave the building!"

Policemen on the street grabbed her and brought her back to the building. Marco Antonio's body was surrounded by police. "Who is this man?" they asked her.

"I don't know."

They hit her with hard, random blows and asked again.

A police car took her to the headquarters of the Operational Center of Internal Defense (CODI). When the officers stripped off her clothes, they saw the wound and said, "If you don't give us your name, you will die."

Angela's mind told her that she must say nothing at all. For the past week she had known the names of almost every member of her party. The very next day she had been scheduled to meet fifteen of its leaders. If they could frighten her into giving her own name, whose name would she give next?

Her wound sent Angela to the hospital for ten days, frustrating the interrogators. When she was moved it was to PIC, the small building within the downtown police headquarters where Flavio Tavares had been tortured.

She was held there naked to be beaten and shocked with wires. One of the torturers was Costa Lima Magalhaes, a distinguished name in Brazil. This Magalhaes was a very small man with a large head and an appetite for torture. Some prisoners attributed his zeal to the wound he had received in the spine during a shoot-out with revolutionaries.

But his torture in this case proved self-defeating. Angela's wound opened and blood poured out until she had to be returned to the hospital. From that time on, she regarded the wound as her ultimate protection. If the torture became unendurable, she could force open the wound and they would have to send her back to the infirmary.

The torture room was being painted a bilious and unsettling lavender. The lights were hot. Noises were piped in from the ceiling, screams and gunshots to add to the sense of impending disaster. Angela told herself that the sounds were a composition by Stockhausen, a composer she admired, and after that the noises stopped bothering her.

The interrogation technique followed the lesson plan from Panama and the IPA by presenting one officer as friendly, one as hostile, the classic method of "good guy, bad guy." They brought in the man who had been picked up during the bank holdup. The torture had shattered him, but he said, "I hope you can hold out. I couldn't."

She also heard news about Mario Alves, a founder of the PCBR. The police had stuck a broomstick so far up his rectum that it ruptured his spleen. Trying to make him talk, they had pulled out his teeth, a technique that both revolutionaries and police could recognize from The Battle of AIgiers. The police also injected Alves with sodium pentothal.

One day, after Angela had been beaten terribly with rubber truncheons and bare fists, a doctor who saw her asked, "What happened to you?"

She told him about the lavender room. His surprise and indignation did not seem feigned. He had never seen a woman tortured, and he was vulnerable to her being a college student and only nineteen years old.

"Do you know who tortured you?" this doctor persisted. "Give me his name. I'm going to report him."

Angela was able to tell him. When the police were torturing, they usually pasted masking tape or a bandage over their nameplates and called each other by an alias. At other times, around a prisoner but not torturing him, they were often slipshod and their nameplates were exposed. She said, "Costa Lima Magalhaes."

The doctor reported that Angela had been whipped and sexually abused, that electric wires had been inserted into her vagina. His charges were impossible to ignore, and Magalhaes was reprimanded for the record. During the next six weeks Angela stayed unmolested in the infirmary. Except for one lapse when she admitted to being a member of PCBR, she revealed nothing.

Two events, however, sent her back to the lavender room: now that he was aware of the continuous torture going on around him, the doctor was so sickened that he applied for a transfer; and two more prisoners from PCBR were brought in. After severe torture, they outlined the important duties Angela had assumed before her capture.

The next day at 3 P.M., the hour that her torture had usually begun, the police brought Angela back for another session. This time they warned her that if she refused to talk, they would turn her over to the Death Squad.

They told her about uncovering a cache of explosives and kept demanding to hear what she knew about it. Staying silent that day was easy. She knew nothing. But she heard stories about other prisoners: a union organizer, Manuel de Conceicao, was being tortured at the same center. As a fellow prisoner with Fernando Gabeira, Manuel had once had his testicles nailed to a table. Now, because his new wounds were not treated, the military doctors amputated a leg.

Throughout her hours in the torture cell, two voices fought a steady battle in Angela's head. One said, "They'll kill you if you don't talk." The other voice said, "They'll kill you if you do." Although the pain was always intense, Angela discovered that the torture never reached through to her subconscious. Every word she spoke to the police was rehearsed and rational. The spasms of pain never caused her to blurt out an answer.

The torture brought with it another reaction, mystical in its way. Angela would faint and awake to find her mind clearer than ever before. She seemed to be floating above her body, and she could look down and watch herself being tortured. The sensation of being outside her body, the distance between her mind and the pain, helped to stop her from talking.

In the lavender room, Angela realized how simplistic her own attitude and that of her comrades had been about torture. They had all agreed that none of them would ever speak, whatever the provocation. If you don't keep your mouth shut, they said, you deserve to die.

Now, after a two-hour beating, she understood why the man arrested in the bank robbery had spoken. She could forgive him. But she would never forgive the United States for its role in training and equipping the Brazilian police.

Since the 1964 coup, Marcos Arruda, the geology student who had protested foreign control over Brazil's mineral wealth, had lived a scrambling sort of life. For the two weeks after Goulart fled to Uruguay, Marcos left Rio for the country and waited there until friends assured him that he did not seem to be on one of General Golbery's lists.

In Brazil, employers had no use for an outspoken student leader. To stay alive, Marcos tutored students and translated technical papers. After a few years, this life was not satisfying his reformer's urge, and in 1968 he applied under his own name for a permit to do manual work in a factory.

Marcos's one deception was listing his highest education as elementary school. Had he been exposed as a university graduate, his motive would have been suspect. Neither the factory owners nor the government would have risked his contaminating fellow workmen with his discontent.

The company that hired Marcos was a foundry and smelting group owned by Mercedes-Benz. The three thousand workers there manufactured parts for wagons and tractors. Marcos was a machine operator, and each day he turned out a thousand molds. Despite the labor laws passed by the democratic regimes, a worker was required to work twelve hours a day. The overtime accounted for $3 or $4 of a $15 monthly wage.

Since college, Marcos had been married and separated. As a single man once again, he could pay rent, eat, and even ride a bus to work on his meager salary. Married men, however, ran through their pay before the month ended. For the last week or ten days, they had to get up in the middle of the night to walk to work and plead to put in fourteen or fifteen hours a day for the extra bit of overtime pay.

The job itself was arduous. The building was open at each end, and in the winter the workers stood burning before the ovens while their backs froze from the Sao Paulo cold. Iron dust filled the air so densely that even on sunny days a man who took a few steps away from his machine was gone from sight, swallowed up in the gray murk. Marcos discovered that company doctors recommended that men contracting tuberculosis be laid off before they became a burden to the company.

It was little different from conditions forty and fifty years earlier in the United States, except that every Brazilian John L. Lewis and Eugene Debs had been killed, jailed, or hounded underground.

Marcos met with his fellow workers each day for coffee. They needed no lectures about injustices in the system. They felt those in their muscles and in their lungs. Their question was what they could do about them.

Certainly a man acting alone had no recourse. One worker who fell sick with lung disease was told by his doctor to recuperate in the cleaner air of the south. The factory owed him back pay; and before he left for Rio Grande do Sul, he went to collect it. A guard stopped him at the gate.

The man said, "I need the money the company owes me.

"Wait here." The guard went to the personnel office and came back. "You're not a worker here any longer. I can't let you in."

Frustrated beyond his endurance, the man drew a knife, stabbed the guard, and ran from the scene. No one heard of him again.

Such were the minor grievances, the disputes a union might have settled with one telephone call. The Metal Workers Union of Sao Paulo, however, was controlled by men named by the military after the 1964 coup.

Marcos and his friends collected evidence that before mass meetings some union leaders met privately with agents from DOPS, the secret police. Together they arranged that if a delegate they did not control took the floor and forced a vote against the official company-union position, the DOPS men would provoke a fight, thereby giving the union president cause to suspend the assembly.

Since the union held no answers, Marcos and other workers formed a committee to meet with delegates from other factories in the area. They would discuss mutual problems and weigh possible solutions. They were seeking change; and by the prevailing definition, that made them subversives.

In May 1970, Marcos was introduced to Marlene Soccas, a woman from the resistance who was not only out of work but living in a house compromised by earlier police raids. Marcos volunteered to find her a job and a safer place to live. By now he was not working either, having developed a spot on his lung and a case of sinusitis. The doctor at the public health service told him he must give up his job ~n the factory.

"I cannot," said Marcos. "I must work to eat."

"Then you must work only the regular schedule, eight hours a day."

Marcos asked for a statement to that effect and presented it to his supervisor. A week later he was fired. "It's not the quality of your work," the supervisor told him. "It's that you can't work long enough. There are a hundred people out there waiting for this job."

Marcos spent the next week hunting for work, and he felt guilty about not helping Marlene. He stopped by the house of a mutual friend and left a message: "I don't know how you're getting along. Let's have lunch." He named a small restaurant in Sao Paulo's Lapa district.

Marcos did not know that Marlene had been arrested four days earlier and tortured continuously. Police agents now intercepted the note and brought her to the cafe to point Marcos out to them.

When he arrived, five policemen were waiting, their shirttails outside their trousers to conceal the pistols in their belts. Surrounded, Marcos tried to rip up a schedule he was carrying, names and places of others in the movement whom he had planned to see that day.

In front of patrons and passers-by, the police fell on him, kicking and punching to get hold of the scrap of paper. Marcos was small and slight, with hands barely larger than a child's. They got his list away from him. They then shoved him into the back of a station wagon. Marlene was sitting in the front seat. "Show him your hands," one of the agents commanded. "Show him your hands so he'll see what he's going to go through."

Marlene raised her hands. Beneath their bandages, they were swollen to twice their normal size. The tips of each finger and the heels of each hand were black. From that moment, Marcos did not blame Marlene for betraying him. He told himself, I am no judge of what she has endured.

As soon as the station wagon pulled into the courtyard of OBAN, the three policemen in the back with Marcos began to beat him. Once inside, they beat him for hours before they asked a question.

Then the interrogation started. They wanted to know who was listening to the workers at the factory and advising them on their problems. Marcos decided that although he knew very little, he would not reveal even that much. Instead, he tried a tactic that occurred to most prisoners early in their torture. He would stall, buy relief from the beatings, by giving them valueless information that would take several hours, perhaps a day, to check. It was time dearly purchased. When the police uncovered the ruse, their torture would become even more punishing; but for a day it might stop the pain, and tomorrow Marcos might be dead.

He gave them the address of his ex-wife's aunt. It would be obvious at once that the old woman was no revolutionary. All she would be able to tell them was that Marcos stayed with her for a few nights. She knew nothing of his activities.

The respite was very brief, and Marcos had not died before it came to an end. The policemen tied his knees to his elbows and ran a pole through to connect them. They lifted him into brackets that held his back suspended four feet off the ground. With the paddle full of holes, they beat his buttocks a hundred times on the same place, until the skin under his flesh was black with blood. As they flailed away at him, they called him "Bastard!" and "Son of a whore!" The way he was hanging exposed his anus, and they threatened to rape him.

Marcos heard all of this very distantly. The threats and excoriation seemed more for their own ears, to goad them on with the work of beating him raw.

They connected the wire of an electric field telephone to Marcos's small toe and the other wire to his testicles. The electricity shot up and down his legs. Marcos did not know he was screaming until a guard shoved a cloth into his mouth. The guards themselves laughed at his shouts, but neighbors around OBAN had been complaining of the noise. Later they put on a record by Roberto Carlos, a leading Brazilian pop singer. "Jesus Christ," the song went, "here I am."

Marcos thought, I have no regrets. My friends and I were struggling for something good, humanly good. I am playing a little part in bringing about a new society. In the Gospels, Jesus had lived among thieves and prostitutes. In the factory, I was living a life as Christian as Christ's life.

Sweat was pouring off Marcos's body. Under the gag in his mouth, his tongue felt crooked. Even without a gag, his voice was gone. His eyes were swollen shut. He heard a voice say, "Let's have some fun."

The policemen washed his body with water. To make the circuit longer and send the shock farther along his body, they moved the wire up to his belly. Then to his throat. To his mouth. Into his ear. When they lowered him at last to the floor, Marcos went into convulsions, which did not stop. For the next month and a half, Marcos could not stop shaking. The police sent him to a military hospital and called in a priest to administer the last rites.

Sometimes, even as the convulsions went on, Marcos fell into a sleep. The police appeared at his bedside and woke him. "You are not a worker," one said. "You are a geologist. That means that you were in the factory to spread subversion. When you get better here, you'll go back to that place again."

But Marcos got no better, and the army doctors had no remedy to stop his convulsions. Two nuns came to his bedside. Marcos was grateful to see them. They were women. The idea of women soothed his spirit.

"How horrible," he heard one murmur. "How can they do that? It is so sad."

Marcos thought, They understand nothing.

The police came again to his bed and called him a Communist. "What is your organization?" "Who are your comrades?" "Why do you work in a factory when you could get a job that pays better? It must be to subvert the others, to make them strike for higher wages."

"Don't you want higher wages?" Marcos asked, but mildly. He did not wish to provoke them to more torture.

"Don't try to sell us your Communist arguments," a policeman said, and Marcos stopped trying to explain.

When his shaking subsided, the police brought him back to OBAN headquarters and told him he had three days to prepare a full confession. They said Marlene had told them he was a member of a subversive group.

Marcos took the three days but gave them nothing "This is worthless!" they said when they saw the little he had written.

They took him to see Marlene. Marcos heard a policeman tell her, "Get ready to see Frankenstein."

Marcos came hobbling in, a broomstick for a crutch. One leg had no feeling in it, one eye was still shut from the beatings. He asked her, "Did you say I was in a subversive organization? It's not true."

"Shut up, you two," said a guard. "Who's asking the questions here?"

They led Marlene next door and gave her more electric shocks. Marcos could hear her screaming. For himself, his feeling about torture was almost peaceful. He had survived two terrible sessions. They had no worse pain in store for him. But now it was Marlene and not him they were causing to scream.

"We're going to kill her if you don't speak," a policeman said. It was the worst anguish Marcos ever knew.

They brought her to face him in a cubicle. An army captain was there with two lieutenants. "You skunk!" the captain said. "Making her suffer this way! You stink!"

"You are beating her," Marcos said. "Not me."

"You know what we want," the captain said. "You must be stupid, working for that shit wage. You're a geologist. You could have an apartment. A car. Women. You must be out of your head. Look at her." He pointed to Marlene, bruised and sobbing. "Isn't that right?" he asked her.

"No, he is right," said Marlene, indicating Marcos. "I wish I had the courage he has."

They pulled her out of the cell and began to beat Marcos

again. One of them held the broomstick to Marcos's throat from behind and pulled so hard that Marcos thought he would strangle to death and this would all be over.

But there was a wooden door to his cell, and from behind it Marcos overheard one guard whispering to another, "What are we going to do? This guy won't talk." At that, Marcos felt his spirit soar. His enemies were powerless. They had electricity, wires, and clubs, but it was he who had the power.

A general came to see Marcos in his cell. He was also a medical doctor, an old man with white hair. He talked about plankton. Ah, said Marcos to himself, he wants to see whether I really am a geologist. The general seemed to be a cultured man. Patiently Marcos answered his questions. Finally the general asked Marcos why he was in prison.

Marcos told his story, ending with the way he had been tortured and crippled.

The old general grew furious. "That's not true!" he exclaimed. "Nothing like that happens in these army units."

"Stay one day, just one day," Marcos said. "I am not here by choice."

The general called to a captain. "This man is telling me lies! Suspend all salt from his diet. And give him no medicines."

Marcos had been receiving treatment for epilepsy. He was not an epileptic, but it was the only prescription the hospital's doctors had devised to end his shaking.

The captain was even angrier than the general: "We'll suspend his food."

The fury of each worked on the other. The general said, "See that he gets as little water as possible."

Within two days, the shaking had resumed, and Marcos was drooling uncontrollably. He returned to the hospital. In another bed was a prisoner who had been shot; then, with the bullet still in his body, he had been tortured until his flesh rotted. Down the hall, on the edge of insanity, was a sixty-year-old woman, her face deformed from beatings.

Another woman, this one twenty-one years old, had been arrested for distributing leaflets to workers outside a government steel mill. The police administered their ritual beatings. Then they learned she was pregnant. They laid her down and stomped on her abdomen, and succeeded in making her miscarry. But she continued hemorrhaging and was brought to the hospital.

Through the hospital's network of whispers, the prisoners exchanged news from other wards. That was how Marcos heard of two friends who had been tortured in the presence of men who spoke only English.

Later, in a security cell, an army corporal remarked to Marcos how odd it was that Marcos should be in jail with the corporal, an uneducated man, standing guard over him. "It's weird," the soldier said as he offered Marcos a cigarette. "Many of the prisoners are students or professional men. It's funny."

Marcos did not smoke, but he thanked the man gratefully. He had found that army-enlisted men sometimes showed human feeling. The police were worse than animals.

"Doesn't that tell you something?" Marcos said. "We've studied, we've read books. We have something in our heads. And we don't accept the situation in Brazil. Doesn't that tell you something?"

"You have strong arguments," the corporal said. "Let me go away or you'll convince me."

Murilo Pinto da Silva had been a schoolboy in Belo Horizonte when Dan Mitrione arrived to show the police how to be more effective. Nine years later, as a member of the Commandos of National Liberation (COLINA), Murilo was trapped with five comrades in their Belo hideout by a police cordon. In the exchange of gunfire, two policemen were killed. None of the rebels was hit.

Murilo was charged with four crimes: unlawful possession of a gun; being a member of an illegal association; armed actions; assassination. As a result, he also played a role in the training of Brazil's police.

In August of 1969, Murilo and his colleagues were transferred from prison in Belo to the Policia Especial of the army's Vila Militar, a jail for political prisoners in Realango, on the outskirts of Rio.

On October 8, Murilo was led from the jail with nine other prisoners and ordered to wait in an open courtyard. Seven of those nine were also political prisoners from Belo, including a fellow member of COLINA, Irany Campos, who had taken the code name Costa. Two of the others were Brazilian soldiers who had been court-martialed. One had stolen a gun. Murilo did not know the offense with which the second soldier was charged.

Being taken from the cell was always a bad sign. But the mood among the guards in the courtyard this day was jovial, and Murilo began to relax. There would be no torture today.

Then one soldier passed by carrying a heavy stick of the kind used for the parrot's perch. Another carried a metal box about eighteen inches long, which Murilo recognized as a generator for electric shocks. It was capable of greater precision than the field telephone.

Still, Murilo was not alarmed. It all looked so routine, so passionless. Then he overheard a corporal asking, "Are they the stars of the show?"

A soldier laughed and said, "I think they will be."

The joke alerted him. Something bad was going to happen after all.

The prisoners were led single file into a low building and told to stop outside a closed door. From beyond the threshold, Murilo heard the laughing and talking of many men. It was high-pitched and sounded expectant. The prisoners stood very still, a guard beside each of them.

From inside the room, Murilo heard an officer giving instructions. He recognized the voice of Lieutenant Aylton, an officer who had greatly impressed Murilo over the weeks he had spent at Vila Militar. As Aylton oversaw the beatings and shocks, he displayed a calm and control that a less assured college student could only envy. Setting up the tortures, Aylton always seemed so-odd description but true-serene. Now Aylton was displaying that same poise before a crowd of men, speaking with absolute self-confidence. Who could hate a man like that?

Murilo could make out only a little of what he was saying. "Approach them as though we are their friends. As though we're on their side." That was followed by what seemed to be a lengthy explanation of interrogation methods, but Aylton's voice rose and fell, and Murilo missed most of the details.

The lieutenant then raised his voice to say, "Now we're presenting you with a demonstration of the clandestine activities in the country."

There was a stir at the door, and one by one six of the prisoners were led inside. Each young man had his own guard, an army private or a corporal. The room looked to be an officer's mess. Six men were seated at each table. Murilo guessed there were about eighty men in all. They wore uniforms, some from the army, some from the air force. They seemed young: lieutenants and noncoms, sergeants.

At the front was a stage that made the room look like a cabaret. The impression was heightened by the skillful way Lieutenant Aylton was using the microphone. One side of the stage was bare except for a screen. The prisoners were lined up on the other side. Aylton called out a name and gestured to the man so that the audience could identify him. From dossiers, Aylton read aloud everything the intelligence services had supplied about the prisoner: his background, details of his capture, the charges against him.

As he spoke, slides on the screen showed various tortures, drawings of men strapped to the parrot's perch or wired for electric shocks. When Aylton finished, the guards turned to the six prisoners on the stage and told them to take off their clothes. The men stripped to their shorts. Then, in turn, each guard forced his prisoner into position for the demonstration.

Pedro Paulo Bretas had his hands bound together. His guard put triangular pieces of metal twenty centimeters long and five centimeters high through the four spaces between his fingers. The soldier pressed down hard on the metal bars, then ground them to one side. Murilo had never experienced that torture. He noticed that when the torturer turned the sticks one way, Bretas screamed and fell to his knees. When he turned them the other way, Bretas screamed and leapt into the air.

Murilo was forced to stand barefooted on the edges of two opened cans. The edges cut into his soles, and the pain rose up along the muscles of his calves.

The next guard attached long wires to the little finger on each hand of a prisoner named Mauricio. Those were connected to the generator that Murilo had watched being carried through the courtyard.

One of the army prisoners was put into the parrot's perch. Another was beaten with the palmatoria, the longhandled wooden paddle with the little holes. To illustrate, he was beaten on his buttocks, his feet, and the palms of his hands. At the microphone, Aylton said, "You can beat with this for a long time and very strongly."

Nilo Sergio was forced to stand on one foot with his arms outstretched like the Christ of Corcovado. Something heavy-Murilo could not see what-was put in each hand.

A prisoner was kept on display while Aylton moved on to discuss the next method. He wanted to impress on the audience that these tortures need not be used singly, that the parrot's perch, for example, was even more effective when combined with electric shocks or beatings from the wooden paddle.

The parrot's perch seemed to be Aylton's favorite, and he explained its advantages to the crowd. "It begins to work," he said, "when the prisoner can't keep his neck strong and still. When his neck bends, it means he's suffering.

As Aylton spoke, the prisoner in the perch let his head fall backward. Aylton laughed and went to his side. "Not like that. He's only faking the condition. Look"-Aylton grabbed the prisoner's head and shook it soundly-"his neck is still firm. He's only shamming now. He's not tired, and he's not ready to talk."

There were other refinements. Use the electricity where and when you like, Aylton said, but watch the voltage. You want to extract information from the prisoner. You don't want to kill him. He then read out numbers-a voltage reading and the length of time a human body could withstand it. Murilo, his feet cut and bleeding, tried to remember the figures, but the pain was driving everything else out of his mind.

There's another method that we will not be demonstrating today, Aylton said, but it has been most effective. It's an injection of ether into the scrotum. Something about that particular pain makes a man very willing to talk.

The lieutenant also recommended, but did not show, an improvement, the afogamento-pouring water in the nostrils while the head is hanging backward. To prove that water on the surface of the skin intensified the shocks, one guard poured some over the prisoner in the parrot's perch and resumed the shocks so that they could all see the increased writhing of his body.

As the water strengthened the current, the prisoner in the perch began to scream. Aylton gestured to the guard, who stuffed a handkerchief into the prisoner's mouth. "Normally you shouldn't use a gag," Aylton said archly, "because how can he give you information when he cannot speak?"

The class had been in session forty minutes, and the tortures had proceeded continuously while Aylton spoke. Now it became clear that Mauricio, strung between two long wires, was suffering unendurably. The soldier assigned to him had been forcing the generator faster and faster until, as Aylton had warned, too much voltage was coursing through Mauricio's body.

Mauricio fell forward onto the nearest table. From the army men, there was a roar of outraged laughter. They pushed him off and hit him and kicked him with their boots. All the time, they kept laughing and shouting jokes at each other.

Murilo came out of his pained trance long enough to have it register with him that these men, the eighty of them, had been laughing throughout Aylton's lecture. Not so boisterously as when Mauricio fell onto the table, but steadily, loudly. Their wisecracking had formed a counterpoint to the demonstration.

I am suffering, Murilo thought, and these men are having the time of their lives.

Or perhaps not every one of them. Sargento Monte became nauseated during the torture and bolted from the room to vomit. It surprised Murilo, this show of sensitivity, because Monte had once ordered a lower-ranking sergeant to give Murilo his daily electrical shock.

The class was coming to an end. Murilo wanted to remember who else was there, joining in the tortures. He might not emerge from prison alive, but if he did, he would remember. There was Aylton and Monte, and Sargento Rangel, from Vila Militar.

Murilo particularly remembered Rangel because of the day Murilo returned from the visitors' room with cigarettes that had been palmed to him. Rangel got a tip that either Murilo or his brother, Angelo, had received the cigarettes, and he ordered each of them beaten with the paddle until he found the cigarettes and pocketed them for himself.

Aylton asked whether the class had any questions about the tortures they had seen. No one had a question.

Murilo was jostled off the sharp edges of the cans and led away with the others. In the anteroom he saw his brother and another prisoner, Julio Betencourt. They were being led in as an encore. Julio suffered the torture called the telephone: a guard cupped his hands like shells and beat on Julio's ears until he could no longer hear. Murilo found that out later. He never did learn what use Aylton had made of Angelo.

Back in the cells, none of the guards mentioned the class; but the prisoners who had gone through the experience with Murilo were consumed with hatred and disgust. On his cot, Murilo heard one shouting to the universe, "Son of a whore!" Another kept repeating, "Well, that's the end of the world." Others traded back and forth a Brazilian phrase, "E of m da piada!" It meant, It's the end of the joke. It's unbearable for me to think about.

On his bunk, Murilo considered the ordeal. His greatest concern had been that if he did not appear to be suffering enough, he would be taken off the sharp edges of the cans and moved to another torture. The cans had cut and stung, but they were bearable. The electric wires were not. So he had grimaced with pain and hoped that his torture would not be traded for Mauricio's.

He had no emotions left over. He felt no shame at being put on display as a guinea pig. No rage at the men laughing at him. No sympathy for Mauricio. Only self-protectiveness. That he would not be taken off the open cans and shocked insensible.

He had got through another day. His feet would heal. He heard a man shout, "E of m da piada!" Murilo felt calm, at peace. He knew that after today, whatever his provocation or the justice of his cause, he would never hurt another human being.

Hidden Terrors

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