On March 30, 1973, in an act of rebellion against the military dictatorship, more than three thousand people gathered at a mass in honor of the geology student at the University of São Paulo (USP) Alexandre Vannucchi Leme. He had been tortured and murdered by the military weeks before, on March 17, 1973, at the Information Operations Detachment – Internal Defense Operations Center (DOI-CODI), in São Paulo. Historians consider that the episode represented the first setback of the dictatorship, putting the military on the defensive before society. To deny death by torture, they maintained false versions. First, that of suicide, and then that of an accident to justify Alexandre’s death. Camilo Vannucchi, professor at the Department of Journalism and Publishing at USP, Alexandre’s second cousin, explains that the demonstration resulted in more repression: “There was an important contraction, that several people from USP were arrested that week, several USP students who they went to mass they were arrested, tortured from that day on, because their faces were recorded. For repression, that is also seen as a question of ‘look, we exceeded the dose, the limits’. Alexandre wasn’t supposed to die, he wasn’t a terrorist, a guerrilla, a clandestine person. He kept going to classes, he was well liked at the college.” Alexandre Vannucchi Leme came from a Catholic family in the interior of São Paulo. Nicknamed Minhoca, he was an exemplary student and also good-natured, according to colleagues and friends. One of his college classmates, Adriano Diogo, remembered some of his outstanding qualities. “Inner intelligence, he made those huge jokes, that mockery. This was Minhoca, a skinny, short guy. They gave him the nickname Minhoca because he lived so much in the earth. People could think that, because the person died, he was murdered, in this case, we always use the augmentative, something to give a heroic tone. Minhoca really was a very different guy”. After being found on March 16, 1973 by the military, he was tortured for two days and did not resist. Alexandre was already weakened due to a recent appendix surgery. According to reports from the National Truth Commission, then Major Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra boasted about this murder, as Adriano Diogo recalls. “Ustra assumed Alexandre’s death. He shouted in the courtyard, on Saturday, March 17th, that he had sent Alexandre to the celestial popular vanguard, that is to say, he had killed him”. After Alexandre’s death, the search for justice by family and friends began. The military forged the death certificate. First alleging suicide in his cell, then the version published in the newspapers that he had run away from the police station and been run over. Furthermore, at the time, the family was unable to locate the body that had been buried in the Perus ditch, the place where the military used to bury bodies of people murdered by torturers. Alexandre’s murder generated a wave of indignation among friends and family and sensitized the then Cardinal Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, who took the lead to hold a mass in honor of the student at the Sé Cathedral, defying the military authorities. Camilo spoke of Dom Paulo’s decisive role in this episode. “Instead of having a mass at USP or at a church close to the university, to his residence, something like that, he says: ‘no, it’s going to be at Catedral da Sé, at 6 pm on Friday’, which is the most popular mass. full, that people leave work and go. And he, at the altar, says that Alexandre was killed, that the state is to blame for his death, that the version of being run over by a car is false. So, he confronts the military and police authorities at the time”. In 1976, the Central Directory of Students at USP, the DCE, began to bear his name. In 2013, the family managed to rectify the death certificate of Alexandre Vannucchi Leme in court, acknowledging the murder carried out by the torturers. The detailed history of Alexandre Vannucchi Leme, authored by Camilo Vannucchi, will be published in the book “My name is Alexandre Vannucchi Leme”, in the second semester.
Agência Brasil
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