3 the treatment of the more vulnerable ones, and also the desperate and despairing search for justice (then private, today public). They unfold the inscrutable presence of tragedy in the mysteries around life, which some have tried to simplify characterizing it as fate. Human suffering hopelessly continues to be a sad trace of human condition along the centuries. With particular foresight, Sophocles warned, already in the V Century B.C., in his Oedipus the King5, that we must never say that someone is happy until the time he has overcome the extreme limit of a painless life. 8. And the evolution from private justice (of the antique Greek) to public justice (of the “modern” and “post-modern”) seems to progress unfinished, acquiring a mainly ritualistic feature, contaminated by the erosion and “outsourcing” of the public services and by a merely formalist justice. To this we must add the regrettable transformation of public assets as health and education into goods. Damião Ximenes-Lopes had a violent death when he was entrusted to the public social “services” and when he was confined to a “resting” home, the one in Guararapes. 9. The violent death of defenseless Damião, who was looking for medical treatment, had a devastating effect in the life not only of his sister Irene, but also in the life of his next of kin. According to Irene’s account before the Court, Cosme, Damião´s twin brother, considering the proximity of the bond with the victimized brother, “was in shock” when he learned about Damião´s death. However, she added, “until today Cosme does not know the details of the torture and the violence; we omitted them because that would cause too much suffering to him and we wanted to preserve his health.”6 In other words, he was duly preserved from the truth, which under certain circumstances proves to be necessary, as the tragedy of knowledge of the human condition may be sometimes unbearable, mainly for those more vulnerable or sensitive. 10. The mother’s life was “completely ruined”, she is always remembering the death of her son Damião, “until today she is depressed and says that she wants to die.”7 Mother and father were already separated, but they have preserved the family bonds of affection with the children; the father, immersed in “deep suffering” and “desire of revenge” by the death of Damião, sought “spiritual help” in an Evangelical Church, which “relieved” him.8 Also, human suffering has an intergenerational dimension, passing from parents to children, -as already noted in the Genesis book, which predicts that all human beings shall know good and evil (3,5). 11. The shadows of human existence are retaken by the Book of Job, where the oppressors give orders to the oppressed using violence (24.2-4.9 and 24.5-8.1012ab). When Damião died, his sister Irene had a newborn baby girl. As a consequence of the events occurred, the baby stopped being breast-fed; as pointed out by Irene before this Court, “due to the emotional shock, I spent weeks without feeding her, and my breasts did not produce milk; my daughter was deprived of 5 . In the piercing final phrase - verses 1529-1530. 6 . Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Transcript of Public Hearing..., op. cit. supra n. (3), p. 27. 7 . Ibid., p. 28. 8 . Ibid., pp. 28.