79
It also reported that the
said law, “required and
Forces and other public
[r]egion of Araguaia, in
remains.”319
Special Commission, in the context of the application of
collected documents and information from the Armed
organs, aside from having carried out missions to the
order to gather information and search for the bodily
208. In response to this remedy, on December 2, 2004, the Regional Federal
Court recognized the existence of “several evasions made by the responsible
authorities regarding the presentation of the legal information requested during
the process” and it considered “the decision […] adopted by [the Federal First
Judge] to be appropriate particularly in regard to broad access to all the data
related to the historic event, as a way to make possible the track down of the
bodily remains of those disappeared for political motivations, reflected by the
next of kin, [plaintiffs] in this action.” It concluded that said information does not
necessarily need to be freed of all secrets, but rather that it should be accessible
to the next of kin who requested it. 320
209. In July of 2009, the Attorney General of the Union offered information on
the Guerrilha do Araguaia to the Ordinary Action, kept in archives of various state
departments in compliance with that ruled in the Judgment (supra para. 192).
210. Of the foregoing, it is evident that, although the State had alleged the
implementation of mechanisms established in Law No. 9.140/95, wherein, inter
alia, the disappeared persons during the period of the Guerrilla were declared
deceased and the searches for their bodily remains had begun to take place, the
fact is that said acts did not respond to the obligations formulated in the
framework of the Ordinary Action. Moreover, the Attorney General’s Office of the
Union expressed, during the proceeding, that there was a lack of evidence
regarding the existence of a report on the Guerrilha do Araguaia, in order to
justify the inability to comply with that requested, although in 2009, it offered
substantial documentation obtained from diverse sources at distinct times (supra
paras. 192 and 209). What draws the attention of the Court is that the State did
not proceed to render all of the information under its protection when requested
to do so within the parameters of the Ordinary Action,321 especially when the First
319
Partial appeal of August 27, 2003, supra note 268, folio 194.
320
Cf. Judgment of Federal Regional Tribunal published on December 14, 2004, supra note 269,
folios 247, 248, and 252.
321
In addition to the various documents and information collected, among other bodies, by the
Special Commission and the Interministerial Commission, of the evidence in the present case, there
are other sources of documentation related to the Guerrilla; for example, the Ministry of Defense in its
official report on Guerrilha do Araguaia stated that in 1993 “three reports by the Army, Marines, and
Air Force were sent to the Ministry of Justice, those of which compiled the available information in
regard to each one of the disappeared persons in the framework of said Forces, among them those
disappeared in the Guerrilha do Araguaia,” Ministry of Defense “Information on the Guerrilha do
Araguaia,” supra note 81. Moreover, in 2006, the Marines reported to the Minister of Defense that
subsequent to “[another] investigation carried out in the document records under custody of [that]
Command, no secret documents were [found] that were produced or [archived in the era of the
Guerrilla],” to which it indicated that “this could be the result of the fact that the data that then
existed in the archives of this institution, were sent to the Ministry of Justice, by means of Note No.
24, of February 5, 1993, of the former Minister of the Marines, facts that were included in the Report
of the Commission of Political Deaths and Dissapeared [Comisión de Muertos y Desaparecidos
Políticos], carried out by the Ministry of Justice in 2001,” order of the Marines of Brazil addressed to
the Ministry of State of Defense on March 15, 2006 (case file of annexes to the final written
arguments of the State, annex 24, folio 9168). In the report of July 10, 2009, presented by the Union
in the proceeding of the Ordinary Action, it is stated that “[i]n attention to the deliberations of the
Interministerial Commission, the Armed Forces elaborated a report based on rigorous investigative
procedures initiated to collect information on the Guerrilha do Araguaia and on the possible burial
sites of the politically disappeared [...]”; moreover,, “[o]n March 8, 2007, they presented a Final
Report of the Interministerial Commission [that included] particularly [...] the reports of the Armed
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