Jair Bolsonaro has called the head of a military dictatorship a "national hero"

Jair Bolsonaro has never hidden his admiration for the last dictatorship. This Thursday, the first president of the far right of Brazil described as "national hero" to the late colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who He headed one of the largest law enforcement centers in São Paulo of the army, where several political prisoners were tortured to death during the dictatorship (1964-1985).

"A national hero who prevented Brazil from falling into the desires of the left today," said the right-wing president to the press after receiving María Joseva Silva Brilhante Ustra, widow of the military officer at the head of the detachment of operations and information. Center for Internal Defense Operations (DOI-CODI) in San Pablo.

"She has a big heart (Maria Joseíta) .I am in love with her.I did not have a lot of contacts, but I had one with her husband when she was alive." , said the former army captain and current president, quoted by the news agency EFE

Brilhante Ustra died in 2015, a victim of cancer. Before the National Truth Commission charged with investigating crimes committed during the dictatorship, he stated that "excesses as in any war" may have occurred But never torture. He also justified the fact that all he did was follow the orders he had received from his superiors to fight communism.

He had been sentenced in 2008 for torturing a journalist in 1971, but the proceedings had been initiated by a Brazilian court, which had ruled that the victim's trial against the family had taken place two decades after the 1988 Constitution, which recognized the death penalty. # 39; amnesty. crimes committed during the military regime.

Bolsonaro had already publicly extolled the figure of Brilhante Ustra during the political trial that had resulted in the dismissal of the old Dilma Rousseff, in 2016, for irregularities in the management of budgets. The head of the Brazilian state, then a federal deputy, said that he voted in memory of the colonel, whom he described as "Rousseff's terror".

During her youth, the former president was arrested and tortured in the center of Ustra.

Already president of Brazil, Bolsonaro had stirred controversy on July 30, when he had questioned the official truth about the disappearance and death under the dictatorship of militant Fernando Santa Cruz, father of the current president. of the Brazilian Bar Association, Felipe. Holy Cross.

According to the President, Fernando Santa Cruz was reportedly killed by members of a faction of the left-wing political organization Acción Popular.

However, the official version of the commission of inquiry into the crimes of the dictatorship is that the death of Fernando Santa Cruz, who died in 1974, occurred between form "unnatural, violent and was caused by the Brazilian state".

A few days later, Bolsonaro replaced by four of the seven members of the Special Commission dead and disappeared politicians (Cemdp) during the military dictatorship because, he said, now the government "is right". Instead, he named like-minded politicians from his party and the army.