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Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff cries during a speech at the launching ceremony of the National Truth Commission Report in Brasilia on Dec. 10, 2014.ERALDO PERES/The Associated Press

Brazil's normally stern president, Dilma Rousseff, was overcome with emotion Wednesday as the country's National Truth Commission delivered a damning 4,400-page report on the killings, disappearances and acts of torture committed by government agents during the country's military dictatorship.

Ms. Rousseff is herself a survivor of torture by police under the dictatorship, which she opposed as a Marxist guerrilla in the 1970s.

The report names 377 alleged perpetrators, of whom about half are still alive, and calls for them to face prosecution, saying that a controversial amnesty law must be repealed and does not protect those who committed abuses due to the extreme nature of their crimes.

"I said Brazil deserves the truth: the new generations deserve the truth," Ms. Rouseff said in Brasilia as she was given the report, referring to her remarks at the inauguration of the commission in 2011. "And most of all, those who lost family members, friends, companions and continue to suffer, as if they died again each and every day: they deserve the truth."

At that point the President had to pause to fight back tears. "We, who believe in the truth, hope that this report contributes to make it so that ghosts from a sad and painful past are no longer able to find shelter in silence."

This report represents Brazil's most serious engagement to date with its dark past – the largely unexamined legacy of which, many human rights organizations say, contribute to abuses that still occur today.

"We can't stop now, we are beginning a new stage, maybe a more daring one, because now the state recognizes that crimes were committed," said Crimeia Almeida, who opposed the dictatorship as a democracy activist and whose husband was killed fighting it. "Up until now the state didn't really admit to the crimes. They gave compensations to victims, but didn't admit to the cause of those compensations, to the crimes."

While Ms. Rousseff was brutally treated by authorities, she has said little to date about the amnesty law or the movement to end the impunity of perpetrators, apparently out of a desire not to be seen to be advancing a personal agenda. Nor has she spoken in detail publicly about her experience. But in a 2001 deposition she recalled her interrogation by the military in chilling terms: "I remember the fear, when my skin trembled. There is a side of it that marks us for the rest of our lives."

Seven commissioners spent nearly three years examining the period from 1946 to 1988, with the main focus on the dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985. They pored over hospital and morgue records, and interviewed victims and their families.

"Under the military dictatorship, repression and the elimination of political opposition became the policy of the state, conceived and implemented based on decisions by the president of the republic and military ministers," the report states. The commission "therefore totally rejects the explanation offered up until today that the serious violations of human rights constituted a few isolated acts or excesses resulting from the zeal of a few soldiers."

Few current or former members of the armed forces co-operated with the commission and it had no power to compel them to testify. Asked to appear in September, former Lt. Jose Conegundes returned his invitation with the words "I won't collaborate with the enemy" scrawled across it.

The commission also concluded that abusive practices by security agencies continue to occur in Brazil today because those who committed such crimes during the dictatorship were never held accountable.

"It's important for society to know that everyone is within reach of the law," said Beatriz Affonso, who heads the Brazil office of the Centre for Justice and International Law, adding that "when the police still use torture to investigate and execute people they think are criminals without giving them an opportunity of a trial … they are repeating the modus operandi that they inherited from the dictatorship."

It is not necessary for police to immediately round up the people named in the report, who are elderly, but the government must immediately begin an independent judicial process to consider prosecutions, she said. "If they understand they will be punished for doing these things, they will start refraining from using those methods, because there will be a consequence for them."

Ms. Affonso called it troubling that no representatives of the national prosecuting authority were on hand at the small event in Brasilia where Ms. Rousseff received the report and said international law makes it clear that her government must act immediately on prosecutions. "This doesn't simply end with the report's publication … The state is obliged, the moment they are informed, they deliver this to the relevant authorities. It's not about politics, it's an obligation."

Ms. Affonso, who followed the commission's work closely, said that behind the scenes former military officers threatened victims and their families, saying that if they named the names of torturers, those torturers would in turn reveal who had given up information on their comrades-in-arms under interrogation. Most victims, however, have long since admitted to having revealed information under torture, and have nothing to hide, she said.

Brazil's military seized power from an elected government under the pretext of staving off a Communist insurgency, and had support from many in the country's elite. The report names businesses and wealthy individuals who colluded with the military rulers, and Ms. Affonso said it will help challenge the narrative, enduring in some quarters, that the dictatorship was conducted in the service of a greater good.

The truth commission requested a copy of Ms. Rousseff's 2001 deposition to a human rights council in her home state of Minas Gerais. In it she described being tied naked hanging from a "parrot perch," electrical shocks and beatings that knocked out teeth. But commissioners did not ask her to give a live deposition, as two former presidents did, saying they did not want to make their work seem "personal."

The report provides careful documentation of the military's "systematic practice" of arbitrary detentions and torture, as well as executions, forced disappearances and the hiding of bodies. It documents 191 killings and 210 disappearances committed by military authorities, as well as 33 cases of people who disappeared and whose remains were later discovered. Investigators were keen to emphasize the list is far from complete – only those it was possible to prove – and that identification of other victims is hindered by a lack of evidence, particularly military documentation that the armed forces insist has been destroyed. They said that indigenous people and poor peasant farmers, in particular, were difficult to identify and that this work must continue.

The wounds of that period remain raw. Some survivors of dictatorship abuses are frustrated that the military continues to be protected by the amnesty and to stonewall the release of information. "The story that is being told [in the report] doesn't even reach page ten of what happened," said Cecilia Coimbra, president of the torture survivors' organization Torture Never Again.

Nilton Cerqueira, a retired general named in the report, told the national newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo that he intends to read the report, although has not yet. "Now, I only have one question: is it me, who followed the law, who violated human rights? What about the terrorists? What are they? Including the terrorist that is the president of the country?"

With a report from Manuela Andreoni

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