Historian Reveals Ties Between Brazilian Volkswagen Affiliate and the Military Dictatorship

08/04/2017 - 13h32

It seemed like it would be just another typical night for Lúcio Bellentani, a toolmaker who, at the time, was 27 and working at the Volkswagen plant in São Bernardo do Campo (SP). But on the night of July 29, 1972, he was accosted by a group of armed agents from the Department of Political and Social Order (Dops), as well as the company's own security guards, right on the factory floor.

Mr. Bellentani, who was a member of the PCB (the Brazilian Communist Party) and an employee at VW since 1964, was taken to a company office in the personnel department. That was when they started torturing him: right in front of the VW head of security, as well as other employees. "They wanted me to rat out others. They punched, slapped and kicked me."

Mr. Bellentani - who is currently 72 years old - was taken to the Dops headquarters in São Paulo, where he remained for 40 days, without being able to contact his family at all. His company made no effort to contact his wife about what had happened, either. He only left prison a year and a half later.

"Security teams at VW cooperated regularly with the regime's police forces", historian Christopher Kopper told Folha. Mr. Kopper has been teaching at the University of Bielefeld since 2016. He began working on his study after the CNV (National Truth Comission) revealed ties between the company and the military regime. Mr. Kopper plans on presenting a report with his conclusions no later than September.

COOPERATION

According to the historian, VW security guards would overhear conversations between employees in the locker room in order to identify those they considered "subversive". They also helped make arrests and routinely came up with reports on employees - Kopper came across over two hundred of these reports in the Dops archive containing information that only the company could have compiled.

One report, for example, mentioned communist pamphlets that were found in one of the bathrooms.

Another document from 1980 mentions a report written by a security guard at the company who heard one of the speeches given to VW employees by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was a union leader at the time. The leader who would later become president warned workers that their company was probably monitoring them: in particular, former colonel Adhemar Rudge, the head of security who participated in the arrest of Mr. Bellentani.

Kopper also pointed out that the company elaborated "blacklists" which were shared among different companies in the ABC region of São Paulo state, containing the names of employees who went on strike. If they were fired, very few of them would get any job offers afterwards.

Over one hundred workers were affected by such blacklists. Ten of them were arrested by the regime, among them Mr. Bellentani, and seven of them were sentenced to prison.

BACKLASH

The São Bernardo plant which was inaugurated in 1959, was VW's first outside of Germany. VW quickly became the biggest company in Latin America. In 1964, the company's representatives in Brazil supported the coup.

The company has been dealing with a backlash these past few days thanks to coverage by channels like NDR and SWR as well as the Süddeutsche Zeitung paper.

The VW headquarters in Wolfsburg is still awaiting publication of Kopper's report before offering the company's official position in connection with its past in Brazil. A spokesperson said that "for the time being, we have to wait". Former company executives who were approached by German journalists rejected the accusations.

Kopper stated that it is feasible the VW headquarters was not entirely aware of the Brazil plant's activities throughout most of the dictatorship. But that changed in 1979 when a group of Brazilian workers went to Wolfsburg for a conference and confronted then-CEO Toni Schmücker about the arrests.

Kopper believes that Volkswagen should apologize for its role during the Brazilian military dictatorship.

Mr. Bellentani stated that he and other coworkers who were harmed mainly desire admission of guilt. "It's not a matter of reaching a settlement. We want the company to say 'we were wrong, we should not have supported that regime'. We want them to acknowledge these events", he said.

Translated by THOMAS MATHEWSON

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