3,000 People have been Buried in Unmarked Graves in the State of São Paulo, Even Though They were Identified

04/22/2014 - 12h11

The telecommunications technician Claudio Rocha, 53, has spent the last 14 years looking for his missing father.

Since January 15 2000, he has been to countless hospitals, Coroner's offices and police stations in São Paulo and, despite his efforts, has never had news from his retired father, João Rocha, 72 years old at the time he went missing from his home.

Last week, Claudio received a phone call that put an end to his search.

The news he received could not have been worse: his father was dead and had been buried in an unmarked grave in March 2000, even though he identified himself as he entered the hospital.

Fourteen years of searching in vain. "I expected to find him alive today. This is outright neglect", he said to Folha.

The Rocha Family was the victim of a flaw in the State bureaucracy only now revealed, which has assigned around 3,000 corpses to unmarked graves in the last 15 years, even though they carried identification at the time of death, in the São Paulo State capital alone.

The "identified indigents" were found following an inquest by São Paulo State's Public Ministry coordinated by Eliana Vendramini, a Public Prosecutor dedicated to finding the whereabouts of missing people in São Paulo.

It took her some time to believe that the State's own funeral system may have been responsible for the "disappearance" of thousands of people in the State capital.

The State assigns corpses to unmarked graves that are not claimed by relatives after 72 hours, even if the deceased carried identification, according to State regulation created in 1993, in Luiz Antônio Fleury Filho's State administration (PMDB - Brazilian Democratic Movement Party).

The State does this without contacting the relatives, despite having information of the deceased, leaving entire families to search endlessly for their loved ones.

Burials are carried out in partnership with the Municipal Funerary Service in two cemeteries at Vila Formosa, in the east of the city - where bodies are delivered bare, in wooden boxes with cardboard lids.

The corpses used to be buried in the Dom Bosco cemetery in Perus, in the north of the city.

Cases investigated by the Public Ministry are the responsibility of the Death Verification Service (DVS) linked to the University of São Paulo's Faculty of Medicine

The service reviews cases of natural death, where there is no suspicion of violence but that require an investigation into the cause of death.

The Public Ministry wants to find out why the State government did not look for the families of the identified deceased.

Contrary to the Prosecutors, the board of the DVS understands that the law does not require the family to be contacted.

Furthermore, it states it does not have enough staff to carry out this task and that it is willing to cooperate with the Public Ministry investigation.

The Prosecutors and the DVS affirm they did not have enough information to locate the families. "However it is possible to locate the families and this is precisely what we are doing", the prosecutor said.

Vendramini also said that, as well as the Federal Constitution, which goes over "the dignity of the human person" in its first article, the Civil Code demands the service to communicate the death to the relatives, because the body belongs to the family.

"This is obvious. Do we need a law to state the obvious? Do we need a law that says: 'Do not bury an identified body without letting the family know'?", the prosecutor questioned.

Another problem is the fact that the DVS is unknown to most of the population, who look for missing relatives through the Coroner - in charge of dealing exclusively with violent deaths or unidentified bodies.

The Public Ministry wants to end unnecessary searches and put an end to burials without notice.

First of all, the Ministry is trying to find matches for the 3,000 "identified indigents" that have gone through the DSV against the list of missing persons in the State of São Paulo.

The aim is to find out how many families are still looking for relatives to notify them of the death and clear the list of missing persons.

João Rocha was in this list and his family was the first to be contacted by the prosecutor.

In the last few weeks, Folha located four more families. None were contacted by the State services and their relatives were buried in unmarked graves.

AT POLICE STATIONS

The Public Ministry has also identified problems with the Civil Police.

According to the legislation, the police are required to register deaths before releasing the bodies to the DVS. The police also register the disappearance of a person when relatives report an occurrence at the police station.

However, in all cases reviewed by Folha, the logs of deaths or disappearances were not cross referenced, which could have put an end to many families endless search for their loved one.

Three out of five families contacted by Folha who reported relatives or friends missing said they were ignorant of the existence of the DVS, stating this reason for not requesting the service. In these cases, relatives were either still looking or had already given up.

In one case the relative had also passed away. In another, a daughter found her father 20 days after his death, buried in an unmarked grave.

She even resorted to the help of a Pai-de-Santo - an Afro-Brazilian priest that evokes deities during rituals - to find her father.

There are still an unknown number of identified people buried in unmarked graves by the Coroner's Office that were victims of violence or accidents.

Translated by CRISTIANE COSTA LIMA

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