Utoo Radio and Other News Sources - April 16, 2024 - Brazil has issued its first-ever apology for the torture and persecution of Indigenous people during the military dictatorship, including the incarceration of victims in an infamous detention center known as an "Indigenous concentration camp."

The apology was made by an amnesty commission attached to the human rights ministry that is tasked with investigating the crimes of the 1964-85 regime. The president of the commission, law professor Eneá de Stutz e Almeida, knelt before Indigenous leader Djanira Krenak as she voiced regret for the violence inflicted on the Krenak people.

The Krenak have spent decades demanding justice for abuses committed against their people during a racist "re-education" campaign which the writer and activist Ailton Krenak said was designed to "rehabilitate" Indigenous people deemed "unfit for Brazilian life."

The campaign involved the incarceration of his people and members of other Indigenous groups in a prison-like "reformatory" on the banks of the Doce River. The rural "re-education camp" opened in 1969 and received dozens of Indigenous inmates who were physically abused, exploited, and forbidden from speaking their own languages.

Krenak expressed hope that the commission's apologies would pave the way for concrete reparations, such as land-based compensation to Indigenous groups stripped of their traditional territories. He predicted dozens more cases of dictatorship-era abuses would be examined over the coming years, many in the Amazon.

During the early years of the dictatorship, Brazil's leaders unleashed a colossal infrastructure and development campaign in the rainforest region, bulldozing roads through remote jungles with scant thought for the Indigenous people who lived there. Disease and violence pushed previously uncontacted peoples to the brink of extinction.

The apology came at a highly symbolic moment for victims of the dictatorship, when thousands of people were tortured or killed.