A subida do monte purgatório: estudo da experiência dos presos políticos da Penitenciária Regional de Linhares

Abstract

The focus of this research is on the political prisoners’ experience of the military dictatorship, at Regional Penitentiary José Edson Cavalieri, known as Penitenciária de Linhares, located in Juiz de Fora (MG), during the years of 1969 and 1972. Although the place had functioned as a political prison since 1967 up to 1980, the temporal outline is due to the proposal of analysing those prisoners’ behavior, most of them with a specific profile, and preceeding from the repression, when some of them adopted urban guerilla techniques, and many of them were exposed to torture’s methods during the regime. The emphasis on Linhares Pententiary comes from the reading of memories, published by political prisoners, where this institute is mentioned as a reclusion institute, distinct of those ones of interrogatory, where tortures were practiced. The purpose then, was to understand the characteristics which point out the penitentiary of Juiz de Fora as a reclusion institute, and in case this hypotheses was confirmed, it was necessary to try to visualize the kind of behavior the political prisoners adopted in that place. The prisoners’ organization inside that institute was analised, with an emphasis on the political actions, which aimed to overlap the prison’s discipline, having as approach the political debate, the rituals, and the survival of the militia in prison. It was also object of study the mobilization of some political prisoners in the making of documents accusing the military regime’s oppression, which seems to have contributed for a new version of the collective memory, later made, about the historical characters who faced each other during the Dictatorship, and which blames the military actions.