What Takes So Long to Reach the Page
Português · English · Communication and Research
Newsletter • Communication and Research
There are three words from a court ruling that I brought into Preâmbulo nº 3: “ainda que tardia”—“however belated.” In the document, they acknowledge the delay in correcting Vladimir Herzog’s death record. In the image, I enlarged them. I wanted that time to stop fitting so quietly into a sentence.
Herzog was tortured and murdered in 1975. His family received the corrected certificate in March 2013. Up to that point, the story might seem to be simply one of a truth that took almost four decades to be acknowledged. But one fact changes that reading: in 1978, the federal court had already recognized the federal government’s responsibility.
What took so long, then, was not simply discovering what had happened. A ruling had already challenged the false account, while the death record continued to uphold it. The family had to seek a further measure for that public document to reflect what the courts themselves had acknowledged.
In the article Herzog and the Time of Truth, I reconstruct this history and examine the scope of its achievements. Correcting the certificate was necessary. It did not amount to holding the agents involved criminally responsible, nor did it restore the years the family had spent living with a false official record.
The news bulletin with commentary follows the same question through the reporting: what changes between the announcement of a response and its implementation? The eight-slide sequence brings together the essential milestones in the story.
Lucas Mendes