This article was originally published in Portuguese by Agência Pública on March 31, 2026.
After more than a year of being subjected to forced labor, a man “eagerly” awaits the single order that can send him back home, more than 1,600 km away. It is July 1971, one of the most repressive periods of the military dictatorship in Brazil, and he doesn’t have the right to move freely. Guilhermano Anastácio is confined at the Krenak Reformatory in Resplendor, in the state of Minas Gerais, a prison created to persecute indigenous people, force them into labor, and torture them.
The monthly reports written at Krenak reveal few details about Guilhermano. He is 41 years old, married, and was detained, allegedly, for theft. The dictatorship describes him as an “element” who “does not engage in misconduct“, is ”hardworking, polite, and obedient,” and classifies him as skilled in various trades, “including carpentry and nursing, as he administers injections very well.” The files also state that he is anxiously awaiting authorization to return to his village in the state of Mato Grosso—in an area now located in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul—where his absence is reportedly being deeply felt.
In Mato Grosso do Sul, 55 years later, a man anxiously awaits another ruling: one granting reparations for the harm inflicted on his father by the military regime. Militino Anastácio still remembers his father’s suffering. And he seeks justice.
In December 2025, the Mato Grosso do Sul Court unanimously upheld a lower court’s decision, which ordered the federal government and the National Indian Foundation (Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas, FUNAI) to pay Militino approximately US$20,000 in moral damages. “I’m fighting so I can get the compensation,” he told Agência Pública about his saga, which has been going on for almost five years and is likely to drag on even longer, as the federal government has appealed the court’s decision.
Although the deaths of 8,350 Indigenous people were officially recognized during the military dictatorship, reparations are usually given collectively, come too late, and are difficult to obtain.
Various indigenous communities have sought collective reparations for the displacement, persecution, and other acts of violence committed against them by the dictatorship. In the 2000s, the Paraná people, victims of forced contact and exile, became the first to file a successful compensation lawsuit against the federal government.
More recently, in 2025, the a federal court, based in Belo Horizonte, ruled against the Brazilian government for collective damages against the Krenak people—including, specifically, the establishment of the Krenak Reformatory in 1969 on the ancestral territory of the indigenous people in Resplendor. In 2024, the Amnesty Commission granted the first collective reparations in the country’s history to the Krenak people and the Guarani Kaiowá people of Mato Grosso do Sul.
Guilhermano Anastácio was arrested in May 1970, one month before the government of dictator Emilio Médici signed the National Integration Plan (Plano de Integração Nacional, PIN), which encouraged the colonization of the Amazon through the construction of highways, including BR-163, now running through Mato Grosso do Sul and Mato Grosso. It was the construction of this highway that nearly wiped out the Paraná people in the 1970s.
With two ruling in his favor, Anastácio’s case is rare: he is one of the few indigenous people to have received individual compensation for human rights violations committed during the dictatorship. In 2016, Nestor Rufino, an indigenous man from the Kadiwéu ethnic group, also sought legal action to demand individual reparations. Nestor was imprisoned at the Krenak Reformatory at the same time as Guilhermano—both were released in the same month and returned to the same region in Mato Grosso do Sul, where they lived. According to Militino, Nestor died in 2025, before his case was fully decided—even though, on appeal, the court also ruled in his favor and awarded him compensation.
For those granted political amnesty, the law has guaranteed this right since 2002. Over the past two decades, the Amnesty Commission, which is part of the Ministry of Human Rights, has recognized nearly 40,000 individuals granted amnesty, and less than 3% of the applications received are still pending. According to the Attorney General’s Office (Advocacia-Geral da União, AGU), more than 1,600 compensation agreements have been signed since 2023, when a specific prosecutor’s office dedicated to this type of negotiation was established.
The Tough Road to Recognition
Guilhermano spent 19 months imprisoned at the reformatory in Resplendor. In December 1971, Capitan Manoel dos Santos Pinheiro of the Minas Gerais Military Police, who commanded the prison, issued the order he had been waiting for. Militino, who was only 25 years old at the time, still remembers how his father appeared weak and frail.
“He worked very hard there, forced to do so. And, you know, prisoners aren’t well cared for. All he did there was manual labor—very difficult, very hard work,” he said. Guilhermano passed away less than four years after his release.
At 79, Militino lives with his wife in Bodoquena, Mato Grosso do Sul, a municipality with just over 8,500 inhabitants on the tourist route to Bonito. He learned he was entitled to compensation due to his father’s imprisonment after contacting attorney Clodoaldo Brichi da Silva, who owned a nearby farm. In 2021, he filed a lawsuit against the federal government and FUNAI.
In order to avoid paying reparations, the AGU, which defends government agencies, argued that there is no evidence that Guilhermano was involved in political activities and that records from that time indicate he was imprisoned for theft which means he would not qualify as a political prisoner entitled to reparations.
The National Indigenous Truth Commission still faces numerous unresolved issues regarding the human rights violations suffered by Indigenous peoples in Brazil.
Judges in the first and second instances who reviewed the case disagreed with this line of defense based on documents that reveal the reality faced by Indigenous people imprisoned at the reformatory.
“The argument that the arrest was for an alleged common crime does not hold up in light of the historical reality of the Krenak Reformatory, recognized by the National Truth Commission as an instrument of state repression, aimed at subjugating and silencing Indigenous people. In this context, the formal grounds for the arrest become secondary,” said Judge Uberto Rodrigues of the Mato Grosso do Sul Regional Court in his opinion, which was supported by his peers.
For Rodrigues, the crime committed by the Brazilian state lay in the “forced removal of an Indigenous person from their community, denying them the right to a defense, and their incarceration in a facility notorious for its use of torture, forced labor, and disappearances.”
The Underlying Land Disputes
Guilhermano was one of at least 94 Indigenous people imprisoned at the Krenak Reformatory until December 1972, when the dictatorship opened a “new” detention facility called Fazenda Guarani. In total, at least 121 people were imprisoned at the two locations, without trial or any legal proceedings to substantiate the alleged crimes committed.
“We do not impose sentences at Krenak,” Captain Pinheiro himself told the Jornal do Brasil in early 1972. “The indigenous person, through their behavior, will determine the length of their stay at the colony. There they will receive all possible assistance and work. If they are uncooperative or violent, they will be placed under constant surveillance and locked up at nightfall,” stated Pinheiro.
The Krenak Reformatory was used by the dictatorship to remove Indigenous people who were claiming ownership of their lands or resisting the farmers who were trying to take them.
Documents from that era reveal the reasons the dictatorship used to “justify” the arrests: drunkenness, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, conflicts with the head of the indigenous outpost, theft, and murder. “The indigenous man known as João Bugre was arrested for consuming alcohol. Located decades later by journalist André Campos, Bugre said he had merely ‘had a shot of cachaça,’ which cost him ‘almost a year and nine months’ in prison,” wrote journalist Rubens Valente, in the book “Os Fuzis e as Flechas,” cited in the opinion of the case’s presiding judge, which shows how the Krenak Reformatory was used by the dictatorship to remove Indigenous people who were claiming ownership of their lands or resisting the farmers who were trying to take them.
“It was to weaken the movement, because no one wanted to leave the territories. So they would take them away, without evidence, without anything. They would grab the Indigenous people and take them away,” said anthropologist Gilberto Kadiwéu, who knows Militino’s family and the families of others who were arrested or expelled during that period.
This was the case of Bonifácio Duarte, a Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous person, also from Mato Grosso do Sul. In testimony to the National Truth Commission in 2014, he recounted that he was taken away at age 27 for “disturbing a farmer.” “And how was I disturbing him? Because I helped the young people and taught them how to play peteca; in that game, there’s no limit on the number of players. So many Indigenous people would gather there. The farmer thought that was wrong,” said Bonifácio.
He also described his experiences in prison: an exhausting routine of forced labor, repression, and torture. “I found it very sad to be there. They would grab us and tie us very tightly to a tree trunk. The soldiers had a game: they would see who could stand there taking a beating without crying,” recounted Bonifácio, who rubbed herbs on his body to endure being tied up longer. “Others were hung upside down, tied with a rope. Sometimes, we’d wake up and find someone dead there—someone who couldn’t take it anymore.”
For anthropologist Tatiane Klein, the report by the National Truth Commission, to which she contributed research, proves that Indigenous people were considered enemies of the state simply for “being who they were.” “Whether because they had a culture at odds with the dominant one, or because they were in coveted territories, such as Mato Grosso do Sul, the target of that great march to the West. Everyone who stood in the way was considered someone to be removed and wiped out,” she explains.
Elimination, a Long-standing Crime
The National Truth Commission investigated crimes committed by the dictatorship against only 10 indigenous communities in a country with at least 391, according to the latest census, marking the Brazilian government’s first step toward acknowledging crimes against indigenous peoples during the military regime. In this initial, though limited, effort, the Commission documented the deaths of at least 8,350 Indigenous people due to direct action or inaction by state agents—nearly 20 times more than the number of people deemed to have been killed or disappeared for political reasons.
Precisely for this reason, the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Articulaçao dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil, APIB), the national association of the indigenous people’s movement, seeks to establish a National Indigenous Truth Commission. The proposal, already recommended by the National Truth Commission to the Brazilian government, was brought to the Lula administration by the Forum: Memory, Truth, Full Reparation, Non-Repetition and Justice for Indigenous Peoples (Fórum Memória, Verdade e Justiça), which brings together, in addition to APIB, the 6th Chamber of Coordination and Review of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (Ministério Público Federal, MPF), the Institute for Relational Policies (Instituto de Políticas Relacionais, IPR), and the Observatory of Indigenous Rights and Policies at the University of Brasília (Observatório de Direitos e Políticas Indígenas da Universidade de Brasília, OBIND-UnB).
A specific commission for indigenous peoples would be essential to guarantee the right to memory, justice, reparation, and non-repetition of these crimes. To this day, indigenous peoples’ rights are still being challenged, as exemplified by the “time frame” thesis, created by ruralists, according to which only those who can prove their presence in the territories on the date of the Constitution’s promulgation would be entitled to land demarcation.
The stories of Guilhermano and Militino are themselves results of a history of violation and erasure.
A special commission for indigenous peoples would be essential to guarantee the right to memory, justice, reparations, and non-repetition of these crimes. Indigenous peoples’ rights are still being challenged today, as exemplified by the “time frame” doctrine—created by pro-agribusiness groups—which holds that only those who can prove their presence in the territories on the date the 1988 Constitution was enacted are entitled to land demarcation. In December, Brazil’s Supreme Court formed, for the second time, a majority to rule that the “time frame” doctrine is unconstitutional. The Agribusiness Caucus claims to be working on a proposed amendment to the Constitution to validate this doctrine.
The stories of Guilhermano and Militino are themselves results of a history of violation and erasure. In official documents, they are identified as members of the Terena ethnic group. But in an interview, Militino explained that his grandfather was Kinikinau and that they, therefore, identify with both peoples. Since the early decades of the 20th century, the Kinikinau were forced to give up their identity and, under pressure from the indigenous affairs agency, declare themselves as Terena, a people with whom they share historical and cultural ties. “Back then, the leaders of the peoples didn’t even ask; there was no respect for self-identification—they just looked and immediately recorded them as Terena,” said Gilberto Kadiwéu.
In a statement regarding the Militino case, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office noted that, for decades, the human rights violations against indigenous peoples committed during the dictatorship remained hidden and have not yet been fully brought to light: “It is clear that two major challenges facing the Brazilian government are the recognition of and redress for these serious violations.”
Isabel Seta holds a bachelor’s in journalism from the University of São Paulo (USP). At G1, Globo’s news portal, she was a producer and scriptwriter for the podcast “O Assunto” for over three years and a reporter, covering various topics. She was also a project manager at Fiquem Sabendo, a non-profit organization focused on public transparency. Isabel also worked for Folha de S.Paulo, Exame magazine, and the digital magazine Gama, from the Nexo group.
Translated from Portuguese by Lara Loaiza