Rádio Debate · Universitária FM 107.9

Violações da ditadura nas universidades públicas do Ceará

·56 min·4 clips

A military colonel in the UFC rector's office told Professor César he couldn't teach — calling him a communist after 105 of 110 colleagues voted for him.

1. Rádio Debate (107.9, Universitária FM) marks the 62nd anniversary of Brazil's 1964 military coup on April 20, 2026 with a discussion of dictatorship-era crimes inside Ceará's public universities. 2. Host Carolina Areal speaks with Professor César Barreira, sociologist and former president of the UFC University Truth Commission, and Professor Geovane Jacó de Freitas, sociologist at UEC and member of the State Truth Commission. 3. The episode centres on the 2024 book 'Times of Never More: Serious Violations of Human Rights at the Public Universities of Ceará, 1964-1985,' which adapted the 2014 report submitted to the National Commission of Truth. 4. The commission was established in 2011-2012 at the initiative of then-UFC rector Gesualdo and UEC rector Jacques Sampaio, composed on a parity basis of three professors, three students, and three officials from each university. 5. César contextualizes his motivation for taking on the commission: he was a high school student in 1968, already involved in university movements, and had personally occupied the rectorate during the period being investigated. 6. The commission conducted 28 testimonies from students, professors, and officials who suffered violations — with more testimony from UFC than UEC due to the latter's more recent institutional origin at the time. 7. César distinguishes two phases of repression: 1964, when professors were expelled from medicine and physics faculties, and 1968 — 'a coup within a coup' under AI-5 — when direct action against students intensified and the Faculty of Law expelled ten students by administrative decree. 8. Rosa da Fonseca, César's Social Sciences colleague, was arrested days after a public debate with Education Minister Jarros Passarinho and was subsequently tortured — directly refuting the 'soft dictatorship' characterization that César argues still circulates today. 9. In December 1972, César was summoned by a military colonel housed in an office near the UFC rectory, told his near-unanimous departmental election (105 of 110 votes) made him suspect as a communist, and barred from teaching — forcing him to take his first job in Piauí. 10. The SNI security information service operated physically inside the UFC rectory building, in a space that is today the university's communications centre — a detail César says shocked even commission members when they discovered the exact location. 11. Geovane, born during the dictatorship with childhood memories of a 'sweet' regime, explains this as the product of deliberate orchestrated memory: schoolchildren were given figurine albums celebrating military presidents portrayed as kindly grandfathers. 12. He argues that the dictatorship's targets were not isolated individuals but a broad coalition — student movements, workers, campesino movements, civic organizations like the Brazilian Bar Association — who collectively believed in democracy and social justice. 13. Professor Geovane frames the university as the regime's primary target of methodical destruction: dismantling the critical spirit and knowledge production that threatened the military-civil project. 14. With direct US support and formal agreements, the dictatorship imposed a model aimed at transforming Brazilian public universities into private American-style institutions — a model Geovane argues is 'still today' partially in effect. 15. The book states that the UFC purges 'suffocated two generations of intellectuals and scientists at the most productive moment of their academic lives,' and Geovane argues the future of that loss is visible in present-day Brazilian social thought. 16. To sustain organizing after student directories were closed, students held clandestine meetings in the dunes of Prado Futuro, bringing a Vitrola record player as cover — under surveillance they knew was present — before the directories were rebuilt in 1980. 17. Lawyer Dr. Wanda Sidó defended persecuted students and staff using the argument that the state was damaging itself by prohibiting people it had trained from practicing their professions — an argument César calls still resonant. 18. The University Truth Commission's recommendations include renaming university spaces that commemorate collaborators with the regime, converting the former security advisory space into a memory centre, and installing dedications to victims such as Bergson Gurjão, who died in the Araguaia guerrilla conflict. 19. The episode is dense and testimony-driven, with César and Geovane building on each other's points throughout; Carolina Areal anchors the conversation with direct references to the book's documented cases. 20. Brazilian citizens, historians of the dictatorship era, educators, and anyone following Brazil's contemporary memory-and-justice debates will find this episode substantive and directly connected to ongoing political disputes.

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