Brazilian Supreme Court Justice José Antonio Dias Toffoli has criticized Argentina for the trials it is holding against those responsible for the military dictatorship and accused the country’s society of «being trapped in the past».
«We cannot let ourselves be carried away by what happened in Argentina, a society that was trapped in the past, in revenge, in hatred, looking backwards, in the rearview mirror, without being able to overcome it,» he said this week during an event with Brazilian businessmen in New York.
«Brazil is much bigger than that, Brazil is stronger than all that and we will not fall into the same situation that unfortunately our neighbors fell into,» said Dias Toffoli at an event attended by other Supreme Court justices such as Alexandre de Moraes, Ricardo Lewandowski, or former Brazilian President Michel Temer.
So far, the Argentine justice system has convicted 1,088 people responsible for crimes against humanity committed during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983, among them the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla.
Dias Toffoli’s statements take on an even more controversial tinge if one takes into account that he is the rapporteur of a legal action that questions the validity of the Amnesty Law for those who participated in the crimes of the Brazilian military dictatorship.
Dias Toffoli was one of the Supreme Court justices nominated by the incoming president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, during his previous term, however, as of 2018 he began his rapprochement with Jair Bolsonaro in campaign.
When he assumed the presidency of the Supreme Court he went to the Army headquarters to receive the blessing of General Eduardo Villas Boas and, according to the magazine ‘Piauí’, he let them know that he would keep Lula in prison until the elections.
During that time, the judge surprised some of his colleagues by appointing two generals as advisors, one of them, Fernando de Azevedo e Silva, would end up being Bolsonaro’s defense minister, recalls the newspaper ‘O Globo’.
