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A Mother's Cry: A Memoir of Politics, Prison, and Torture under the Brazilian Military Dictatorship. By Lina Penna Sattimini. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii,188. Bibliography. Index. $74.95 cloth; $21.95 paper.
On May 11, l970, Marcos Arruda, a geologist still in his twenties and an Acão Popular militant was kidnapped on a street in São Paulo by agents of OBAN (Operações Bandeirantes), a secret political police force established by the Second Army in São Paulo in l969. He had agreed to meet Marlene de Souza Soccas, a dentist in her mid- 30s, with whom he had worked in an adult literacy program. Marlene communicated that she was separating herself from Resistencia Democratica, one of several underground opposition groups targeted for destruction by the Brazilian military. She told of her need for a safe residence and her desire to join Marcos in Ação Popular (AP). Like him, she would seek a job in a factory in order to connect with workers, part of the organization's effort to advance political struggle against social injustice. In fact, Marlene was already in hands of OBAN, and had been tortured. The meeting was a setup to arrest Marcos-OBAN agents expected to get information from him about members of Resistencia Democratica.
Thus began almost nine months of torture and terror for Marcos Arruda, and anguish for members of his family. His story is largely told through a trove of letters written by his mother Lina Penna Sattamini, and his grandmother, brother, sisters, father, and aunt, and finally by others who interested themselves in his parlous situation, including Amnesty International human rights supporters in the United States. The letters record the effort: first, to find Marcos whose location was unknown for 24 days; second, to get him out of the hands of the OBAN torturers; third, to have him released from military detainment, and fourth, to fly him to the safety of the United States, where his mother was living as a naturalized citizen and working as a State...