The response to the request of the Attorney General's Office (PGR), was signed by the president of the STF, Rosa Weber.   | Photo: EFE

Brasilia, January 18 (RHC)-- In Brazil, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) on Tuesday temporarily suspended the pardon granted by former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to military and police officers convicted by the courts, including those involved in the Carandiru Massacre.

The decision was made in response to the request of the Attorney General's Office (PGR), which was signed by the president of the STF, Rosa Weber and published the day before.  In this sense, it will be analyzed by the rapporteur of the case, Luiz Fux, to be effective.

At the time of the event, aggravated homicide -- the crime for which the perpetrators of the massacre were convicted -- was not considered a heinous crime, while the legal sanction changed in 1994.

Meanwhile, the decision on the measure taken by President Jair Bolsonaro last December 22, 2022, should also pass through the plenary of the Supreme Court, regardless of the decision conceived by Fux.

According to information platforms such as Brasil de Fato, in the request sent to the STF, the Attorney General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, stressed that the perpetrators of the massacre should not benefit from the pardon, since the decree recognizes the heinous nature of the massacre.

The sentences handed down to the 74 police officers involved ranged from 48 to 624 years in prison, with the verdicts being handed down in 2013 and 2014, although the São Paulo Court of Justice (TJ-SP) suspended the sentence in 2018.

It was then that on August 4, 2022, STF minister Luís Roberto Barroso, decided to uphold the conviction of the 74 military police officers.  

The Carandiru massacre was perpetrated on October 2, 1992, during an operation by the Military Police with the purpose of stopping a riot in the House of Detention in São Paulo, where 111 prisoners from Pavilion Nine were killed in a context of political elections.  Investigations corroborated that the 111 dead were shot 515 times, 126 of them in the head.

According to an analysis by Brasil de Fato on September 30, 2022, "on the one hand, the political agents and the police sought to legitimize the deaths, qualifying the event as a riot and justifying the police action in the strict fulfillment of their legal duty. On the other hand, denunciations by survivors, relatives, civil society and the press pointed out the illegitimacy of the summary executions, qualifying the action as a massacre."