Manoel Leal de Oliveira
Editor of the newspaper A Região
Itabuna, Bahia, Brazil
Murdered on January 14, 1998

Convicted and sentenced:
• Mozart da Costa Brasil, sentenced on September 26, 2003 to 18 years in prison (perpetrator)
Acquittals:
• Thomaz Iracy Guedes, acquitted on September 25, 2003 (alleged perpetrator)
• Marcone Sarmento, acquitted on December 5, 2005 (alleged intermediary)

IACHR:
• May 19, 2000, case submitted to IACHR.
• January 24, 2003, case acdepted by IACHR for review (Case # 12,308).
• January 27, 2006, IACHR proposes amicable solution effort, there was no agreement between the IAPA and the government.
• November 17, 2006, IACHR issues report with recommendations on compliance by the government of Brazil (it requests international responsibility, a full investigation into the murder, punishment of the perpetrators and masterminds, look into irregularities in the official investigations, reparations to family members, homage be paid to the victim’s memory, adoption of policies of protection of the press, impunity to be combated).
• October 11, 2007, Brazilian government agrees to begin compliance with recommendations.
• 2008–2010, process of communication with the IAPA and consultation with Bahia state officials to follow up and comply with recommendations.
• September 21, 2009, public ceremony to laud and pay homage to De Oliveira and another nine journalists killed in Bahia in the 1990s (among them the cases of three others that the IAPA submitted to the IACHR).
• April 7, 2010, Bahia state pays reparations, about $55,000, to four members of the journalist’s family.

May 2010, the Bahia State Attorney’s Office asked the Itabuna Public Prosecutor’s Office to reopen the investigation and identify the masterminds and to investigate another 10 murders committed in Bahia.

The story of the murder of Manoel Leal de Oliveira, founder and owner of the Itabuna, Bahia, newspaper A Região, will be the subject of a movie with all the intrigues that often fascinate the public. Corruption, cheating, collusion, there is a little of them all in this story which began long before January 14, 1998, when six shots took the life of the journalist.

This would be one more case in which only hired gunmen are convicted, but not the masterminds, if it were not for the persistence of journalist Marcel Leal, who is following in his father’s footsteps at the newspaper, and the insistence of the IAPA’s Rapid Response Unit (RRU) in demanding responses from the authorities.

Currently awaited is a reopening of the police investigation, which had been shelved, to determine who were the masterminds of the crime and so the case be fully solved.

“The murderers were so sure of going unpunished that they committed the crime just a few yards from the Military Police barracks and the Prison complex that are located on the same street as my father’s home,” said Marcel Leal, Oliveira’s son, in May 2010 in Rio de Janeiro at the seminar “Failures and Shortcomings in Justice: How to Prevent Impunity in Crimes Against the Press” held by the IAPA, the Brazilian Association of Investigative Reporting (Abraji) and the Catholic Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).

At that event he and other specialists suggested that the investigation and trial of those charged with crimes against journalists while doing their work be dealt with at the federal level, so as to avoid what occurred in the inquiries into the death of his father. And he spoke of the surprising chapters in the story.

The case was still shelved when the RRU began to investigate in 2000. In that year the Salvador newspaper A Tarde published a series of articles about the 10 journalists who had been murdered at that time. Public Prosecutor Cinthia Portela then decided to reopen the investigations, as the case had been shelved for lack of evidence, despite the fact that there were strong indications that pointed to probable guilty parties, with eye-witnesses who had recognized the suspects and, especially, with information on March 1998 from the Federal Police pointing to the suspects.

The Federal Police investigation was a response to a request of the National Journalists Federation (FENAJ). Despite repeating that the crime was not within the jurisdiction of either the Ministry or the Federal Police the latter presented the names of Marcone Sarmento (at the time at large), police officer Mozart Brazil and police informer Roque Souza as being involved in the crime.

The watch by the media on the facts since the reopening of the investigation gave the Itabuna public prosecutor and judge new encouragement to bring the murderers to justice. But even that was not sufficient to get to the masterminds of the crime.

The motive: his high position. Oliveira, a controversial and restless journalist, decided to denounce in his newspaper that the mayor of Itabuna, Fernando Gomes, and Police Chief Gilson Prata were involved in wrongdoing. The two turn up at a number of points in the investigation into the murder, but have never been formally charged.

It was a difficult investigative process, full of interruptions, pressure and concessions made by police chiefs and “outside forces.” The RRU was in the city of Itabuna several times, speaking with those involved, putting pressure so that the case not be forgotten, which would mean the guilty going completely unpunished.

Two years after Leal’s death Police Chief Gilson Prata was promoted to advisor to the head of the Bahia state police force on economic offenses. One of the witnesses was working in the mayor’s office. After new threats that the case would be shelved the pubic prosecutor finally named the accused, which gave rise to new curious chapters in the movie.

One of those accused, the person who had been Prata’s direct advisor, police officer Mozart Brazil, was convicted in September 2003 and sentenced to 18 years in prison with no parole. But he obtained a habeas corpus on Christmas Eve and continued working normally as a policeman until very recently.

If the RRU had not frequently questioned this situation, denounced by the newspaper A Região, perhaps the police oversight board would not have fired him in 2010 nor would he have been jailed.

Another accused, Macone Sarmento, who had worked for the municipal government secretary, Maria Alice Araújo, was acquitted for lack of evidence in December 2005. Marcel Leal filmed as the members of the jury congratulated themselves with officials linked to Fernando Gomes, the mayor at the time of the murder. “Of the seven members of the jury six have something to do with the Itabuna mayor’s office,” he said.

Nevertheless, the sensation of impunity, despite the advances, remained in the air until the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) accepted the case that the IAPA submitted in 2000. IACHR representatives and those of the Brazilian government, with the IAPA as petitioner, had more than one meeting until they signed an amicable agreement.

As part of that agreement in September 2009 the Bahia state government paid public homage to the memory of Manoel Leal de Oliveira at a ceremony held to celebrate Radio Journalist Day in Salvador, the state capital. At that event the government remembered the other nine journalists murdered in Bahia in the course of doing their job in the 1990s and acknowledged the government’s responsibility for having failed to guarantee press freedom of those news men and women.

Another point in the agreement was complied with in April 2010, when the Brazilian government paid reparations to Oliveira’s family. And, finally, in May 2010 public prosecutor Livia Maria Santana e Sant’Anna Vaz of the Itabuna 11th District Public Prosecutor’s Office received a request from the Bahia State Attorney’s Office to take the investigation up again and identify who had masterminded the journalist’s murder.

Tireless in complaining of the lack of punishment for the crime that ended his father’s life Marcel Leal seemed not to feel that the work of the RRU and his own insistence would have any effect and he believes that “only when the masterminds are jailed” can the case be concluded. Meanwhile, he defends the IAPA stance that investigation into crimes against journalists while doing their job should be dealt with at the federal level in order to prevent pressures such as there had been in the case of his father.

Marcel Leal’s wish might soon become reality, if the Brazilian Congress passes a bill to amend the Constitution introduced by Senator Roberto Cavalcanti based on the conclusions reached at the event held by the IAPA/Abraji/PUC-Rio in Rio de Janeiro in May. The bill, PEC no. 15, is awaiting the opinion of the Constitution and Justice Commission rapporteur.

Already in December 2003 a constitutional amendment had authorized the federal government to take up crimes against human rights (among those seen to be included are ones committed against freedom of expression and press freedom); however, the Cavalcanti proposed amendment concerns crimes against journalists, requesting that state and federal jurisdictions coordinate the investigations.

Symbolically, the Oliveira case ended a cycle of murders in Bahia and will remain as an historic milestone in the battle against impunity once the masterminds have been tried and convicted.