Dom Phillips – Bloomberg, 06/28/2012
The demise of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1985, after 21 dark years, was supposed to have ended government intrusiveness in people’s lives.
But searching through government documents, the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo has found evidence to the contrary. Papers show that Brazil’s secret service spied on both Dilma Rousseff, now the president, and her mentor and predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, from the time democracy was restored until the early 1990s.
Jose Sarney, who was president from 1985 to 1990, responded as if he had no knowledge of the surveillance. “I had determined that the SNI (National Information Service) would never do an investigation of any person,” he told Folha.
