A questão dos desaparecidos no Brasil: da identificação à devolução a sociedade

Abstract

The issue of the disappeared is a social, health, justice, and public security problem that affects Brazilian society and has gained greater visibility since the struggles of survivors and the families of victims of the military dictatorship (1964-1985) and which has taken on various forms in recent times. This theme is present in debates about human rights, criminal justice, policing, justice, and citizenship, and it intersects with discussions in the fields of Bioanthropology and Forensic Anthropology. This research was conducted from 2020 to 2024 and constitutes the scope of the doctoral thesis developed in the Graduate Program in Anthropology at the Federal University of Pará-PPGA, in Bioanthropology within the research line of Genetic and Forensic Anthropology. The thesis is divided into three articles and a connecting text, as stipulated in the PPGA's internal regulations. The first article engages in a debate about the bioethical aspects related to the way unidentified or unclaimed bodies are treated in Brazil, highlighting the main bioethical needs in the treatment of these victims considering possible human rights violations caused by the fragility of Brazilian law. The second article presents a scenario of how the official fo- rensic institutions of the states have handled information about unidentified or unclaimed deceased persons, the types of existing databases, methods of sharing and accessing in- formation, and how these actions have impacted the location of these victims. In the third article, an analysis was conducted on the panorama of missing and located persons based on official data provided on the Sinesp-VDE platform of the Ministry of Justice and Pub- lic Security-MJSP, within the historical series from 2015 to 2024. Based on the analyses conducted, there is a need for the implementation of more coherent legal devices aligned with bioethical issues that prevent and curb potential rights violations, through the crea- tion of national-level protocols that standardize the procedures to be adopted for cases of unidentified or unclaimed victims, and the creation of state databases in forensic units in an integrated manner, with information transparency, increasing institutional capillarity and information decentralization, thus allowing families of the missing to conduct effi- cient active searches; further improvement of the national policy for searching for missing persons is also necessary, increasing the efficiency in locating them, improving the con- solidation of data in the centralizing body, and creating socioepidemiological monitoring strategies for this phenomenon. Despite the creation of the law bringing greater legal se- curity, public authority actions need to be improved, with a necessity to enhance actions for combating and preventing the crime and locating the victims.