Despite the Public Prosecutor’s Office denouncing the practice, the state of São Paulo was still burying identified bodies in anonymous graves in public cemeteries until at least 2016, without notifying the affected families. This piece by Ali Rocha for Agência Pública was translated for LAB by Stanton Geyer. You can read the original, in Portuguese, here.
Luiz Henrique Marchioro, aged 25, left his home on 2 January 2014 and never came back. A month after his disappearance, his family finally found him: buried anonymously as an ‘indigent’ in Perus, a cemetery in São Paulo’s North Zone.
I only learned about Luiz’s story because he had been the student of a friend of mine. It shocked me, and I wanted to understand how such a thing could happen and whether this was a standalone case. Not long afterwards, the São Paulo press reported on the scandal of the ‘Documented Indigents’: people who, despite carrying state identification, were being buried anonymously in the city’s public cemeteries without their families’ knowledge. Thousands of people. Luiz’s case was no exception.
Reports revealed that, between 1993 and 2013, more than 3,000 documented individuals had been buried in public graves for the ‘unclaimed’ despite passing through the city’s death verification service (Serviço de Verificação de Óbito – SVO). This information eventually came to light thanks to the Missing Persons Location and Identification Programme (Programa de Localização e Identificação de Desaparecidos, – PLID) at the São Paulo Public Prosecutor’s Office, created in November 2013 and led by prosecutor Eliana Vendramini. The programme found that the state’s public services responsible for handling disappearances were gravely deficient, and that many people still listed as missing had in fact long been dead.
From the outset, PLID found there was no data on the actual number of missing persons in the state. Many people registered with the Missing Persons’ Division (the Fourth Division, part of the Civil Police’s Homicide and Personal Protection Department – DHPP) were also listed in Brazil’s official autopsy system — whether at the Forensic Institute (Instituto Médico Legal – IML) or the SVO. ‘The person disappears, reappears, and then the state makes them disappear again. We’ve called this “re-disappearance”,’ Eliana explains. These ‘re-disappearances’ could easily happen at the Missing Persons’ Division, as police reports recording a death were never cross-checked with those recording a disappearance.
When someone dies alone, the police are called to confirm the death, ultimately resulting in a police report. Once this is completed, a doctor must issue their death certificate, and a police inspector decides where the body will be sent: to the IML in the case of violent death [which functions as a forensic morgue], or to the SVO in cases of natural death [which functions as a clinical morgue]. A forensic doctor then carries out an autopsy to determine the cause of death. If the body is not claimed within 72 hours, it may be sent to a public grave. That is the schedule adopted by the IML, which argues that it has nowhere to store the bodies for longer.
If a body goes unclaimed, both the SVO and IML contract São Paulo’s Municipal Funeral Service (SFM) to arrange a free burial. The city is ultimately responsible for interment and buries all unclaimed bodies in two public cemeteries: Dom Bosco in Perus, and Vila Formosa in the East Zone.
PLID uncovered failures across every institution involved in the handling of missing persons cases — the SVO, IML, SFM, and the Missing Persons’ Division — and began searching for solutions as early as 2014. ‘These people are being buried far away from their families, in the midst of the families’ continued search,’ says Eliana, who was struck by the sheer number of bodies left unclaimed. ‘Are we really supposed to believe that no one cares about all these people? 3,000 of them?’
The PLID team began checking the names of the dead against the SVO records and found that many had, in fact, been formally reported as missing. They eventually tracked down the relevant families by checking tax records and searching property registries through the Federal Revenue Service, thereby discovering that many families had no idea their loved ones were dead.
One of the first names they came across was João Rocha, who was 72 when he died and was buried in March 2000. Eliana managed to locate his son, telecommunications technician Claudio Rocha. At the time, Claudio did not know his father had died and still hoped he might be alive somewhere. ‘You’re handing me two police reports from the same institution, and no one told me in 14 years that my father was dead?’, Claudio stated, outraged.
Realising the families’ anger, Eliana decided to pursue a collective lawsuit against the state for moral damages, through the Human Rights Division of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Later, however, the Public Prosecutor’s Office abandoned the case and instead opted for a Conduct Adjustment Agreement (TAC), which has yet to be finalized. At the time of publishing, no date has been set for its ratification.
Missing Organs
Another emblematic case was that of Edson Araújo Leão, who was 63 when he disappeared in June 2003. In addition to always having his state documents on hand, he carried an ID tag made by his daughter which listed five family phone numbers, so they could easily be contacted if anything were to happen. (He had previously suffered an aneurysm, and his daughter feared he might experience memory lapses.)
After falling ill while out in the street, Edson was taken by police to the city-run Vergueiro Hospital. He remained in the ICU for two weeks before dying, and was then sent to the SVO, the Death Verification Service, where his body remained for another six days. His daughter, Maria Cecília Leão, only found him 20 days later — already buried as an unidentified person in Perus cemetery.
Shaken, she went to the cemetery intending to exhume her father and transfer him to the family tomb in Itapecerica da Serra. But a gravedigger discouraged her: ‘Why would you want to move him? He came here nothing but skin and bones, hollow inside.’
– ‘What do you mean, hollow?’
– ‘He had nothing inside. Like he’d been stuffed with rags. Better leave him where he is.’
Maria Cecília only came to understand what had happened to her father’s body when PLID contacted her 11 years later.
She learned that the SVO has an agreement with the Department of Pathology at the University of São Paulo’s Medical School (USP). The department conducts the autopsies and, in return, the SVO allows them to to make use of unclaimed bodies and organs for study.
Federal Law No. 8.051 stipulates that corpses which remain unclaimed for at least 20 days may ultimately be allocated to medical schools for educational and research purposes. However, another State Decree, issued under the Fleury government in 1993, stipulates that unclaimed bodies may be buried in public cemeteries after as little as 72 hours after death. The SVO relied on this decree to decide the fate of bodies during this period.
All evidence suggests that Edson Araújo’s organs were removed for study before he was buried.
Prosecutor Eliana Vendramini argues that one cannot simply assume no one cares about a body without first trying to find the family. In her opinion, whoever has custody of a body has the duty to notify their relatives. ‘They are not in possession of some inanimate object, like a chair, nor is their body public property. A body doesn’t “become public” when a person dies. This is a base principle of medical ethics in Brazil. Families are consulted when it comes to surgeries and transplants, and they should also be consulted on the fate of their dead, on what happens to their bodies,’ she explains.
Vendramini believes that search services should be introduced across all institutions handling human remains, stating that ‘Families should be able to complete their search process’. She further defends the idea that the SVO, since it may control and benefit from the use of unclaimed bodies, should also be required to have a family search service. In her opinion, the SVO should have a standing agreement with the Civil Police, giving access to their database.
The SVO’s director, Carlos Pasqualucci, insists it is not the SVO’s role to notify families. ‘The body is sent to the SVO by the relevant police authority. This comes by way of a police report. Identification is the police’s job,’ he argues. Pasqualucci also questions the list of 3,000 names published by the press in 2014, claiming it included all bodies that passed through the SVO — even cases where families chose the free burial offered by the SFM. He maintains that only a small fraction of cases go unclaimed.
‘Do you know how many unclaimed adult bodies there are each year? On average, 50. And many of those cases are people with no one at all. These fifty cases could potentially involve people listed as missing, but in the end, only one or two turn out to be. There was a big commotion around these 50 when the real concern should be for the 30,000 people who disappear each year across São Paulo State.’
Nowadays, the SVO waits at least 10 days — instead of 72 hours — before determining what to do with a body, giving families more time to be notified and to claim their relative. But the problem persists.
Prosecutor Eliana notes that São Paulo records around 30,000 disappearances each year. At the time of publishing, 10,000 people were still listed as missing, a total count which includes all unresolved cases. ‘My main concern lies with disappearances not being trivialized and reduced to routine paperwork. When someone files a missing person’s report, this testifies to the presence of serious underlying concern – whether it is related to family, social, or personal problems’ she says.
Lost in the System
The IML, Brazil’s forensic institute, receives all the bodies of those who die violently or under suspicious circumstances, as well as people found undocumented in the street, even when there are no signs of violence. The Central IML alone receives an average of 20 bodies a day.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office programme found that the IML had never kept precise records. There was no list of documented individuals and no count of how many ‘indigents’ they had sent to be buried. Neither digital fingerprint records nor genetic material were routinely collected, making later identification all but impossible. For some families, this meant their relatives disappeared forever.
Eliana also discovered that there was no consistency to the photo albums of corpses shown to relatives — some were physical albums, others digital — nor was there a protocol for registering the dead as they were brought in. Worse still, there was no centralized digital database for all the IML units across the state, forcing families to go from one unit to another in search of their missing loved one. There are 72 IML units in São Paulo state – 17 of these are located in the capital city’s metropolitan region alone. For relatives, finding their way through this maze before a body is sent to a public grave is almost impossible.
Eliana has no doubt that this lack of clear protocol is a holdover from Brazil’s military dictatorship. ‘I think the issue was never taken seriously. There was no dedicated public policy. Not simply in regard to missing persons, but for other cases too. We went through a dictatorship, which I am certain had an influence on the lack of protocols – [they wanted to] ensure the dead weren’t properly identified,’ she said.
The head of São Paulo’s Forensic Police, Dr Ivan Miziara, actively denies there are flaws in the service. ‘The very first step when a body arrives at an IML unit is to identify it. Fingerprints are collected immediately and sent to the IIRGD, the Ricardo Gumbleton Daunt Identification Institute, for cross-checking,’ he explained.
The identification institute conducts this comparison manually, through an outdated process in which fingerprint technicians use a magnifying glass to match patterns on paper cards — a procedure that can take up to two hours. In October 2014, the state government purchased an Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which allows all registered fingerprints to be immediately compared. But so far, only the fingerprints from those in possession of the newest ID card model, introduced in February 2014, are included in the database.
Furthermore, when the deceased carries an ID issued in another state, the IIRGD cannot identify them. In exceptional cases, they may turn to the Federal Police, who keep fingerprints for all Brazilian passport holders. But Brazil still lacks a national fingerprint database.
Following meetings with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Miziara proposed a central database linking all 72 IML units. This would compile the relevant data, photographs, and descriptions of all bodies examined across the state. Work began in September 2015 and the database was promised for completion in June 2016.
Disappeared Persons’ Division
The Missing Persons’ Division, linked to the Civil Police’s Homicide and Personal Protection Department (DHPP), holds all relevant information on disappearances across São Paulo state. After repeated appeals to the Public Security Secretariat, prosecutor Eliana Vendramini was finally given the total number of registered missing or disappeared people for 2013: 18,000. Of these, only 51 cases were being investigated.
Forced disappearance — which may involve kidnapping, homicide, concealment of a body, or human trafficking — is considered a crime in Brazil. When there is evidence linking a disappearance to a criminal case, the Civil Police opens an inquiry for further investigation. In all other cases, no formal investigation takes place, only a brief database search.
For the Public Prosecutor’s Office, this is not enough. Even when there is no apparent evidence of a crime, if the family believes the disappearance to be suspicious, the police should begin investigating immediately.
‘It’s pointless,’ says Eliana, ‘to register disappearances and then simply wait for the person to come back.’
Because of this inaction, the affected families themselves usually end up carrying out the investigation, embarking on an aimless search through hospitals, IMLs, homeless shelters, drug-use hotspots, and communities of unhoused people.
Luiz Henrique Marchioro, actor, 25
On 2 January, Vera Lúcia Marchioro was startled awake by the screech of tyres and the garage door slamming shut. She realized her son Luiz had rushed out of the house. She found it strange: he disliked driving and rarely took the car. Something was wrong.
That day, she tried calling him repeatedly, to no avail. She waited for him at night, but he did not return. She phoned several friends, but nobody knew where he was. The next morning, Friday 3 January, she went to the nearest police station to file a missing person’s report.
At the Vila Clementino station, in São Paulo’s South Zone, the duty clerk tried to reassure her. It was common, she said, for young people to go missing for a few days without telling their families. He would be back soon. Still, she recommended that Vera register the case with the Missing Persons’ Division so it would be entered into the official database.
Despite her growing conviction that something terrible had happened, Vera tried to stay optimistic and continued her search. It was only the following Monday that she was able to go to the DHPP in person. From there, she went straight to the IML Central, the main Forensic Institute behind the Hospital das Clínicas. She explained that she was looking for her missing son and asked to see photographs of the bodies that had recently arrived. One of them caught her eye: it resembled Luiz, though the face was badly swollen. She asked whether the young man had tattoos — Luiz had one on his arm — and was told no. Relieved, Vera went on searching.
Meanwhile, Luiz’s friends launched a social media campaign. The appeal was widely shared and soon reached the programme A Tarde é Sua on RecordTV, hosted by Sônia Abrão, who invited Vera to speak. Not long afterwards, she was contacted by another RecordTV programme, Balanço Geral. The case quickly garnered national attention.
Vera continued her frantic search. She spoke to people sleeping rough, visited hospitals, and checked the places Luiz used to frequent. She made a poster with his photo on it and put copies up all around the city.
Finally, on 3 February, investigators from the DHPP came to her house. They had found her son. Police had matched Luiz’s fingerprints to those of a young man who had committed suicide on 2 January.
Luiz had taken his own life by jumping from the bridge on Avenida Doutor Arnaldo onto Avenida Sumaré, in the city’s West Zone. His suicide had been recorded at the 23rd Police Station in Perdizes. His body was taken to the IML Central, where it remained for 19 days before being buried in Dom Bosco cemetery, Perus, on 21 January.
According to police, Luiz had no documents on him when he was found, and was identified through fingerprint sheet records nearly a month later. Vera was once again called to the IML Central to view and identify photos. To her shock, they showed her the same pictures she had seen before. Once again, she asked if the young man had tattoos. This time, the attendant said yes. It was indeed her son. ‘For a mother, for a citizen who pays her taxes, to find out that your son was buried as an “indigent”… it’s a word that… hurts. It hurts terribly,’ Vera says.
She now wants to remove Luiz from the public cemetery, give him a dignified ceremony, and cremate him, in keeping with the family’s Spiritist faith. To do so, she had to begin legal proceedings to request exhumation — but first she needed to correct his records, since he had been anonymously buried. The case dragged on in the courts. In January 2017, three years after his burial, Vera would finally be legally permitted to exhume her son.
According to Article 551 of State Decree No. 16.017/80, after three years (for adults) and two years (for children up to the age of six) from the date of burial, the closest relative of the deceased is entitled to request exhumation.
When I accompanied Vera to Dom Bosco six months after Luiz’s suicide, it was her first and only visit. We stopped at the flower shop opposite the cemetery, then walked to Block 3, Section 3, Grave 99. We passed through rows of well-kept family graves, marked with headstones, photographs, and flowers, the grass neatly trimmed.
But Luiz lay elsewhere. That ground bore no markers, no flowers. Only wooden stakes among tall grass, mounds of churned soil, and open trenches waiting for more bodies.
A gravedigger helped us locate Luiz’s grave, next to stake number 100. Vera was devastated once more. ‘I thought there would be a sign — something. I just see more disrespect, more neglect. I need to believe my son is here. I feel like digging him up myself. If I just scraped at the soil with my bare hands, I’d reach the coffin.’
It was still hard for Vera to accept her son’s death. ‘We never saw his body. We had nothing.’ Family and friends organized a memorial gathering instead. They put together a mural of photos, artwork, and poems written by Luiz. ‘We needed to feel that Luiz was really gone,’ she said.
Maria Helena Nascimento, chief of the Missing Persons’ Division since early 2013, says they register around 20 disappearances a day, each of which triggers an investigation. By August 2016, they had already opened around 4,800 such cases. Since the Civil Police issued Ordinance No. 21 in 2014, setting out protocols for missing person cases, more than 18,000 investigations have been opened.
These investigations mean entering the case into the division’s system, which is linked to several databases – including those held by Prodesp (São Paulo’s data processing company), the Infocrim crime database, records from the Health Secretariat, and CCTV from highways, streets, and airports.
‘We do cross-check the data, but sometimes it takes a little while because of the complexity of the work,’ the chief explains. The goal, she insists, is always to return the missing person to their family, alive or deceased. Whenever they do find someone, they try to notify relatives as quickly as possible. But, she adds, ‘some people seem to vanish into thin air. We search everywhere, and there is just nowhere left to look.’
Maria Helena cannot give a precise success rate, but she says that around 90 per cent of missing people eventually return home of their own accord. Cases where the person has died account for only a small fraction of the disappearances they investigate.
Dimas Ferreira Campos Júnior
The last time Dimas Ferreira Campos Júnior was seen by his family was on 19 June 2015. A father of two, he had recently separated from his wife and returned to live with his parents. He worked as a shop manager in Heliópolis (the city’s largest favela), had alcohol abuse issues, and would often disappear and not come home for long periods of time. So, when he went missing for a few days, the family wasn’t alarmed. They only began to worry when two weeks had passed. When they contacted Dimas’s workplace, they learned he hadn’t shown up to work for weeks.
They began searching the neighbourhood. His brothers tried to file a missing person’s report at the local police station in Sacomã, but the police turned them away. The duty officer refused to register the disappearance and told them they would have to go to the Missing Persons’ Division in central São Paulo — even though new Civil Police regulations allow a missing person’s report to be filed at any police station, while also stipulating that the station closest to the disappearance should investigate.
At the DHPP (the Civil Police’s Homicide and Personal Protection Department), after providing all the information, they were informed that the system was ‘offline’. Since the investigator had written everything down, they assumed he would enter it into the database once the system came back online. They were also advised to check the IMLs. They went to the Central IML, without success, and then to the South IML, which was closer to their home. There, they were shown photographs of recently admitted bodies; none were Dimas. A staff member told them other bodies had not yet been entered into the computer system due to technical issues. If they wished, they could view them directly. One of the brothers, Daniel, followed the attendant into the next room, where the attendant pulled open several drawers, revealing bodies inside. None were his brother.
The mystery of Dimas’s disappearance was only solved 48 days later, on 11 August, when prosecutor Eliana Vendramini personally visited Dimas’s sister, accompanied by a TV Globo Profissão Repórter crew, to inform her that Dimas had died and had already been buried in Perus cemetery.
Dimas had died of a heart attack in the street in the early hours of 3 July. His body was taken to the South IML on 4 July. He had no documents on him, but because he had a new ID card issued in January 2015, he was identified through his fingerprints. He was buried 19 days later, on 23 July. When his brothers first tried to report his disappearance, Dimas was already at the IML — possibly in one of the drawers that had not been opened for them. When they returned to the DHPP the second time, he was still there.
Neither the DHPP nor the IML cross-checked his missing person’s report with his death record before he was buried anonymously.
The family only obtained a photograph with help from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, taken by a passer-by who had photographed Dimas’s body in the street. By the time he was identified, a missing person’s report had already been filed for him, but the records were never cross-checked. His sister had even been at the IML while his body was there, but the drawer holding him was never opened.
Without a photograph and with the body already buried, the family were denied the chance to make sense of their grief. They are now suing the state with support from the Public Prosecutor’s Office. In mid-August 2016, they were contacted by the DHPP and, in September, gave statements to the Civil Police’s Internal Affairs division, which promised to investigate.
New database: solution or stopgap?
In May 2016, public prosecutor Eliana Vendramini was shown a prototype of a new IML database. It was to be shared with the Missing Persons’ Division to prevent people still listed as missing from being buried anonymously. The idea was that once an autopsy report was completed, the database would instantly receive all available information about the body, and the Missing Persons’ Division would have instant access.
‘The problem persists to this day,’ Eliana told Agência Pública. ‘But since 2015, we have been developing a database. It includes all IML units in São Paulo state, not just in the capital. It records all available data on a body — if there is no name, then physical characteristics, photographs, clothing, everything needed for the Civil Police to receive the information as soon as the report is uploaded. That way, the family can be notified in time and the person is not buried as an ‘indigent’.
Eliana also cited the state government’s Transparency Portal for criminal data, launched in May 2016, designed to publish details of all deaths handled by the IMLs and to provide a research tool for the public.
However, by July 7, a month after the IML-Civil Police database was scheduled to launch, the flaws were already visible. That day, Agência Pública came across the case of 25-year-old Midian de Arruda dos Santos, who had died in the street on 14 June 2016. A quick Google search revealed her photo posted on the website of the NGO Mães da Sé, which campaigns for missing persons. On 17 June, it listed Midian as missing. On 1 July, the same page was updated: she had been found dead. Yet 22 days after her burial in Vila Formosa cemetery, the Civil Police website still showed her as missing.
Despite Eliana’s initial enthusiasm, the database has been largely unable to solve the issue at hand and prevent missing persons from being labelled and buried anonymously. Its rollout was behind schedule: by September 2016, only 27 of São Paulo state’s 72 IML units had been integrated. ‘Technicians are visiting units across the state and making adjustments in the capital,’ explained Ivan Miziara, superintendent of the IML, on 5 September 2016. ‘They haven’t given us a schedule yet, but according to the IT department, the system should be fully operational within a few weeks.’
There were further obstacles. Data was entered only after the autopsy report was complete — a process that takes at least 10 days, sometimes much longer. Two months after Midian’s death, her autopsy report was still pending.
When Agência Pública visited two IML units — the Central and East — staff at both said they had no access to data from other units.
At the IML’s central office in August, Miziara himself walked reporters through the database. Of the four test cases reported in the mini-documentary Indigente, only one had been uploaded — and even that record remained incomplete.
The Transparency Portal was also behind. At the time of its launch in May 2016, it only contained data to March. By August of the same year, it had still not been updated. When Agência Pública raised this with Miziara, he seemed surprised: ‘We submit the information monthly to the Public Security Secretariat; updating the system is their responsibility,’ he insisted. He assured that he had issued a directive requiring all IML unit directors to appoint a staff member to liaise with relatives of those whose bodies were sent for autopsy.
After this exchange, the Portal was finally updated in September 2016, but only up to August. By 25 October 2016, September’s data was still missing.
Note from the editor: Although the state did move to centralize and publish IML-related data, launching tools that allow cross-site queries, in 2025, the database has still not been completed.
In LAB’s new book The Congress of the Disappeared, the ghosts of those disappeared by Brazil’s military dictatorship come together and organize a congress, joined by some iconic figures from Brazilian history as well as more recent victims of state and para-state violence.
In the imagined space of the congress, the author Bernardo Kucinski draws a line from the state violence of Brazil’s military dictatorship (and since) to the genocide and slavery of the colonial period in Latin America. He gives a voice to the victims, especially the disappeared, allowing them to challenge the attempt to erase them from history and denounce a culture of impunity which continues to pollute Brazilian politics today.
Ali Rocha will speak at the book’s launch in London about contemporary ‘redisappearances’ by the system in Brazil and about poor, Black men intentionally disappeared by the police. Join us.
