THE STADIUM THAT BECAME A PRISION: THE USE OF THE CAIO MARTINS SPORTS COMPLEX BY CIVIL-MILITARY DICTATORSHIP

Abstract

The Caio Martins stadium was opened in the 1940s in the city of Niterói (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and is part of a sports complex of the same name. For the residents of the city of Niterói, it is a cultural and sporting facility. However, during 1964, its facilities were used as a repressive apparatus, inaugurating the use of stadiums as a prison, which also occurred in other Latin American countries. This use was justified at the time by the lack of space in the police stations, which provides clues about the number of people who were imprisoned for investigation because they were considered a threat to the government at the time. We aim to go back to the events of 1964, emphasizing the use of the Caio Martins sports complex as a prison in a context in which different types of changes in the function of the stadiums were made explicit. In this bias, the journalistic news accessible by the Newspaper Digital Archive of the National Library and the testimonies of prisoners gathered by the National Truth Commission and made available by the National Archives were used as sources that allow recomposing the intricacies of this use. The documents were analyzed in the light of the debate proposed by authors such as Daniel Reis Filho (2014) who investigates the dictatorial context, Milton Santos who points to the roughness of space, and Pierre Nora (1993) who indicates the potential of places of memory. From another perspective, recomposing how the sports complex came to be used as a prison allowed us to understand appropriations of space in its complexity, evidencing memories. In this return process, we illuminate the attempts to erase facts and silence people (men and women), who are not only heard but are brought to memory, marking the geographic space in the lived, perceived, and conceived, in a context where past, present, and future are timelessly imbricated in memory.