A Grim Chapter in Brazil's Recent History

In November 2023, Cleriston Pereira da Cunha, a 45-year-old Brazilian known to those close to him by the affectionate nickname “Clezão,” died of a massive heart attack within the confines of the Papuda penitentiary complex in Brasília. His story bears an unsettling resemblance to some of humanity’s darkest periods, echoing eras when justice was subverted by arbitrary rule.

Clezão had been imprisoned since January of that year, detained without trial or conviction, a victim of the unchecked power of Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes and a judicial system critics say is corrupt and politically weaponized. His only “crime”? Being in the vicinity of the National Congress during the January 8, 2023 protests—an act spun as an armed criminal conspiracy and a threat to the rule of law. His lawyer’s petitions for release were ignored, and Clezão’s life was tragically cut short.

Cleriston’s ordeal marks a grim chapter in Brazil’s recent history, a tragedy that cannot fall into oblivion. The details expose a system that failed to safeguard a citizen, condemning him to death through sheer negligence—with diabolical fingerprints smudged across every stage of the process.

On January 8, 2023, while certain buildings on Brasília’s Praça dos Três Poderes were being stormed, Clezão was busy with his work at his beverage distribution business until approximately 4 p.m., as captured by surveillance cameras. Prompted by curiosity regarding the unfolding chaos, he headed for the National Congress to observe the events firsthand. He arrived around 5 p.m., after the clashes between protesters and law enforcement had already ceased. Like many others who were there out of curiosity, he went inside the Congress building to take photographs. Upon entering the Senate chamber, he was immediately apprehended by the police officers present.

Cleriston took no part in vandalism, property damage, or violence. He offered no resistance during his arrest, as he assumed he would be released after explaining that he had only just arrived. Testimonies from the very police officers involved in his case corroborate this: he remained calm and posed no threat. Nevertheless, he was not released that night, nor the next day, nor in the days that followed. With him inside the Federal District Penitentiary, his family’s life would change forever.

Already in precarious health following a bout with COVID-19 during the pandemic—including 33 days in the hospital and resultant severe cardiac issues—Cleriston required daily medication and constant medical supervision. His next appointment was on January 30, 2023. A medical report explicitly warned: “Due to the gravity of the clinical condition, the risk of mortality due to immunosuppression and infections, we request expedited resolution of the patient’s legal situation.“

The defense’s battle to secure his release, based solely on his deteriorating health, dragged on for months. Seven distinct petitions for his release were filed:

January 16, 2023

February 27, 2023

May 31, 2023

August 3, 2023

September 26, 2023

November 7, 2023

Each reiterated the dire warnings from his physicians: “Incarceration poses a potential death sentence.” Clezão required medication every twelve hours without fail. The habeas corpus petitions, ed by extensive medical documentation, underscored the “imminent risk of sudden illness and death” without the necessary medications, which were not being istered to him consistently in prison. Each was denied.

On September 1, 2023, the Prosecutor General’s Office (PGR) issued a recommendation in favor of his release, acknowledging the gravity of the situation. Yet Alexandre de Moraes disregarded this counsel for a full 80 days. On November 20, 2023, Cleriston suffered the heart attack predicted by his doctors, and died at Papuda—an avoidable outcome.

A lifeless body in the arms of the State after an arbitrary arrest, without due investigation, trial, or conviction. A relentless refusal to grant freedom in the face of a critical medical condition. A deliberate disregard for the opinion of the PGR. Cleriston Pereira da Cunha fell victim to political persecution, criminal neglect, and abuse of power. Alexandre de Moraes effectively chose to defer his decision until it was far too late.

The death of Clezão is more than just a tragedy; it’s a piercing alarm, a stark reminder of how totalitarian regimes warp prisons into instruments of repression, crushing dissent and silencing the powerless before the unscrupulous tentacles of the State.

Totalitarian Regimes: A Horror Script

From Stalin’s sprawling network of Gulags to Hitler’s extermination camps, from Mao’s brutal forced labor system to the Kim dynasty’s Kwaliiso colonies in North Korea, the script remains chillingly consistent. These regimes did not merely punish; they sought to erase—stripping individuals of their rights, their dignity, and frequently their very lives, all under the guise of safeguarding the State. Cleriston’s story echoes these dark chapters, a modern Brazilian footnote in a global narrative of repression. What unites these cases is the regime’s penchant for circumventing justice, for detaining individuals without cause or due process, leaving behind shattered families and scarred societies.

Stalin’s Soviet Union: A Network of Dread

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the prison system was not simply about punishment, it was a vast empire of obliteration. The Gulags, a network of forced labor camps, engulfed approximately 18 million people between 1929 and 1953. Political dissidents, intellectuals, peasants who resisted collectivization, or simply those unfortunate enough to be denounced by a neighbor or be at the wrong place at the wrong time, they all could vanish without trial, labeled as “enemies of the people” or the “State.” The NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, operated with complete impunity, fabricating confessions through torture and intimidation, detaining entire families to stifle resistance. Like Clezão, many were denied any semblance of defense or a fair hearing—subject only to the whims of a system that perceived every individual as a threat. The Gulags were not just places of confinement; they served as a warning: dissent, whether real or imagined, meant oblivion, or even death.

Nazi : Concentration Camps as Death Machines

Under Hitler’s Third Reich, imprisonment was turned into industrialized annihilation. The concentration camps—Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and dozens of others—began as detention centers for political adversaries after 1933, but quickly expanded to target Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and anyone deemed “undesirable.” The Nazis stripped prisoners of all rights, reducing them to numbers branded onto their flesh, enslaved to death in forced labor camps, or murdered in extermination sites. Heinrich Himmler’s SS commanded this machinery of terror, bying legal norms with decrees of “protective custody”—arbitrary detentions that mirror the unchecked authority that threw Cleriston in prison in Brazil. Men who committed atrocities because they were “just following orders.” The totalitarian instinct silenced people through force or confinement.

Mao’s China: The Laogai and the Grinding of the Individual

Mao Zedong’s China turned imprisonment into an instrument of ideological purification. The Laogai camps—translated as “reform through labor”—emerged in the 1950s and incarcerated millions during campaigns such as the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution. It is estimated that between 40 and 50 million people ed through these camps from 1949 until Mao’s death in 1976, with mortality rates reaching as high as 20% in certain years, due to malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion. They were dissidents, intellectuals, or anyone suspected of harboring “counter-revolutionary anti-system” sentiments. Cleriston’s detention without due process finds a distant parallel here: Mao’s regime, like Brazil’s degraded justice system in 2023, flourished under arbitrary power, where mere accusation became synonymous with guilt.

North Korea: Kwaliiso, a Living Nightmare

In the North Korea of Kim Il-sung, and later under his son and grandson, the Kwaliiso political prison camps persist as hideous emblems of human rights atrocities. Defectors recount a world of starvation, torture, and public executions. As many as 200,000 individuals may be held captive today, often for “crimes” as nebulous as listening to a foreign radio broadcast or criticizing the regime—offenses that require no trial, but the nod of the State Security Department. Entire families are imprisoned under the policy of “three generations of punishment,” ensuring guilt by association. The parallels with Cleriston’s case are chilling: a system that incarcerates without evidence or recourse, where the word of the State, and not the Constitution, is the law.

The Thread Leading Back to Brazil: Clezão’s Legacy

Clezão’s ordeal in 2023 may not mirror the scale of these historical regimes, but it carries their DNA. In the wake of January 8, Alexandre de Moraes ordered the apprehension of over a thousand individuals, many of whom were held indefinitely without unmistakable evidence, without defense, without trial. Cleriston’s ing at Papuda did not occur within a Gulag or Kwaliiso, but its roots—illegal detention and a corrupted system—connect it to that sinister lineage of injustice and abuse of power. In present-day Brazil, a citizen can perish while imprisoned without having committed a violent crime, without conviction, and without his deteriorating health prompting comion from those self-proclaimed guardians of human rights. Cleriston Pereira da Cunha is more than merely another name among the hundreds of political prisoners of January 8. He stands as a symbol of the encroaching authoritarianism that has taken root in Brazil—and his death, a verdict rendered by those who have subverted justice into a tool of political vengeance.