Texto do Comissário Aposentado Varig Bolognese para a HRF. Human Rights Foundation.

Mr. Thor Halvorssen

President & CEO

HRF - Human Rights Foundation,

Dear Sir,

I beguin with two of the fundamentals of HRF on your web page:


"We recognize the inalienable rights that protect the individual from arbitrary state and legal actions. "

"We stand for the possibility of fully democratic American states, limited by the rule of law, that honor and uphold individual rights."

Forgive me if I´m wrong, but I have not seen or read in your pages anything related to the specific rights of workers (except slave work) and saw no mention of elderly or retired people. I understand that your mission is to primarily fight human rights abuses in their main spectrum, i.e., political & police violence, abuses against children and women, as well as to foster freedom of speech and individual liberties in all its forms. But the case I hope you will embrace, is about circa ten thousand people now steadly moving towards below poverty line, an avoidable tragedy should the brazilian government listened to reason and took the appropriate measures to stop it. I should also mention that it is too late now for some 300 of us to benefit from any justice made so far.

Human rights are simple in its own concept. People is complicated and often cruel. But although they are simple things, its application is tough and the human rights violations have many ugly faces. One of these ugly faces that has befallen on us is that we, the former workers and retired personel of Varig Brazilian Airlines, are being denied our basic rights to survive. Many workers who lost their jobs with the demise of the airline remain unpaid to this day. The retired employees now mostly in their sixties, seventies and eighties, are seeing pensions grow smaller every month since april of 2006.

The United Nations Proclamation on Ageing notes that there is an unprecedented ageind of populations taking place througthout the world. The number of elderly men and women is also on the rise in Brazil, and so the need to respond to their changing needs, mostly health care.

But far from being a "A Society of All Ages" as stated by the UN Secretary General, Brazil allows hard working people to be humiliated and be denied the resources they saved for retirement. These workers who contributed for many years of their active labor to a private pension fund are now being paid only 8% or less of their pensions in a clear violation to their original contracts, making us, former and retired employees of Varig Airlines, part of the most vulnerable groups in the nowadays brazilian society.

So we beg you to help us convince the brazilian government to recognize and protect our inalienable and individual rights as people who actually paid to retire with dignity. Brazil is a fully democratic american state although individual rights, as in the case of Varig Airlines´former workers here, are not being honoured or upheld.

Please, on our behalf, have your say on this matter to the Brazilian Authorities.

Yours Gratefully,
José Carlos Bolognese
Flight attendant (retired)
Varig Brazilian Airlines