SAO PAULO, Dec 13 (Reuters) -- Brazil Sunday marked the 30th
                  anniversary of one of the darkest days of its military rule, one which unleashed
                  more than a decade of political killing and torture and set the stage for more
                  violent repression in neighbouring Chile and Argentina.

                  On Dec. 14, 1968 Brazilians woke to find their civil liberties suspended, their
                  Congress shut down and a new group of hardline generals in charge of the
                  country.

                  The night before, Friday the 13th, the generals issued Institutional Act 5, or
                  AI-5, to justify a tighter rein on Brazilian society, unsettled by a small guerrilla
                  insurgency, student protests and strikes.

                  Over the next 10 years, hundreds of opposition activists and leftist guerrillas
                  were killed or disappeared and hundreds more politicians, professors,
                  musicians, writers and artists were forced to leave Brazil.

                  "It was a dark night because (what followed) was repression, censorship and
                  all kinds of violence," President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who fled Brazil
                  under the regime, wrote in a recent letter to a news magazine recalling
                  implementation of AI-5.

                  Cardoso, who was re-elected in October, is expected Jan. 1 to become
                  Brazil's first democratically elected president to serve his full term since the
                  return of civilian rule in 1985.

                  The anniversary of Act AI-5 comes at a time when Latin America is already
                  doing a lot of soul searching about its military past thanks to the high-profile
                  arrest and extradition proceedings in London of former Chilean dictator
                  Augusto Pinochet.

                  Pinochet presided over the murder and disappearance of thousands of
                  Chileans after he took power in a U.S.-sponsored military coup. Pinochet
                  faces extradition to Spain, which wants to try him for the murders of
                  Spaniards in Chile.

                  Brazil was the first Latin American democracy to fall under a wave of military
                  rule that struck the region in the 1960s and 1970s. A group of moderate
                  generals took power in 1964 with the help of many members of Brazil's top
                  political and business elite, who feared the growing power of the left in
                  national politics.

                  But AI-5 was a watershed for Brazil and the rest of Latin America because it
                  signalled to the world that Brazil was not going to let democratic institutions
                  like the courts and Congress handle growing unrest.

                  Rather, it would stifle opposition to its rule with repression and censorship-- a
                  mix that would later be adopted in a more repressive form in neighbouring
                  countries.

                  The violence in Brazil does not compare with that in Chile or Argentina, where
                  the military confessed to throwing sedated prisoners into the ocean from
                  airplanes so their bodies would never be found.

                  Still, historian Marshall C. Eakin called the period between 1968-1973 "the
                  darkest and most sinister years in Brazilian history."

                  While newspapers devoted some coverage to the anniversary, few Brazilians
                  Sunday seemed to take much notice of it.

                  "Most Brazilians will not pay attention to this because many don't even
                  remember," said Guilhon Albuquerque, a political scientist at the University of
                  Sao Paulo.

                  "Brazil is a young country and about 40 percent of the population was born
                  after AI-5 was revoked in 1979."

                    Copyright 1998 Reuters.