On August 14, 1997, at 6:22 a.m., a prisoner transfer bus left the yard of the Marabá detention center in Pará, bound for the Altamira regional prison. The distance between the two cities, via the P-150 highway and the old dirt road that cut through the forest, was approximately 340 km. Under normal conditions, the trip took between 5 and 6 hours.
The bus never arrived. Inside were 15 inmates, two prison guards, and a driver. The vehicle was a modified state bus, white with a blue stripe, identified on the side with the acronym Susep-PA. The prisoners traveled handcuffed in pairs, seated on metal benches fixed to the vehicle’s body
The windows had bars, the doors had external padlocks. The driver’s name was Nereu Tavares Gomes, he was 52 years old. He had worked for the Public Security Secretariat for over 20 years and knew that road like the back of his hand. Nobody saw the bus arrive, nobody saw it stop. Nobody along that entire highway and its branches remembered seeing that vehicle pass by that August morning.
The first alert reached the Altamira police station late in the afternoon, when the bus failed to appear and none of the officers could be located. Most of the staff did not have cell phones that year. The communication radio installed in the vehicle had been reported as defective two weeks earlier.
The repair request was contained in an official document that was still awaiting a response at the secretariat in Belém. For nine days, the Fire Department, the Military Police, and agents from the Public Security Secretariat of Pará searched the P-150 highway, its side roads, and the banks of the streams that crossed that region. They found no trace of the vehicle, of the people, nothing to indicate what had happened that morning between Marabá and Altamira.
The case was registered, investigated for a few weeks, and then closed. The official version that prevailed was that of a planned escape involving an internal riot. The prisoners, the report said, had overpowered the officers, forced them to stop, and disappeared into the forest. According to the same version, the officers also disappeared because they were involved.
None of these claims were proven, and none were officially refuted. 28 years later, in March 2025, a group of workers clearing a path for the installation of an electrical transmission line in the interior of Pará found a bus hidden by vegetation more than 40 km from any paved road. The vegetation had grown over it.
The roof had collapsed in two places. The sides were covered in rust and vines. But what caught the workers’ attention was not the state of the vehicle, but what was inside. The handcuffs, all of them open, were laid out on the seats, as if someone had carefully removed them and left them there in order before departing.
There were no bones, no belongings, no visible signs of violence, only the silence of a forest that had grown around a vehicle closed for almost three decades. And the open handcuffs lay on the rusty metal seats. What happened that August morning in 1997 between Marabá and Altamira? Who opened those handcuffs? And where are the 18 people who boarded that bus and never reached their destination? There are details in this case that the original investigation never managed to explain, and the reappearance of the bus in 2025 made them even harder to ignore.
The first is technical. The handcuffs used in prison transport in Pará during that period were the standard model for the state fleet, with a double locking mechanism. A specific key was needed to open them. Each officer carried a pair of keys stored on their belt.
The forensic examination conducted after the bus was discovered confirmed that the handcuffs were not forced. There were no signs of forced entry, cutting, or deformation of the mechanism. They were opened with a key, one by one.
The second detail is geographical. The location where the bus was found is more than 40 km from the nearest road, within a dense forest area that, in 1997, did not have a suitable passable road for a vehicle of that size. The experts who were at the site in 2025 raised a question that has not yet been answered: how did that bus get there?
The third detail is human. Among the 15 prisoners transported on that bus, there was one name that resurfaced as soon as the case was reopened. Evanildo Custódio Braga, 38 years old, convicted of property crimes in Marabá, had requested a transfer to Altamira three times in the previous six months. The requests were recorded in his medical file. The stated reason was a death threat inside the detention center. The real reason, according to investigators who reviewed the case in 2025, is still being investigated.
On the morning of August 14, 1997, the Marabá detention center woke up earlier than usual. Transfers were always like this. They woke up the entire pavilion, even those who weren’t going anywhere. There was a different noise on those mornings, a movement in the corridors that the inmates recognized even before the guards started calling them by name. It was the sound of keys clinking in the bars, of hurried footsteps on the concrete, of low voices trying to maintain order without having to shout.
Those who were leaving knew they were going, and those who stayed knew too. Nereu Tavares Gomes arrived at the courtyard at 5:40 a.m., half an hour earlier than expected. What was his habit? He wasn’t the type of man who showed up at the last minute. His eldest daughter, Soraia, who is now 42, remembers that her father used to wake up before his alarm clock rang.
“I prefer to take my time rather than rush.”
He said. That August morning, Nereu checked the oil level, tested the brakes, and verified the fuel reserve. The bus had been filled with enough fuel the previous day for the outward journey, with some to spare. The list of prisoners to be transferred had been given to the two agents the previous night.
The officers were Valdemar Souza Correia, 44 years old, with 12 years of service, and Geraldo Matos Figueiredo, 37 years old, who had joined the Security Secretariat 4 years ago. The two knew each other, but were not close. They worked different shifts, and that was one of the few times they coincided on the same mission.
Everything was going according to procedure. The forms were signed. The prisoners were led to the yard in a line, handcuffed two by two before entering the vehicle. Boarding took approximately 20 minutes. The rear door was locked with a padlock from the outside. Valdemar climbed in through the front door and remained in the interior aisle near the seats. Geraldo occupied the seat behind the driver, facing the prisoners. Nereu adjusted the rearview mirror, started the engine, and left the yard at 6:22 a.m.
What Nereu didn’t know—what none of the three knew—was that the radio installed in the vehicle, the equipment that should maintain contact with the control center throughout the trip, had been formally checked the previous week and deemed operational in the maintenance report, but it wasn’t. The inspection had been carried out with the vehicle parked in the yard, unloaded, and without any journey having been made. While moving through the forest, the radio signal would be lost in the first few kilometers after Marabá and would not return. This defect had been informally reported by other drivers in the fleet, but never officially documented.
And the repair request document filed in the Belém office referred to another problem, an ignition fault that had been repaired three months earlier. Technically, the radio was still operational on paper. The courtyard of the Marabá detention center smelled of diesel and wet earth that morning. It had rained overnight, one of those quick, heavy downpours that Pará sometimes brings in August without warning. And the concrete floor was still damp. The sky was clear when the bus left.
The night shift driver, who was leaving when Nereu arrived, later told police that they had exchanged a few words at the gate.
“I’m doing well and the weather looks promising.”
Nereu said. The other driver confirmed:
“Yes, he shows promise.”
This was the last documented conversation anyone had with Nereu Tavares Gomes. The bus turned left at the exit of the detention center, took the main street towards the ring road, and entered the PA-150 highway heading north. A gate guard recorded the departure in the logbook with the exact time: 6:22 AM. This handwritten entry in a hardcover book that has survived the test of time was the only official document that accurately confirmed the moment that vehicle left Marabá. After that, the bus disappears from all records.
Of all the names on that day’s transfer list, the 2025 investigation was able to accurately reconstruct the history of 11. The other four had incompletely recorded identities in the files from that time, a common problem in the prison administration of Pará in the 1990s, and there were inmates whose entry records at the unit had only a name and an ID number which, when cross-referenced with state systems, did not return consistent results; it was not a case of identity fraud. It was, often, simply a reflection of a system that recorded what it could record with the resources it had, at the speed that bureaucracy allowed.
Among the 11 who were definitively identified, the stories were similar with slight variations. Most had been convicted of crimes against property, aggravated theft, simple robbery, and receiving stolen goods. Two of them were accused of small-scale drug trafficking. This type of case, in the language of prison officers at that time, was called “survival trafficking,” because it involved quantities that did not indicate organization or leadership, and one of the individuals had been convicted of serious bodily harm after a fight at an illegal gold mine near Marabá.
None of the 15 had been convicted of homicide. None of them appeared on any list of leaders of a criminal organization. This detail is important because, in the years following the disappearance, one of the versions that circulated in the corridors of the Security Secretariat and reached some newspaper newsrooms was that the bus had been intercepted by an organized criminal group seeking to rescue one of its leaders being transported in that vehicle. The version was never supported by any name, any medical record, or any formal investigation, but it circulated. And it circulated because, in the absence of a consistent official explanation, any narrative that filled the void found room to grow.
Evanildo Custódio Braga was the name that appeared most frequently in informal conversations inside the Marabá detention center in the months leading up to his transfer. He was 38 years old. He was from Tucuruí, the son of a family that had settled in the region after the arrival of the hydroelectric dam, when many people came and many were left with nowhere to go. After the reservoir rose and the land disappeared, Evanildo entered the prison system at age 29, convicted of fraud and document forgery. It wasn’t a violent crime; it was the kind of crime that, within prisons, placed a man in a delicate position, without the respect that violent crimes sometimes generated among inmates, but guaranteeing him access to skills that organized groups valued.
He had requested a transfer to Altamira three times in six months. The reason stated on the forms was a death threat within the unit. The forms existed; they were located by investigators in 2025 in Evanildo’s original file, and were filled out in his own legible and careful handwriting. The detention center administration had responded to the first request, stating that it was under review. To the second, they said it depended on a vacancy in Altamira. To the third, there was no formal recorded response. The transfer had been approved based on other administrative criteria, unrelated to Evanildo’s requests, and he had been included on the list that August morning without anyone, apparently, having cross-referenced his name with his previous requests or the reasons he gave for wanting to leave.
What did Evanildo know that others didn’t? And if he knew anything at all, that’s one of the questions the researchers in 2025 couldn’t answer. His medical records were thoroughly examined, his visits were tracked. His phone call records within the unit were analyzed to the extent that they survived the test of time. What emerged from this material was a man who received visits from his mother every three weeks and who, in the two months prior to his transfer, had received two visits from a man identified in the records as his cousin, whose name appeared in the unit’s books, but whose ID, when checked in 2025, belonged to a person who had died in 1993. This detail was highlighted in the preliminary investigation report of 2025. It was not explained.
The PA-150 highway in 1997 was not what it is today. There were paved sections, yes, but there were also long stretches of dirt road that worsened in the summer and turned into a mud pit during the Amazonian winter. The stretch between Marabá and the first mandatory detour, approximately 60 km after leaving the city, had uneven asphalt, with patches that drivers learned to avoid by heart, because the sequence of potholes didn’t change from one year to the next. After that detour, the quality of the road progressively deteriorated. Red earth appeared between the stones. Trees grew closer to the roadside. The shade of the forest arrived earlier than in any city.
Between Marabá and Altamira, the official route included two mandatory detours during that period. The first was necessary to avoid a bridge over the Itacaiunas River, which had been closed since 1994 due to structural problems and, in 1997, was still awaiting federal funding for repairs. The detour added approximately 30 km to the route and passed through a section of an INCRA settlement, where the road was pure dirt and where, in the days following rain, heavy vehicles left deep ruts that the sun later hardened like cement. The second detour was necessary to bypass an area of agrarian conflict near the municipality of São João do Araguaia, where the Military Police had maintained an intermittent presence since 1996, after a confrontation between landless rural workers and farm security guards that resulted in deaths.
This second detour wasn’t signposted. The fleet drivers knew about it through verbal instructions passed from one to another, because no official document acknowledged that the main stretch was closed. The prison fleet drivers were aware of these irregularities. Nereu had done it dozens of times. He knew where the road narrowed, where there were loose stones, where vegetation grew over the road surface during the rainy months. He also knew that in those sections there was nobody: no houses, no businesses, no gas stations, no formal rest stops. Once on those dirt roads, a vehicle could disappear from any observer’s sight in a matter of minutes and could remain gone without anyone, along that entire stretch of forest, being able to tell whether it had passed or not.
Could you go about your routine knowing that someone you love left home on an ordinary morning and that no one, anywhere along the road, could tell if that person had passed by? That is the kind of silence that Nereu Tavares Gomes’ family began to experience from the afternoon of August 14, 1997. Not the silence of those who know but do not speak; the silence of those who search and find nothing, not even a trace of an answer.
The first employee to notice something was wrong was the head of security at the Altamira prison, Raimundo Pereira das Neves, who waited for the bus until 2 p.m. before calling the office in Belém. Raimundo was 51 years old. He had worked in three different prison units in Pará and had been in Altamira for two years. He was a man accustomed to delays. Note that transfers from the state fleet frequently took long enough that a wait of a few hours didn’t cause immediate alarm. The road was difficult, the vehicle was old, and unexpected things happened.
The response Raimundo received when he called at 2 PM was to wait another hour, as delays were common on that route. The person who answered the phone in the office was an administrative employee who had no authority to activate any emergency protocol and who noted the call in an incident log. This notebook was found in 2025 in a file in Belém. It contained a record of Raimundo’s call, with the time and a summary of what had been discussed. Next to it, written in pen, was the instruction the employee had received from his immediate supervisor: “Wait.”
At 3:30 PM, Raimundo called again. This time, the advice was to file a police report and contact the local police station. The police report was filed at 4:16 PM at the Altamira civil police station, almost 10 hours after the bus left Marabá. The officer on duty who signed the report was a man named Hélio Drumond Vasconcelos, who had arrived in that district less than a year ago and who, according to later accounts from colleagues, initially treated the incident as a probable case of mechanical failure or an accident on the way. He sent a patrol car to check the initial stretch of the PA-150 highway towards Marabá. The patrol car returned without having seen anything out of the ordinary. During that 10-hour period, there was no active search, no call to the fire department, and no communication with the families of the officers or the detainees. There was no contact between the Altamira police station and the Marabá police station to confirm whether the bus had actually left. The system functioned exactly as it had been designed to function at that moment: with bureaucratic caution, with waiting as the first response, and urgency only when authorized by the chain of command.
Na manhã seguinte, quando ficou claro que o ônibus não chegara e que nenhum dos três funcionários dera sinal de vida, a natureza do caso mudou. O corpo de bombeiros foi chamado. A Polícia Militar recebeu ordens para mobilizar pessoal. A Secretaria de Segurança em Belém começou a monitorar a situação diretamente, mas as 10 horas perdidas no dia anterior eram 10 horas que a floresta já havia absorvido. E a família de Nereu Tavares Gomes soube do seu desaparecimento por um vizinho. Um senhor chamado Dirceu, que costumava ouvir rádio AM de Marabá durante o almoço, ouviu uma reportagem dois dias após o incidente mencionando um ônibus da frota prisional do estado que havia sido dado como desaparecido na rodovia PA-150. Dirceu foi à casa de Aparecida Gomes, a esposa de Nereu, bateu na porta e perguntou se ela sabia de algo. Aparecida não sabia de nada. Ninguém do escritório havia ligado. Nenhum dos colegas de Nereu havia aparecido. Ela explicou a ausência do marido para si mesma como uma daquelas situações em que o ônibus para para dormir no meio da jornada porque a noite cai antes de chegar. Algo que já acontecera antes, uma ou duas vezes em anos anteriores.
Aparecida Gomes tinha 50 anos em agosto de 1997. Trabalhava como merendeira em uma escola municipal no bairro Cidade Nova, em Marabá. Ela acordava às 5h, fazia café para os filhos, saía às 6h para pegar dois ônibus até a escola e voltava às 14h. Estava criando três filhos com Nereu: Soraia, 18 anos; Cleiton, 20 anos; e o caçula, Tadeu, que tinha 16. Nereu trabalhava de forma irregular, às vezes saindo na segunda e voltando na quarta, às vezes ficando fora a semana inteira porque a viagem se repetia ou porque havia trabalho extra na unidade. Aparecida estava acostumada a esperar. O que ela não estava acostumada era esperar sem saber por quê.
Na tarde do dia em que Dirceu bateu em sua porta, ela foi à delegacia de Marabá. O policial que a atendeu conferiu o registro e confirmou que havia um boletim de ocorrência em Altamira relacionado ao ônibus, mas disse que o caso estava sendo tratado pela delegacia daquela cidade e que ela precisaria falar com eles. Aparecida não tinha como ligar para Altamira àquela hora. O telefone da delegacia de Altamira, quando ela finalmente conseguiu o número, não era atendido. Ela voltou para casa, deu o jantar aos filhos e ficou acordada até as primeiras horas da manhã esperando o telefone tocar. O telefone não tocou.
The families of the prisoners had even less access to information than the families of the staff. Some took weeks to realize that their loved ones had not arrived at their destination. Official communication between the prison system and the prisoners’ families was poor during that period, and there was no established procedure for notifying relatives in case of a failed transfer. Prisoners were not allowed to make a phone call to report their arrival. Families relied on letters, scheduled visits, and sometimes rumors circulating among acquaintances.
Benedita Custódio Braga, Evanildo’s mother, was a 62-year-old woman who lived in a peripheral neighborhood of Marabá called São Félix, on the other side of the Tocantins River. She worked as a laundress for three families in the city and visited her son every three weeks, always on Wednesdays, because that was the day the municipal school where her granddaughter studied closed earlier and she could find someone to pick up the girl. When the day of the visit following the disappearance arrived, she went to the detention center and was informed that Evanildo had been transferred. She asked where, and they said Altamira. She asked when she could visit him there. They said she would need to wait for her registration to be updated in the system.
Benedita returned home. The following week, she went back to the detention center with a letter she had written to her son. The letter was rejected because the recipient was no longer in the unit. She asked if there was any way to send the letter to Altamira. They said they didn’t know. It was only when a niece who worked at a notary’s office in Marabá heard about the case from a client she had read about in a newspaper that Benedita understood what had happened. She took the bus to Altamira alone two weeks after the disappearance. She arrived at the regional prison at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. The employee who attended to her confirmed that Evanildo Custódio Braga had never been admitted to that unit. Benedita asked what that meant. The employee said she didn’t know. Benedita returned to Marabá that same day. She arrived home at 11 p.m., her feet swollen from walking so much, and with an answer that, in reality, was no answer at all. She sat down in the kitchen chair and stayed there for a while, a time that her niece, who was waiting for her, couldn’t measure. Then she said she would make a promise to Our Lady of Nazaré and that she would wait.
She waited for years. The investigation opened by the Civil Police of Pará in August 1997 formally lasted 4 months. During this period, 16 witnesses were heard. Most were employees of the Security Secretariat, administrators of the Marabá detention center, the head of security in Altamira, and the administrative employee who answered Raimundo Pereira das Neves’ call on the afternoon of his disappearance. The others were residents of gas stations and isolated houses along the PA-150 highway, who stated that they had not seen the vehicle pass that morning. None of these witnesses had been on the side roads. None had been approached while inside the forest. No formal investigation was carried out on the side roads beyond the first stretch, which the inquiry justified with a phrase that the 2025 investigators underlined in the original document: “Access impossible for police vehicles under the current conditions.”
This justification was never accompanied by a technical report describing what those conditions were, nor by an assessment of how much time or resources would be needed to overcome the impediment. It was an administrative phrase that closed off a possibility of investigation without needing to explain why it was being closed. There were no overflights of Pará, as the state did not have its own helicopter at that time. The Military Police helicopter had been requested for another operation in the Belém region and was not redirected to the search. There was no sniffer dog, no formal communication with other states, no request to Sinalid, which that year still functioned in an extremely precarious way and without integration between the federative units to cross-reference information about the 18 missing people. There was no detailed map, at any point in the investigation, of the possible routes the bus could have taken, indicating distances, access conditions, and points where a vehicle of that size could have stopped or been stopped.
The conclusion of the inquiry, written in December 1997 by police chief Hélio Drumond Vasconcelos, pointed to an organized escape involving inmates. The text was technical and concise. It stated that, in the absence of evidence of a crime against the vehicle’s occupants, the hypothesis most consistent with the available facts was that the inmates had, in a coordinated manner, overpowered the officers and the driver, forced the vehicle to stop, and disappeared into the forest, possibly with previously arranged external support. According to this reasoning, the officers either participated voluntarily, or were held under coercion and then eliminated or integrated into the group. This conclusion was not supported by any physical evidence, any direct testimony, or any field investigation that had reached the interior of the branches. It was a working hypothesis that had been promoted to the official conclusion because the investigation deadline had expired and because no other explanation had emerged to replace it. In March 1998, police chief Hélio Drumond Vasconcelos was transferred to the district of Redenção, in southern Pará. The original investigation was sent to the archives of the Security Secretariat in Belém. The Public Prosecutor’s Office approved the archiving without requesting further investigations.
If this happened to you, or to someone you love, would you believe this conclusion? Would you accept that a relative of yours disappeared in a forest without anyone actually going into that forest to look for them? Amazonian vegetation doesn’t wait. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s a functional description of what happens when the forest encounters a stagnant surface. Pioneer plants arrive first. Ferns, thin vines, and weeds—they grow quickly and die quickly, but they pave the way for what comes next. Then come the shrubs, the young trunks, the lianas that climb any vertical structure they find. In 5 years, a vehicle parked in a clearing will already have vegetation growing on the roof, on the fenders, and on the flat tires. In 10 years, it disappears from the line of sight of anyone passing 50 meters away without knowing what they’re looking for. And in 28, it becomes part of the landscape. A strange shape under the vine, a different kind of resistance in the undergrowth when the machete strikes, something the eye doesn’t immediately identify because the brain isn’t prepared to find it there.
The workers who found the bus in March 2025 were employees of a company contracted to install an electrical transmission line in a section of the interior of Pará that had never been electrified before. The trail they were opening was new, traced from a satellite map that had identified the least rugged corridor for the project. None of them knew they had been through that area before. No local resident had mentioned anything unusual about that region. One of the workers, a 41-year-old man named Davi Pantoja, was clearing vegetation with a machete when he felt the blade hit metal. The sound was different from the sound of wood, drier, harder, with a vibration that lingered in his hand.
Davi slowly cut through more undergrowth around the vehicle and saw the rusty surface underneath. He called his colleagues. It took them almost 40 minutes of cutting vegetation to identify what they had in front of them. The shape of the vehicle gradually emerged. First the roofline, then the sides, then the barred windows, then the blue stripe that the rust had turned into a dark stain, but which was still recognizable against the faded white of the body. Davi Pantoja took a picture with his cell phone and sent it to the foreman at the construction site. The supervisor called the G company. The company called the civil police. The information reached the regional police station in Altamira that same afternoon. The officer who received the report, a man who had been in the position for two years and who had been born six years after the bus disappeared, asked that the area be preserved and that no one touch anything.
Meanwhile, in a house in a neighborhood of Marabá, Aparecida Gomes, who had only officially become a widow in 2004 when Nereu’s death was judicially declared due to absence after the seven years required by law, was celebrating her 80th birthday with fragile health and a still intact memory. Her eldest daughter, Soraia, lived with her. Her middle son, Cleiton, lived in a nearby neighborhood. Tadeu, the youngest, had moved to Belém years ago. On that day in March 2025, Aparecida was sitting in the living room when her daughter arrived with her cell phone in hand and began to recount what had appeared in the news. Aparecida listened in silence. Then, she asked her daughter to repeat it. Then, she remained quiet for a while. No one had contacted her before the news broke on social media.
The forensic team from the Pará Institute of Criminalistics arrived at the site two days after the discovery. Access was difficult. The nearest passable stretch of road was more than 12 km from where the bus was located. The last leg of the journey was completed on foot, with the equipment carried manually by the team. The specialists arrived at the site early in the morning, when the forest was still damp from the night and the light filtered through the treetops in narrow bands, illuminating the ground unevenly. The bus was in a small depression in the terrain, slightly tilted to the right, as if the front wheels had progressively sunk over the years of rain. The roof had collapsed in two places due to the accumulated weight of the vegetation on the structure. The sides were covered in rust and vines. The barred windows were still in place, although the panes where there had once been glass were shattered. The front door was open, the rear door was closed. The specialists documented everything before entering. Then, one by one, they went in.
What was found inside the bus was recorded in a preliminary report, released in April 2025, after review by the Institute of Criminalistics and approval by the delegate responsible for the reopened case. The 15 handcuffs were open and arranged on the metal seats. Each pair was next to its corresponding seat, as if they had been deliberately removed and placed there, one by one. The arrangement was not random. Each open handcuff was on the seat where, according to the transfer list, a detainee was seated. There were no cut marks on the rings, no deformation in the locks, and no sign that the handcuffs had been forced or broken. The mechanism of each was intact and functioning normally when tested by the experts. Due to the accumulated humidity of almost three decades in the Amazon rainforest, this was considered in the report as a factor to be verified. The metal had rusted on the outside, but the internal locking mechanism, protected by the handcuff itself, had remained intact.
The experts’ provisional conclusion was that the handcuffs were opened with a key, one by one, using the correct tool, without apparent haste. But no keys were found inside the vehicle. The officers’ belongings had also disappeared. There were no holsters, no documents, no badges. The driver’s seatbelt was unfastened, as if Nereu had stood up. The rearview mirror was adjusted to its normal operating position. The ignition key was not in the ignition. The rear door was locked from the inside with the internal bolt in the locked position. This meant that whoever exited the vehicle did so through the front door, the only one that was open, or that whoever locked the rear door from the inside did not exit through it. The experts could not explain this part, not at that moment. And the final report, according to the latest information available on this case, has not yet been released.
Do you remember what was said at the beginning? The handcuffs placed on the seats, the door locked from the inside, the forest that grew for 28 years over a vehicle that no one should have been able to get there. The answer to what happened that August morning in 1997 still doesn’t officially exist, but there is evidence that investigators in 2025 found in the files that had been forgotten for almost three decades. And that evidence changes something.
When the case was reopened by the Pará state police unit combating crimes against public administration in April 2025, the investigators’ first task was to locate the original 1997 inquiry. The case had been initiated in Altamira, but the physical file had been transferred to Belém in 1999 during a reorganization of criminal courts in the interior of the state. In Belém, it underwent at least two institutional address changes before arriving at the location where it was found: in a basement corridor of the Public Security Secretariat headquarters, inside a cardboard box marked with the original protocol number, which in turn was inside a metal filing cabinet whose inventory had not been updated since 2007. The three folders containing the inquiry were yellowed and had damp stains on the edges. Part of the text was illegible, especially on the pages at the ends of each folder. The researchers in 2025 photographed everything before handling it, as a precaution. Reading and transcribing the material took four days; It was during this work that Álvaro Mendes Pinto’s testimony came to light.
Álvaro was 43 years old in 1997. He was a truck driver. He worked independently, transporting wood between sawmills in the interior of Pará. And on that morning of August 14th, he was on highway PA-150, traveling in the opposite direction to the missing bus. The statement was taken at a police station in the interior, not in Altamira or Marabá, but in São João do Araguaia, where Álvaro had stopped to refuel three weeks after the disappearance. A police officer at the gas station had heard him telling the attendant that he had seen a bus stopped at a fork in the road that day and had taken the man to the police station to give a formal statement. Álvaro Mendes Pinto’s statement consisted of two handwritten pages in the handwriting of a small-town police chief who wrote quickly and used his own abbreviations. But the content was clear.
Álvaro had passed a fork in the road approximately 80 km north of Marabá, around 9 am on the 14th. He saw a white bus with a blue stripe stopped at that fork, its engine apparently off, with no smoke coming from the exhaust. There were two men outside the vehicle, on the dirt area of the fork, near the front door. The two were standing and talking, without any signs of agitation or conflict. Álvaro had slowed down as he passed because the road was narrow and the width of the truck required attention. And, at that moment, he had observed the bus for a few seconds. He hadn’t seen any movement at the barred windows. He hadn’t seen anyone else outside the vehicle besides the two men.
Álvaro continued his journey because the scene hadn’t seemed strange to him at that moment. A bus stopped on the side of a country road with two men talking outside wasn’t, in itself, an unusual occurrence on those roads. He only remembered this more clearly after hearing, weeks later, that a prison transfer bus had disappeared on that same route, that same morning. The statement had been recorded, signed by Álvaro, and stapled to the inquiry’s appendices. It had never been mentioned in the body of the document, never cross-referenced with other testimonies, and never generated any further investigation. In 2025, investigators found the name Álvaro Mendes Pinto in the records and tried to locate him. They then discovered that he had died in 2011 in a traffic accident on the BR-222 highway, near Açailândia, in Maranhão. His version remained on paper for 28 years without anyone reading it carefully.
What that testimony suggested was both simple and disturbing. Álvaro had seen the bus stopped 80 km from Marabá at 9 am on the 14th, with two men outside the vehicle having a calm conversation. This meant that the bus had left the city, traveled the first 80 km of the route without apparent incident, and stopped voluntarily, or at least without visible signs of conflict, at that point. This meant that, at least until 9 am, everyone was still inside the vehicle, or that at least two of the occupants were outside of their own free will, in a calm and composed manner. And while the bus waited, stopped, what happened after 9 am on August 14, 1997, at that fork in the road, about 40 kilometers downstream from where the bus would be found 28 years later, is not recorded anywhere. There are no witnesses, no photographs, no physical traces that have been preserved. There are only the open handcuffs, laid out on the rusty metal seats of a bus that the forest has preserved for almost three decades.
In May 2025, the case was still officially reopened. The Pará state police unit responsible for combating crimes against public administration had requested that the State Public Prosecutor’s Office appoint a specific prosecutor to oversee the investigations. The request had been submitted, officially registered, and was awaiting a decision. The complete forensic report from the Institute of Criminalistics had not yet been released. The identity of the bus was confirmed by the chassis number, located on the plate affixed to the vehicle’s interior panel, which matched the fleet registration of the Pará Public Security Secretariat from 1997, after consultation with the Historical Archive of the state’s Department of Transit (Detran). None of the 18 people who boarded that bus in Marabá on the morning of August 14, 1997, had been found alive or dead to date. None of them had been admitted to a hospital, police station, or any official identification system in Brazil or abroad in the years following their disappearance—at least none with the names and documents that appeared in the 1997 records.
The Sinalid system was consulted. Records from the Forensic Medical Institutes of the states of Pará, Maranhão, and Tocantins were checked for the period immediately following the disappearance. Prison entry records from other states were also checked for the names on the transfer list. Nothing conclusive was returned. The Public Defender’s Office of Pará had commented on the case in April 2025, requesting access to the original inquiry and the expert report on the bus found. This was on behalf of the families of three of the detainees transported that morning, whose descendants still resided in the state and had sought legal assistance after the news of the vehicle’s discovery. Among these relatives was a woman named Rosângela Braga, daughter of Benedita Custódio Braga and niece of Evanildo, who was 7 years old when her uncle disappeared and who was now 35. Rosângela had read the news of the bus’s discovery on a cell phone app one Sunday morning, sitting in the kitchen of the house where she grew up, listening to her grandmother talk about her son who had gone to Altamira and never arrived. Benedita died in 2019, at the age of 84, without knowing what had happened to Evanildo. A promise to Our Lady of Nazaré. She fulfilled it every year until the last.
Aparecida Gomes, upon being informed by her daughter Soraia about the discovery of the bus, remained silent for a period of time that her daughter described as long. Then, she asked to see the photo. Soraia showed it on her cell phone. Aparecida looked at the image of the vehicle enveloped in vines and rust, with that blue stripe still visible beneath the decay, and said nothing for some time. Then, she said she wanted to know where her husband’s body was. Not the official version, the body. Soraia didn’t know what to answer. This is the question that remains open in this case. This is not a rhetorical question, it is a real question, asked by an 80-year-old woman who waited 21 years for a judicial declaration of death and who now knows that the bus her husband boarded in 1997 was found empty, with the handcuffs open, 40 km from any road, in a forest where he should not have been able to reach. The question has no readily available answer, and the people who might have one, if anyone does, have not come forward.
According to the most recent data from the Brazilian Public Security Forum, Brazil has more than 60,000 missing persons per year. Most of these disappearances have an explanation, but many do not. Some remain unsolved for decades, filed away in physical archives that deteriorate before they are even read, forgotten in police reports that no one ever revisits. Preserved in the memories of families who have learned to silently endure what they could not resolve. The case of the bus on the PA-150 highway is different in scale. 18 people, a state vehicle, a documented route, but it is the same in essence. Someone left, did not return, and the system that should explain what happened did not.
What the workers found in that forest clearing in March 2025 wasn’t an answer. It was a question deeper than any that had existed before. It was confirmation that the bus had been there, that the handcuffs had been opened, that the 18 people had left or been removed, and that the forest had closed in on that place with the same indifference with which it closes in on everything. The case remains open. The families continue to wait. And the handcuffs, which are now in a forensic room in Belém, inside numbered plastic bags, were opened by someone with a key, one by one, on an August morning in 1997, which has not yet been fully explained.
