The project, whose authors reserved their anonymity as a safety precaution, collected and analyzed documents for more than 707 Brazilian military court proceedings spanning the time frame from 1964 to 1979.
By providing such irrefutable proof, the members of the project hoped to negate any claim that the victims of torture were politically motivated or biased in their accounts of the abuse suffered at the hands of military and police personnel.
Within days of taking control of the Brazilian government in 1964, the military regime began categorizing society in two ways: civilians and subversive enemies.
Almost immediately, Operation Cleanup (Operação Limpeza) was created, and the government began kidnapping, imprisoning, and torturing thousands of suspected subversives.
Some of the defendants from the court documents were forced to participate in the practical application portion of the class; these individuals were tortured in front of the classroom of students as a pedagogical approach.
BNM classified many of the torture defendants into the following afflicted groups: Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff was a former guerrilla who was part of the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard in the 1970s.
The project was proposed by the activist group Grupo Tortura Nunca Mais, founded during the first months of civilian government following twenty-one years of military dictatorship in Brazil.
The first was supposed to rename streets and plazas in homage to those who had disappeared or been assassinated, and the second, to convert the former police headquarters in Rio into a cultural center and state archive.
The monument depicts a man in the "pau de arara", or parrot's perch, torture position, in which victims are hung upside down with their wrists and ankles bound.