Arns initiated a years-long campaign against torture and made it a priority pursued by the Brazilian Conference of Bishops. In 1975 the regime's censors at times restricted Arns's ability to protest by refusing permission to print his views in the archdiocesan weekly newspaper, "O São Paulo". He had written: "Even last week, a number of cases of torture took place in São Paulo. A number of persons were arrested, hooded and are kept incommunicado for a long time... Systematic torture has been instituted in Brazil with modern techniques to obtain confessions from ordinary as well as political prisoners." Authorities did not allow the archdiocesan radio station to broadcast for a year. When authorities called the death of journalist Vladimir Herzog in prison a suicide, Arns led an ecumenical memorial service and characterized Herzog's death differently, saying "Those who stain their hands with blood are damned. Thou shalt not kill." A message the next week read in all the churches of the archdiocese said: "It is not lawful during interrogation of suspects to use methods of physical, psychological or moral torture, above all when taken to the limits of mutilation and even to death, as has been happening."