Brazil
For a year intermittent riots, bombings, angry street demonstrations, daylight violence, and other forms of popular manifestations against the Costa e Silva regime have erupted throughout the country. At least a score have been killed, hundreds injured, and thousands arrested. (Exact figures are unknown since the government does not make them public.) The diverse elements in Brazilian society—labor, the Church, the press, academe, and the arts—have felt, with justification, estranged from the government since the 1964 revolution ushered in the “reign of the generals” and led to the creation of a hybrid form of government which defies definition except in the eye of the partisan beholder.
For four years Brazil’s governing military elite has been offering with artless deception the notion that it was fashioning a popular revolution. By mid-December this elaborately contrived charade was unmasked. In one impetuous stroke, President-Marshal Artur da Costa e Silva invoked the “Fifth Institutional Act,” which declared a state of siege, closed Congress, imposed tight press censorship, suspended individual rights, including that of habeas corpus, and led to the imprisonment of some 200 oppositionists and journalists. The act, in reality a decree beyond judicial appeal, was the vehicle which formally returned this sprawling, untamed giant of a country back to the folds of totalitarianism reminiscent of the Vargas era.
Following the adoption of the sweeping new powers by Costa e Silva last December (predictably provoked, according to the government, by the increasing intrusion of “subversive elements”) , Washington expressed the hope that the crackdown was only temporary and would soon be relaxed. This proved to be wishful thinking. In subsequent action, the military regime further tightened its grip; it broadened its purge of public figures to include thirty-three members of Congress, recessed five state legislatures, decreed that foreigners may be expelled from the country without investigation on charges of “acting against the national security,” and removed from the Supreme Court three justices who had been associates of Goulart and Kubitschek. The latter measure, unprecedented in Brazilian history, caused Chief justice Antonio Goncalves de Oliveira to resign. The Chief justice gave no reason, other than to say, “Silence speaks for me, for my gesture speaks louder than words.”
In another significant development, Interior Minister General Afonso de Albuquerque Lima resigned in January, the first member of Costa e Silva’s cabinet to do so, leading to outside speculation of internal dissension in the government. More likely, however, Albuquerque Lima’s decision presages an extension of the military’s reign. Shortly before his resignation, he advocated the prolongation of the revolutionary movement for another decade. Albuquerque Lima has now returned to the army, the ideal base in these times for launching a bid for the presidency.
Paranoid reaction
Ironically, the incident which provoked tile military into a paranoid reaction—or, at least, the pretext given for it—was a relatively minor one involving an indifferent political figure. Its genesis dates back to August when Sr. Marcio Moreira Alves, a demagogic federal deputy from Guanabara (Rio de Janeiro), uttered a string of blasphemous remarks about the armed forces from the sanctuary of the floor of Congress. The military, already pushed to the limits of restraint by student demonstrations, haughtily contended its honor had been impugned and demanded retribution. Properly incensed, Justice Minister Luiz Antonio Gama e Silva directed the federal Supreme Court to require Congress to lift Sr. Alves’ parliamentary immunity so he could be tried for his transgressions within the confines of revolutionary justice.
Since the government party, ARENA (National Renovating Alliance), enjoyed a 2-to-1 majority in Congress, the bemedaled brass surrounding Costa e Silva confidently presumed the proposed action would be merely an exercise in parliamentary procedure. But the Congress, misused in the past and now seeing its limited prerogatives further trampled, defiantly voted 216 to 141 to deny the government’s request. More than seventy ARENA members crossed over to the opposition, sending the military into something like a state of apoplexy.
Once the shock over Congress’ recalcitrance had subsided, the hardline general officers perceived that this was the moment to press their claims for tighter control. Caught between the public unrest and his autocratic generals, the harassed Costa e Silva abandoned his moderate position and assumed extraordinary powers, converting his government to a full-dress military dictatorship. It was not lost on Costa e Silva that the military had put him in office and the military could just as easily put him out of office, The threat was implicit in their demands.
Carnival of blunders
A mild-mannered, slow-moving man who enjoys card playing, Western movies, and three-hour siestas (Brazilians say that if an alarm clock were thrown in the presidential bedroom, it would cause a government crisis) , Costa e Silva has neither the disposition nor the experience for popular leadership. His two years in office have been marked by a paralysis of leadership, a carnival of blunders, and a lack of cohesion within the government. On one notable occasion, three different ministries released different versions of the government’s new minimumwage law.
Another time one minister declared unconstitutional a program proudly unveiled by a colleague. And for more than a year the armed forces have been locked in an internecine quarrel over whether to buy French or U.S. jet fighters. Compounding the confusion, at least three ministers have their eye on the 1971 presidential election, an event which might well have been scuttled by recent developments. As the highly respected newspaper Jornal do Brasil put it last fall: “No previous government was ever endowed with so many powers to tackle questions, but no other previous government ever showed such a lack of decision and initiative.”
Costa e Silva’s principal accomplishment has been to maintain planned economic development on the pattern of his predecessor, Humberto Castelo Branco. Yet it was only a matter of time before public discontent would boil over because of repressive social and political measures. This, in turn, led to the “Fifth Institutional Act.”
Crackdown
The mass of Brazilians will probably not find much variance in their daily lives under the new dictatorship. The right of habeas corpus, for instance, was commonly abused during the regimes of Castelo Branco and Costa e Silva. People were often arrested and jailed without formal charges being filed against them. Various individual rights were dishonored: protest demonstrations, as a case in point, were summarily banned last summer. I know of a young woman who was harassed by the secret police because she had been to Moscow as a student and continued to take Russian language lessons in Rio de Janeiro. Censorship of the arts has long been enforced: every movie, stage play, and TV program has to be approved by a federal censorship board prior to exhibition.
Before Costa e Silva’s move, however, the nation’s newspapers and magazines were more or less free to criticize the government, which they did with increasing gusto. Freedom of the press was proudly cited by both Castelo Branco and Costa e Silva as tangible proof of a representative government. But today, the Brazilian press is silenced.
Almost equally significant in the government’s crackdown was the arrest of former President Juscelino Kubitschek and Carlos Lacerda, a perennial dissenting politician whose tongue and pen have toppled governments. The regime’s action against the two gives evidence of its deep sense of insecurity. Kubitschek, whose political rights have long been suspended, remains one of the most popular political figures in Brazil, and Lacerda is regarded as a dragon slayer.
School scandal
It public disturbances had centered on the country’s educational system alone, there would have been reason enough for trouble. Archaic, neglected, and formalized to a fault, it tanks as one of the worst in the hemisphere and undoubtedly is a contributing factor to Brazil’s sluggish development. An idea of the magnitude of its ineptness can be gained from a few facts and statistics.
Although Brazil boasts a population of almost go million, it has but 50 universities with facilities for only an estimated 180,000 university students (Argentina with one quarter the population has more); only slightly more than 7 percent of the federal budget is allocated for education, less than half as much as is spent on the military; universities, which charge only a nominal tuition, are preserved for the sons and daughters of the elite and the influential since most secondary schools are expensive private institutions beyond the reach of the underprivileged; the country’s 30,000 professors spend only an average of three to six hours a week teaching and more often than not turn their classes over to assistants. Despite Brazil’s crying need for technicians, the university system continues to emphasize the classics in the old French manner (the Brazilians are avid admirers of French culture).
Perhaps the saddest commentary on Brazil’s educational operation was pointed up in a Latin-American survey which showed that in 1957 there were 6 million children in the country without schools, while eight years later in 1965 the figure rose to 8 million. The illiteracy rate was pegged at higher than 50 percent of the total population.
Over the last several years the United States has poured more than $100 million into Brazilian educational projects. But this has met with indifferent success because of the xenophobic conviction that the United States was bent on exporting “cultural imperialism” to brainwash Brazilians.
Trend to the right
The effects of the assumption of dictatorial powers by the Costa e Silva government are far-reaching and foreboding:
Costa e Silva’s action settles once and for all the intragovernment struggle between the hard-liners and those espousing a more conciliatory posture. It makes a mockery of his pledge to “humanize” the revolutionary government.
It demolishes the unorthodox governmental structure built after the 1964 coup and betrays the revolution’s original intent of leading Brazil back to a form of limited democracy.
It will probably produce a new government party, since the ARENA failed (in one noble gesture) to match the military’s concept of (blind) party loyalty.
It almost certainly will drive the antigovernment movement underground and perhaps eventually give rise to guerrilla warfare.
It makes the United States, which was an active accomplice in the 1964 revolution, look like a bad broker, and puts Washington in the position of providing a repressive military dictatorship with a sizable measure of foreign aid.
It confirms the antidemocratic trend in Latin America.
Today, Costa e Silva is a captive of his own generals. He may be excused the privilege of laboring under the illusion that he is the leader of his country, but unless he acquiesces to the wishes of the hardline military cabal, he will likely find he is dispensable to its plans.
—Dom Bonafede