Brazil

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 20, 2019 1:38 pm

BRAZIL, DELEGATED EMPIRE

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MARCH 20, 2019 · NEWS > BRAZIL


Bolsonaro visits Washington and the world media do not know whether to make jokes about the "tropical Trump" or take it seriously or even with concern . And is that under the blunders and exchanges of shirts has sealed a continental historical change.


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Neither the primary anticommunism of Bolsonaro in his dinner with the American right nor the anti-China rhetoric borrowed from the Trumpist lobbies have been the relevant part of this trip. Even the support for Brazil's entry into the OECD and the alignment with the trumpist policy in the WTO are not more than the first effects. However, winning the status of "extra-NATO preferred ally" is more than symbolic : they confirm the perspective of the Brasilia-Washington axis as a disciplinarian of the Americas with Brazil as a hegemonic power franchised in South America.

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A possible entry in one way or another to NATO is nothing compared to the global nuclear pact Bolsonaro pushed on this trip . The US would access Brazilian uranium reserves by investing in exploration, mining and enrichment and transferring technology. In a denuclearized continent, Brazil does not need the nuclear weapon for the moment and Washington sees no reason to have it. But access to enrichment technology would show clearly that no one could, in any case, develop it before Brazil. In addition, the US would win a new Cape Canaveral on the southern continent, already thinking about the logic of the new space armaments race.

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The first place to test this alliance is, of course, Venezuela. Brazil, which had been the engine and largely the designer of the "soft coup" against Maduro , was displaced and left in the background diluted by the prominence of the Miami lobby and its allies. The current stagnation of the situation made clear to US analysts that without Brazil and its military and diplomatic capabilities, the plan was simply unfeasible. Hence, the first US request to Bolsonaro was to enable the "interlocution" now non-existent with the Venezuelan military and the surprising and unexpected visit of honor to the CIA .

To make things even clearer, Bolsonaro is a fanatical servant of the Brazilian national capital, not a Trump gang, he threw Trump his willingness to put the army ... only if the US got involved militarily too . Of course, these statements were quickly used by the São Paulo bourgeoisie to stir up the military against Bolsonaro . Too late: at the same time Guedes announced the paperwork so that they would be left out of the pension reform and from Washington the president quickly returned to the discourse of " diplomacy to the last consequences " ...

The magnitude of the play was completed at the same time in Buenos Aires. There, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay delineated ProSur , the continental institutional structure that succeeded the late UnaSur . Apparently a reissue of the anti-Venezuelan block without Colombia - which will be invited later - led, like the Lima group, by Chile. In practice, it became clear that, as in the Venezuelan case, Macri and Vázquez lined up to avoid isolation and Piñera acted as Bolsonaro's point. How can he not aspire to organize the continental institutionality at the same moment in which he confesses his inability to organize a mass like the climate summit ?

In summary, the Brazilian strategy therefore has two axes: firstly to obtain the blessing and military reinforcement of the US, secondly to turn its advantage into alliances, economy and army into a continental institutional framework that aligns the countries of South America with your interests

The Brazilian strategy has two axes: first to obtain the blessing and military reinforcement of the US, secondly to turn its advantage into alliances, economy and army into a continental institutional framework that aligns the countries of South America with their interests.

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Meanwhile, the Brazilian bourgeoisie continues in internal war and the petty bourgeoisie continues its exodus towards Europe and the US , fleeing from an organized lumpen - the commandos - whose actions have an increasingly marked political aspect. The last one: machine-gunning a nuclear convoy , not coincidentally coinciding with the agreement with the United States. And what is even more alarming: growth forecasts have been revised downwards, worrying above all the financial and industrial capital paulista Bolsonaro adverse ... and in front of which this seems to have no spirit of reconciliation: being in the US, took the opportunity to renew the agreement with Mexico that allows American and European auto parts manufacturers, export cars and parts without paying customs ... which immediately caused waves of protests in the São Paulo press . Mourao, an anchor of the government, once again serving as acting president awaiting the return of Bolsonaro, said phlegmatically that the trade opening will be "slow, gradual and safe" .

The painting, together with the images of a Bolsonaro inflated by corticosteroids, antibiotics and medication, give an account of the urgency with which Bolsonaro plays what he sees as a historical opportunity. Each day that passes the economic situation breaks down and the classes in power fracture more. The fear in the government of a workers response to pension reform increases for days. Speed ​​and forcefulness are the weapons of this particular blitzkrieg of initiatives because in reality it is nothing more than a flight forward.

Each day that passes the economic situation breaks down and the classes in power fracture more. The fear in the government of a response from workers increases for days. The "great game" of Bolsonaro is a flight forward.

Summary in tweets
The US-Brazil military cooperation agreements open the perspective of the Brasilia-Washington axis as a disciplinarian of the Americas with Brazil as the hegemonic power franchised in South America.
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The nuclear agreement makes it clear that only Brazil is able to access nuclear weapons throughout the continent. In return, the US would gain a space launch base in the logic of the new space-militarized race.
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The stagnation of the situation in Venezuela made it clear to the US that without Brazil and its military and diplomatic capacity, the "soft coup" plan that had been promoted by Brazil and from which it had been boosted later, was unfeasible.
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The Brazilian strategy is based on obtaining the blessing and military reinforcement of the US, to turn its advantage into a continental institutional framework that aligns the countries of South America with their interests.
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Each day that passes the economic situation breaks down and the classes in power fracture more. The fear in the government of a response from workers increases for days. The «great game» of Bolsonaro is a flight forward
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https://nuevocurso.org/brasil-imperio-d ... =onesignal

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 23, 2019 1:56 pm

PCB: 97 Years of Struggle Alongside the Working Class
March 22, 2019

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The trajectory of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), founded on March 25, 1922, is an integral part of the history of the struggles of the working class and the oppressed against capitalist exploitation and in defense of social and labor rights and democratic freedoms, always under threat reactionary groups in Brazil.

One of the most important moments of this trajectory was the Communists' performance in the 1946 Constituent Assembly, which was held after the Second World War and the end of the Estado Novo dictatorship, when the PCB became the main party representing the working class and the exploited masses. obtained a significant vote in the December 1945 elections.

The Communist Party in the Constituent Assembly of 1946

The PCB was the fourth largest political force of the Constituent Assembly of 1946, with a seat composed of a senator (Luiz Carlos Prestes) and 15 deputies (among them Carlos Marighella, one of the most active), all of them militants deployed in active popular movements in the 1930s and 1940s, many of whom were imprisoned during the Estado Novo. The PCB elected parliamentarians in Bahia, Pernambuco, Federal District, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul.

Although a minority, the Communist party had an intense participation in the Constituent Assembly and immediately protested against the "Great Commission" in charge of drafting the preliminary draft that would be the basis for the amendments submitted by the Members. The communists criticized the reactionary aspects of the bill, such as denial of the right to vote to soldiers and illiterates, failure to establish proportionality in the organization of the electoral system, lack of political autonomy of municipalities, and prohibition of direct elections for several cities in Brazil, the lack of full recognition of the right to strike, the lack of separation between the Church and the State, and the excessive influence of the conservative Catholic clergy in the drafting of constitutional provisions.

In the struggle for rights and freedoms

The Communists made several proposals in defense of the democratic freedoms and the economic, social and political rights of the workers: implantation of parliamentarism, extinction of the position of vice-president of the Republic, end of the Senate and adoption of the unicameral system; education in public schools; wide freedom of belief and free exercise of religious worship; institution of divorce; expropriation of land aimed at speculation, for purposes of Agrarian Reform; participation of employees in the profit and management of enterprises; broad autonomy and freedom of association; maximum working day of 8 hours; nationalization of trusts and monopolies; extension of labor legislation to rural workers; right to strike against civil servants; guarantee of asylum to all political persecution;

Although most of the proposals have been rejected, some have been approved, such as the wide religious and religious freedom (amendment of Jorge Amado), the highest remuneration for night work, the addition of the item "Health and Safety at Work" in the recommendations to be observed by the labor legislation, the transfer to the municipalities of 10% of the income tax collected by the Union and the exemption of import taxes on books, periodicals and press paper.

But this movement of political affirmation was brutally interrupted by the Cold War: between 1947 and 1948, the Party is put into lawlessness and persecuted by the Dutra Government. Clandestinely, the PCB responded to the truculence of Marshall Dutra's government with a less comprehensive policy (expressed in the Manifestes of 1948 and 1950), which led the communists to political isolation.

XX Congress of the CPSU: conflicts

Tensions exploded in 1956 with the impact of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU): the denunciation of the so-called "cult of Stalin's personality" catalyzed the attention of the militants and erupted inside the PCB, provoking the emergence of divergences and internal conflicts.

The internal struggle that followed the impact caused by the 20th Congress of the CPSU (in which, in addition to a significant number of militants, the PCB lost important leaders and intellectual cadres) began to be overcome in March 1958, when the Political Declaration which proposed a new perspective of communist action. The March Declaration linked the conquest of socialism to the expansion of democratic spaces and formulated a long-term revolutionary strategy.

Brazilian Communist Party, PCB

The Sixth PCB Congress (held in September 1960) consolidated this orientation and set forth as an immediate task the achievement of legality, for which it was necessary for the Party to comply legally with party legislation, including changing the name "Communist Party of Brazil PCB) ", which existed since the foundation in March 1922, designating the Brazilian Section of the Communist International, for the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB).

Later, the name Communist Party of Brazil would be restored by communist leaders and militants who left the PCB and created, in February of 1962, PC of the B, another communist organization, that at the time, had disagreed with the process of "de-Stalinization" occurred in the Soviet Union, and later, in a variation of its political-ideological line (as would otherwise be the case again in this party's trajectory), it would have to be linked to Maoism.

Blow of the bourgeoisie and dissidents

With the new orientation, the PCB experienced great growth. By broadly renewing its contingent of militants, it began to exercise a hegemonic role in the leftist intelligentsia and, above all, increased its influence in the trade union movement, articulating broad and flexible alliances, which proved effective in certain difficult political conjunctures, such as in the owned by João Goulart in September 1961. Such alliances, however, precisely because of their breadth, often put the Party in the interest of other classes, weakening its role as the political vanguard of the proletariat. It was in this sense that the coup of April 1964, articulated by the hegemonic fractions of the Brazilian monopolist bourgeoisie, found neither in the popular forces nor in the Party the necessary conditions for immediate resistance,

The Party, however, reassembled and defined an anti-legitimative line of action centered on the refusal of any proposals that did not involve mass political actions. This refusal to foquism and to various forms of armed struggle that did not take into account the need for organization and participation of the mass movement, representing a phase of predominance of political leftism in the struggle against dictatorship, cost the PCB the loss of important leaders, such such as Carlos Marighela, Mário Alves, Jacob Gorender and Apolônio de Carvalho, among many others. This orientation was ratified in the VI Congress that the PCB held in December 1967, a victory against the repression that had settled in the country.

Repression and exile

The following years, marked by the fascistization of the dictatorial regime (mainly from Institutional Act no. 5, of December 13, 1968), marked, paradoxically, the verification of the correctness of the political strategy of the PCB. At the same time that the combination of clandestine political action with the use of legal spaces (especially through acting within the MDB) was the correct way to isolate the dictatorial regime, the PCB was violently beaten. Between 1973 and 1975, one-third of its Central Committee was murdered for repression, and thousands of militants were subjected to torture, some to death, including journalist Vladimir Herzog and worker Manuel Fiel Filho. The bloodthirsty governments of Medici and Geisel were responsible for the creation and implementation of the so-called Radar Operation,

Nor did the Communists stop intervening actively in Brazilian life. Although the majority of its leadership was exiled and much of it was imprisoned in the prisons of the dictatorship, the PCB developed a policy that privileged the unity of democratic forces. Thus, with the conquest of amnesty, which was part of the PCB program since the VI Congress (1967) in September 1979, the return of leaders and militants who were abroad and the return to social life of cadres who were in hiding were central elements in the dynamism of the struggle against the dictatorship in its most acute crisis, after the end of the so-called economic miracle cycle.

VII PCB Congress: the consolidation of the "democratic road"

Restructuring throughout the country since 1979, the PCB held its VII Congress in December 1982, which formulated a political line for the new conditions of society, entitled "A democratic alternative to the Brazilian crisis." The PCB was updating its project of becoming a national mass party by organically linking the socialist goal to a mass democracy, to be built with respect for pluralism and the fundamental values ​​of freedom.

The Party, in the run-up to this Congress, was again engulfed by internal struggles of grave consequences. On the one hand, the so-called Eurocommunism (which proposed the occupation of spaces within bourgeois society without a clear affirmation of the class struggle and the overthrow of revolutionary capitalism, in a misreading of the ideas of the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci) solid foundations in partisan thought. On the other hand, the group led by Luiz Carlos Prestes, diverging from the orientation of the majority of the Central Committee, broke with the Party, after innumerable clashes that had been stirring since the exile.

Due to internal disagreements and the fact that the Congress did not end, having been invaded by the forces of repression, the Central Committee only in 1984 was able to publish the final document of "A Democratic Alternative to the Brazilian Crisis", document permeated by contradictions generated by the attempt to contemplate the main factions and stifle the internal conflicts, trying to avoid, for some years, the fragmentation of the party.

Even so, with the former combatant of 1935 Giocondo Dias as party secretary, the party achieved gains in the political scene, although much weakened within the popular movements (especially within the workers' movement, in which its policy of class reconciliation was widely questioned). This weak insertion in the movements would end up weakening the political intervention of the PCB, in spite of its relevance in the institutional articulations of the left and the democratic field. Thus, during the defeat of the dictatorship and the democratic transition, the Party did not affirm itself as a mass organization, nor was it at the forefront of the main struggles and workers' strikes during the 1980s, even though it participated prominently in numerous union struggles. example of the work in the Banking Union of Rio de Janeiro and others.

Legality and crisis

The VIII (Extraordinary) Congress, held under legal conditions in July 1987, failed to advance the policy of the PCB: important tactical issues (eg trade union action and alliances policy) and strategic issues (the party organization, the conception of a Brazilian path to socialism) were not effectively equated. A veiled crisis reached the partisan set, expressed in the stagnation of the contingent of militants, in the loss of insertion in the union movement, in the poverty of the electoral results and in the inefficiency of the party instruments, like the weekly Voice of the Unit and all the publications of Editora Novos Rumos , which were not legitimized by militancy.

The IX Congress (1991), following the fall of the Berlin Wall, showed the Party divided from the Central Committee to the rank and file among those who wanted to capitulate to the neoliberal offensive and adapt to the new cycle of hegemony bourgeoisie and those who advocated the revolutionary reconstruction of the Party. Already in this process, the liquidationists wanted to change the name and Marxist-Leninist character of the Party and were prevented from doing so by the enormous resistance of some leaders and party foundations.

X Congress of the PCB: the streak

The crisis exploded at the X Extraordinary Congress (in January 1992, in São Paulo), set up with the sole intention of finally carrying out the liquidationist proposals. The clash occurred between a forged numerical majority, which was attended by non-members of the PCB and members of other parties, and the militants of the National Movement in Defense of the PCB, that is, among those who would leave to create the Popular Socialist Party (PPS) and those who complained about the continuity of the PCB.

At the same time that the forged majority voted for the party's liquidation, the militants of the National Movement in Defense of the PCB, after exposing their decision and objective in the opening of the spurious X Congress, retired in march until the Roosevelt State College. There, the Extraordinary Conference of Reorganization of the PCB was held, which decided, by acclamation, for the continuity of the Party, with maintenance of its name and historical acronym, continuing in the struggle for socialism.

The resumption: the struggle for the revolutionary reconstruction of the PCB

The fight for the existence of the PCB took place on several fronts: in the mass struggle and in the legal and institutional level. The militants kept the Party alive in the mass movements, affirming in the spaces of popular struggle the revolutionary reconstruction of the PCB. In the Electoral Court, a clash of more than one year was blocked for the right to use the historical acronym. At the end of the legal dispute, the sentence of the then Minister of TSE, Sepúlveda Pertence, made it clear that the acronym PCB and its symbol could only belong to who actually claimed heir to the party's political and historical legacy.

The reorganization of the Party began in the mass movements, especially in the student and union movements. In this period, a National Political Conference was held in Brasilia (1995) and two congresses were held: the X Congress in Rio de Janeiro (1993), which confirmed the purpose of building an alternative in Brazil revolutionary, having in Marxism its theoretical basis and in the construction of the Party together with the mass movement the primordial task aiming at the conscious organization of the proletariat for the transformations toward socialism in Brazil; the XI Congress, also in Rio (1996), that surpassed the national-liberating and statist evaluations that still thrived since the split with the PPS. These rich processes of partisan militancy debate have in the past removed any reformist formulation and emphasized the revolutionary character of the PCB. They returned to the concept of democratic centralism, according to their origins, and reaffirmed the Party's Marxist-Leninist character. In April 2000, in Xerém (Rio), the XII Congress was held. In addition to deepening its reading on the national and international political conjuncture and formulating its political action, the Communists of the PCB advanced in other questions that are posed for the society in the face of the capitalist exploration. The construction of a leftist front in a project to confront neoliberalism and the unity of communists in Brazil were important resolutions approved by Congress.

In March 2005 in Belo Horizonte, the PCB held its Thirteenth Congress and reinforced the understanding that the "socialist revolution is a complex historical process", that is, that "the triumph of Socialism is not a fact that will happen naturally or inexorable, as some mechanistic readings of Marx's work claim, but rather a historical possibility that must be constructed. " It marked the need to break with the government policy that the then President Lula developed in the country, under a social-liberal orientation and conciliatory with the interests and perspectives of the elites and imperialism. In January 2006, the PCB decided not to act on the CUT (Single Workers' Union) forums, because it understood that this entity had become a governmental arm and promoter of class conciliation.

XIV Congress: building the Revolutionary Block of the Proletariat

At the XIV Congress held in Rio de Janeiro in October 2009, the success of the PCB's reinsertion in the international communist movement and of militant solidarity with the parties, movements and governments that were advancing in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle around the world . There was a strong presence of foreign guests to the Congress, through the delegations of the Cuban, Greek, German, Peoples of Spain, Mexican, Lebanese, Colombian, Venezuelan, Bolivian, Chilean, Peruvian, Paraguayan, The French Communist Renaissance, the Popular Liberation Front of Palestine, the Continental Bolivarian Coordinator, the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Korean Labor Party.

Also present as guests were PSOL, PSTU, PDT, PH, Popular Consultation, MST, CRP, Intersindical, CUT, Communist Refoundation, CECAC, internationalist solidarity organizations and our dear Communist Youth Union, demonstrating the growth of PCB work within social and political movements in Brazil.

At the XIV Congress, the PCB affirmed that Brazil had already fulfilled the bourgeois cycle, becoming a developed capitalist social formation, a propitious terrain for the open class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And he asserted that the scenario of world class struggle and its manifestations in the Latin American continent, the character of Brazilian monopoly capitalism and its deep articulation with the world imperialist system, conservative hegemony, the results of this domination over workers and the popular masses in the sense of precariousness of the quality of life, unemployment, growing concentration of wealth and flexibilization of rights led to reaffirm that the character of the class struggle in Brazil inscribes the need for a SOCIALIST STRATEGY.

In order to do so, he proposed the formation of a permanent political front with an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist character, which should not be confused with a mere electoral coalition, in view of the constitution of the Revolutionary Block of the Proletariat as a movement towards socialism.

XV Congress: fight, create Popular Power!

At the XV Congress, held in April 2014, PCB militants categorically reaffirmed the contradiction between capital and labor at the global level as the fundamental contradiction in demanding the organization of the working class in the struggle against the dominant system. While recognizing that the mutations suffered by the working class in the context of the global re-sizing of present capitalism have led to very significant changes in the proletariat as a whole, it is quite different today from the industrial proletariat identified as the revolutionary subject of the Party Manifesto Communist, considered that this contingent of workers, by its central position in the process of production of wealth, the group enabled to assume the leading role in the class struggle,

As an alternative to the bourgeois order, the XV Congress advanced in the formulation of Popular Power, whose construction process must take place from the independent actions of the working class in its attacks against the concrete manifestations of capitalism, through mobilizations, strikes and movements that to set in motion the different segments of the proletariat and the working class in general. Such struggles can turn into more intense clashes against the capitalist system, but only the programmatic unity around common axes capable of unifying fragmented sectoral demands into an increasingly precise pattern of flags and claims will effectively shape the field popular and left-wing, towards a political program of anticapitalist transformations. That way,

The Political Declaration drafted by the Central Committee elected at the XV Congress states:

"The revolutionary reconstruction of the PCB now advances with a renewed and dynamic Party present on the different fronts of struggle of the working class and in all regions of the country, cohesive around precise formulations and revolutionary principles, seeking to organize the workers in their places of work and housing, attentive to the national and international conjuncture and aware of the immense task and responsibility of representing the ideals of communism in this century. "

At the present moment, we are experiencing a set of political setbacks in which the workers are subjected to the intense attacks of capitalists and subordinate governments, such as that of Bolsonaro, which seeks to destroy the set of social gains obtained through much struggle over the entire twentieth century and the beginning of this century, the same period in which the PCB established itself on the national scene, with its combative and often heroic actions alongside the working class. Looking at the historical example of the communists of the PCB, we will stick to the resistance and advance towards the People's Power and a Socialist Brazil.

WE ARE, WE ARE AND WE ARE COMMUNISTS!

https://pcb.org.br/portal2/22630/pcb-97 ... balhadora/

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 29, 2019 12:58 pm

31/3/1964: Brasil’s Zombie History

On March 31, extreme-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has called for the Military to commemorate the Coup of 1964, a Coup which he insists was nothing of the sort. Such commemorations were outlawed under Dilma Rousseff in 2011, and for the Brazil of 2019 to celebrate the anniversary in any form is horrific. It is also unsurprising, and logical.

There is a surreal asymmetry to Brazil’s conservative revisionist view of the Military Coup, and this persisted throughout the democratic period. They maintain the entirely discredited propaganda of the early 1960s and claim that March 31 1964 was simply the result of a spontaneous popular movement, a “coming together of civil society” to counter a non-existent communist threat, of Brazil becoming “the next Cuba”. Brazil ’64 served as a blueprint for the generation of public hysteria that would be used repeatedly across Latin America in the decades that followed, and for Brazil’s next Coup in 2016.

Neofascist President Jair Bolsonaro, who as a Congressman had portraits of 1964-85’s Military Dictators adorning his office walls, and has repeatedly spoken of that period as if a golden age. He now says that the 21 year dictatorship never happened. It was simply a period of “Civil-Military Governance”.

Of course, this zombified telling of history says nothing about the United States broad role in the years prior, it’s carrier group heading for the coast of Éspirito Santo, or its discomfort with then expanding relations between Brazil, Russia and China, which was echoed by its desire over the past decade to keep the BRICS multipolar project from consolidating in its “backyard”. It took over a decade for substantial detail of the foreign interests involved in 1964’s coup to come to light, much of that down to the tireless work of Professor and former CIA analyst Jan K. Black, and her 1977 book ‘United States Penetration of Brazil‘, which should be required reading on the subject.

When one looks at the actors involved in the slow motion coup between 2014-19 (still ongoing, namely with the new far-right mobilisation for the closure of the Supreme Court) it is entirely unremarkable that it would want to commemorate the Coup of 1964. These players, these children and ghosts of 1964, include the highest number of military in government since the era of Geisel in the mid 1970s. The father of Miguel Reale Jr, articulator of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, was the integralist Miguel Reale, one of the architects of 1968’s Institutional Act 5 – the neofascist “coup within the coup” which ushered in the bloodiest period of the dictatorship era.

Then you have General Sergio Westphalen Etchegoyen, arguably Brazil’s most powerful man, whose family have been involved in a succession of coups and coup attempts dating back almost a century. Business Group, the organisation of US Corporations initiated by David Rockefeller at the behest of John F. Kennedy (who had been considering military intervention in Brazil), was set up to fund (bribe) Anti-Goulart candidates and groups at the 1962 election, which included IBAD and IPES. In 2019 these organisations are the renamed Business Group itself, now called AS/COA (who publish Americas Quarterly magazine), and the Millenium Institute, considered the successor to IBAD, and whose founder Paulo Guedes is Bolsonaro’s economy minister. Millenium is affiliated to Students for Liberty and the Koch Brother’s Atlas Network, as are the libertarian MBL, who along with the hedge fund-backed VemPraRua, synthesised a revival of the “green and yellow nationalist” street demonstrations, which the United States and Brazilian Military had successfully harnessed 50 years prior. These gave both coups the outside appearance of democratic, popular will.

The sections of international media which celebrated Brazil’s “Democratic Revolution” of 1964, were mirrored by the likes of WSJ, Bloomberg and the Guardian 50 years later. Sérgio Moro, who that same media had elevated to saviour status, was the US-trained inquisitor-judge responsible for the jailing of former President Lula, thus handing the election to Bolsonaro, who would later appoint him Justice and Security Minister. Following Rousseff’s impeachment, for which his Anti-Corruption Operation Lava Jato, was a spurious pretext, Moro, the recent visitor to CIA headquarters, received a Military medal of honour for his service to the country. His work had been conducted in collaboration with the US Department of Justice.

Last but not least, we have the omnipotent media conglomerate Globo, which was instrumental in building the campaigns which powered both the coups of 1964 and 2016. Following the coup of 1964, Globo was the recipient of a huge investment from Time Life, with which it built the national media infrastructure used to maintain public opinion in support of Brazil’s Military Government in the decades that followed. Globo only atoned for its support for the Dictatorship in 2013. It did so opportunistically, with the storm clouds of a new Coup already gathering, and went on to help construct the dual popular premises for that, of selective anti-corruption sentiment, and of exaggerated economic crisis.

None of this should surprise anyone who has been paying attention. “The defining characteristic of a post-modern coup is not putting troops on the streets,” said the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven A. Cook in 2012. “Instead, you have the informal institutions of the state and past patterns of civil-military relations at work. It’s a more subtle kind of way to get what they want.” he continued.

Brazil’s Coup of 1964 wasn’t just a warning from history, it was an instruction manual.

Those ghosts of 1964 were already haunting Brazil in 2013. In April that year, when Jair Bolsonaro was still a fringe far-right crank with no realistic chance of ever being President, the “pro-business” US-backed PSDB candidate Aécio Neves generated controversy by calling the Coup of 1964 a “revolution” at a private event. Then, after losing to Dilma Rousseff in October 2014, Neves, whose grandfather Tancredo was credited with helping bring the dictatorship to an end, refused to accept the result, called his voters to the streets and sparked what would become the coup of 2016.

This abandonment of democratic process was underpinned by an insinuation that the PT administrations of Lula and Dilma amounted to “a dictatorship”, maintained by social security and corruption, rather than force.

Justification for the resulting coup of 2016 was accompanied and fed by revisionism of 1964 and the dictatorship era which intensified ahead of the 2018 election, reaching the police and judiciary. One week before the first round vote, Supreme Court President Dias Toffoli, operating with General Fernando Azevedo e Silva as his advisor, said that he now refers to the Coup as the “Movement of 1964″. Similar changes, originating from the network of the São Paulo Military Police, were made to Wikipedia entries during the period prior to the election.



Again there should be no surprise given just how brazen this transition to militarised, neofascist governance has been. Jair Bolsonaro’s speech as he cast his vote for Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, which he used as a springboard for his own presidential ambitions, began with the ominous “They lost in 1964, they lost again in 2016.”, before going on to eulogise Brilhante Ustra, head of the feared DOPS secret police, the very man responsible for Rousseff’s torture in the early 1970s.

In the face of permanent revisionism, which is well resourced and now spreading into mainstream media and education, it is essential to constantly reiterate the true nature of Brazil’s 1964-85 dictatorship, no matter how unnecessary it may seem to those with historical awareness. Military top-brass are far more cautious about glorification of that period than the bellicose President himself.

This supposed “Civil-Military Government” period was bathed in blood. On the orders of Dictators such as Medici and Geisel themselves, there came murder and torture of political opponents, and even their children at the hands of the notorious DOPS, who were often removed from their parents, and illegally put up for adoption. Entire tribes of indigenous peoples were massacred, and popular resistance crushed under a media blackout. As a result, many Brazilians still have no knowledge of what actually occurred during that period, enabling this modern day revisionism to take hold. Chronic foreign debt and rampant inflation were depicted as an economic miracle. Brazil under Dictatorship, with rampant corruption, brutal repression and complete un-acountability, was a country governed solely in the interests of its white elites.

The isentões, the appeasers, those who obfuscated or denied the 2016 coup, for the sake of their class, or their ideological and party political preferences, those who argued the impeachment was legitimate, and suspended disbelief at the makeup and programme of the corrupt Temer administration which it brought to power, those who turned a blind eye to Lula’s politically motiviated imprisonment, or assumed guilt without evidence, and those who equated the candidacies of Fernando Haddad and Jair Bolsonaro, because they wanted neoliberals running the economy, even if it had to be at the point of a gun.

All of the above could arguably join with the Bolsonaristas and celebrate the anniversary of 1964’s coup, as if at any point they tolerated what was being done to Brazil’s democracy because they believed it might bring some eventual benefit, then they too own a slice of this political conjuncture.

On April 1 2019, Brazil will again awake to find a cruel joke turned on itself.

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Children of political dissidents, detained by the notorious DOPS secret police.

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 30, 2019 11:13 am

Carlos Marighella’s call to the Brazilian People

In 1964, after President Jango Goulart announced he was going to implement agrarian reform, the US Government helped install a Military Coup in Brazil. In 1967, Carlos Marighella, grandson of a slave and life long revolutionary who had been living underground for years, was kicked out of the communist party for complaining of its inertia.

In 1968, as student uprisings and strikes spread across the country and the government initiated a series of violent clampdowns which resulted in the legalization of torture, Marighella founded the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN/National Liberation Action) revolutionary guerrilla group. That year, the ALN began robbing banks to purchase weapons, eventually kidnapping US Ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick and releasing him in exchange for 15 political prisoners, including student leader José Dirceu (who would go on to be President Lula’s chief strategist). In December, 1968, at the age of 56, Marighella wrote the following document, “A Call to the Brazilian People”, which was widely distributed in factories and universities across the country. In it, he contrasts the guerrillas, who he refers to as patriots, with the “gorillas” from the military government. A year later, he was ambushed and shot dead by CIA-supported secret police while he was walking down the street in São Paulo.

In 2016, President Dilma Rousseff, herself a former member of the VAR-Palmares guerrilla movement, was deposed in a US-supported soft coup followed by a massive sell off of Brazil’s natural resources to American and European multinationals, a Military occupation of Rio de Janeiro State, persecution of journalists and the arrival of US forces in the Amazon. In April 2018 a US Department of Justice-backed judge and prosecutor arrested, ex-President Lula in a kangaroo court proceeding for committing “undetermined acts”. Lula continues to lead all polls in this years presidential elections from behind bars, banned from communicating with the press.

In short, Marighella’s words from 1968 are more relevant than they have been in decades, because the “gorillas” have retaken control of the country.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A Call to the Brazilian People

From somewhere in Brazil I address the public, especially the workers, poor farmers, students, teachers, journalists, intellectuals, priests, bishops, young people and women.

The Military violently took power in 1964. They are the ones who opened the path to subversion. They can not complain or act surprised that patriots are working to dislodge them from the command posts they brazenly usurped.

After all, what type of order do these “gorillas” want? The public assassination of students? The death squads and their firing lines? The torture and beatings at the DOPS secret police headquarters and in the military barracks?

The government privatized the Nation, delivering it to the United States, the worst enemy of the Brazilian people. The North Americans are the owners of the greatest amount of land in Brazil, they have a big part of the Amazon and our mineral wealth, including atomic minerals, in their hands.

They have missile bases in strategic locations in our territory. The North American spies from the CIA are in our country as if it were their own home, instructing the police on how to conduct manhunts against Brazilian patriots, and providing support to the government to repress the people.

The Dictatorship put the partnership between the Brazilian Education Ministry and USAID in place to install the North American-style education system in our country and transform our universities into institutions of private capital, where only the rich will be able to study. Meanwhile, there is no space in the schools and the students are required to face military police bullets and give their blood for the right to study.

All that workers have is wage stagnation and unemployment. For the peasants, forced evictions, illegal land seizures and predatory leases. For the North-easterners, hunger, misery and illness.

There is no freedom in the country. Censorship is practiced to repress intellectual activity. Religious persecution grows day by day. Priests are imprisoned and exiled from the country and the Bishops are attacked and threatened.

Inflation spins out of control. There is too much money in the hands of the big capitalists, while every day the workers suffer from scarcity. We have never paid so much for rent and our basic needs with salaries that are so low and continually reduced.

Corruption prevails over the government. It is no wonder that the country’s most corrupt people are ministers and military officers. Members of the government live like princes, smuggling and robbing. But the public sector workers receive miserable salaries.

Faced with a scandalous avalanche of lies and terrible slander against me, I have no choice but to respond to the government’s bullets and its disgusting police forces which try to capture me dead or alive.

This time it won’t be like 1964, when I was unarmed when the police shot me and couldn’t fire back.

The far right groups rob, explode bombs, kill and kidnap. However nobody has heard of the Government trying to capture the thieves and terrorists from the Communist Hunting Command.

The dictatorship says that there is a subversive plan and a conspiracy of deposed politicians who are trying to overthrow the government. It is conducting a witch hunt, searching for the leaders of the subversion. But the leadership of this subversion is in the people and their dissatisfaction, because nobody can take this government anymore.

This movement, that has provoked so much dread in the “gorillas”, rises from the bottom up. It doesn’t come from the politicians who have been stripped of their political rights, but from the bowels of a dissatisfied people, who have found unity and organization in the power of the masses

We will not overthrow the dictatorship through elections, re-democratization or other or cure-alls of the spoiled bourgeois opposition.

We do not believe in a conformed and submissive parliament, maintained with the consent of the dictatorship and willing to sacrifice everything so that they can keep their salaries.

We don’t believe in a peaceful solution. There is nothing artificial about the need for violence which was set in Brazil when the Dictatorship took power by force.

Violence against violence. It is the only way out and we will continue what we are doing: using violence against those who practice violence against the interests of the people and the nation.

The “gorillas” think that the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia means the end of the guerrilla war. To the contrary, we are inspired by the detached example of the heroic guerrilla and will continue our patriotic fight in Brazil, working together with the people in the certainty that history is in our favor.

There is a vast resistance movement against the dictatorship. And, within it, guerrilla operations and tactics have arisen. I accept the honorable title of “Public enemy number 1”, given to me by the Gorilla government. I take responsibility for the expansion of guerrilla operations and tactics.

Who will trigger the next attacks, where and how and when will they be unleashed? This is a guerrilla secret that the enemy vainly tries to discover.

The revolutionary initiative is in our hands. We have already taken action.

We will wait no longer.

The gorillas will be stuck in a dark labyrinth until they are forced to transform the political situation into a military situation.

By using guerrilla tactics to trigger the people’s revolution, we aim to coordinate a just and necessary total war between the Brazilian people and its enemies. The Brazilian revolutionary war is not a conspiracy – it will be a long war.

Its history is already written with the blood of the students on the streets and in the prisons where patriots are tortured and annihilated. It is written in the actions of the persecuted priests, in the strikes of the workers, in the repression of the peasants, in the violent struggles in the countryside and in the great urban centers.

The destiny of the guerillas is in the hands of the revolutionary groups and in the acceptance, support, sympathy and direct or indirect participation of the people. For this, the revolutionary groups should unite in action from the bottom up.

Revolutionaries of all kinds and every party affiliation, wherever they may be, must continue the struggle and create support centers for the guerrillas. Since it is the duty of every revolutionary to make revolution, we do not ask permission from anyone to practice revolutionary acts. All we have is a commitment to the revolution.

Recent experiences of the people’s struggle show that Brazil has entered a phase of guerrilla tactics and armed actions of all kinds, surprise attacks and ambushes, weapons seizures, protests and sabotage. Mass protests, student demonstrations, strikes, occupations, and kidnapping of police and “gorillas” to exchange them for political prisoners.

Our main tactic now should be to scatter the revolutionary forces to intensify the struggle. Later, we will concentrate the revolutionary forces to organize plans and maneuvers.

There are three great options in terms of paths to be chosen by revolutionaries in the city and the countryside: to fight on the guerrilla front, to work mobilizing the people or to work in the support network.

In each of these fronts, it is important to work in a clandestine manner. We have to organize secret groups, be vigilant against police infiltration and kill snitches, spies and scouts so that no information leaks to the enemy.

Regardless of the situation we need more guns and ammunition. We need to increase our revolutionary firepower and act with precision, decisiveness and speed, even in small acts like distributing pamphlets and painting graffiti.

The following are some of people’s measures that we will impose after the victory of the revolution:

* Abolish privilege and censorship;

* Establish freedom of expression and religious freedom;

* Free all political prisoners and all people who have been condemned by the dictatorship;

* Eliminate the police, the National Information Service, the Naval Information center and all police repression institutions;

* Hold public trials and execute all CIA agents found in the country and all police officers guilty of torture, beatings and firing squad assassinations;

* Expel the Americans from the country and confiscate their property, including their companies, banks and land;

* Confiscate all national private companies that collaborated with the North Americans and oppose the revolution;

* Implement a state monopoly over finance, foreign trade, mineral wealth, communications and fundamental services;

* Confiscate land from the big ranchers and plantation owners, ending their land monopoly, guaranteeing land deeds to the farmers who till the earth, extinguishing all forms of exploitation of peasants and punish all crimes committed against them;

* Confiscate all illicit fortunes from the big capitalists and exploiters of the people;

* Eliminate corruption;

* Guarantee full employment for all workers, men and women, ending unemployment and underemployment and applying the principal of “for each second of your capacity to each second of your labor”;

* Eliminate the current tenant’s laws. Eliminate all rental contracts and reduce rents to protect the interests of the tenants. Create material conditions for people to acquire their own homes;

* Reformulate the education system, cancel the partnership between USAID and the Brazilian Education Ministry and every other vestige of North American interventionism, to enable Brazilian education to meet by the needs of the liberation of our people and their independent development;

* Expand scientific research; and

* Remove Brazil from the condition of satellite state to US foreign policy, so that we can be independent and support other underdeveloped nations in the fight against colonialism;

All of these measures will be guaranteed by the armed alliance of workers, peasants and students – the revolutionary national liberation army – which is rising out of the embryo of the guerrillas.

We are at the threshold of a new era in Brazil, which will bring about the radical transformation of our society and the valorization of Brazilian women and men.

We will fight to take power and replace the State bureaucratic and military apparatus with the armed people. The goal of our strategy is a People’s Revolutionary Government.

Down with the Military Dictatorship!

Viva Che Guevara!

Carlos Marighella

December, 1968, Brazil

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 01, 2019 1:53 pm

Image
A woman holds a sign that reads in Portuguese "Never commemorate, remember to not repeat. Dictatorship never more," during a protest against the military coup of 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 31, 2019. Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who waxes nostalgic for the 1964-1985 dictatorship, asked Brazil's Defense Ministry to organize "due commemorations" on March 31, the day historians say marks the coup that began the dictatorship.

SAO PAULO (AP) — Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in several major Brazilian cities Sunday to protest the 55th anniversary of the coup that instituted the country's 1964-1985 military regime.


The demonstrations took place in 10 states, a day after an appeals court judge overturned another judge*s decision barring the commemorations sought by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has sparked controversy with comments seen as racist, homophobic and misogynist, and has praised the authoritarian regime.

In Brasilia, the nation's capital, protesters marched chanting "dictatorship never again."

Brazil's armed forces overthrew President Joao Goulart on March 31, 1964.

"Bolsonaro expresses his love for the dictatorship because he thinks that violence will resolve the country's problems," said Marcos Souza, a 37-year-old bank worker in a Rio protest.

The celebrations called for by Bolsonaro were roundly condemned by human rights activists and social groups that quickly organized Sunday's protests.

A 2014 report by the country's truth commission concluded that at least 434 people were killed or disappeared during the military regime Bolsonaro repeatedly praises.

During Bolsonaro's 28 years in Congress, he repeatedly expressed support and admiration for the military regime. During last year's election, that position angered and shocked many Brazilians while seducing others who think of the dictatorship as a time of low crime and general order. Bolsonaro has said the dictatorship should have gone farther in killing communists who threatened Brazil.

A video sent by Brazil's Presidency to journalists via WhatsApp on Sunday defended events on March 31, 1964.

"It was a time of fear and threats. The communists were detaining and killing their own compatriots; there was a lot of fear," a man said in the video looking at the camera. "Called on by the press and by the people in the streets, Brazil agreed that it had a national army and appealed to it. Thanks to this, the darkness passed and there was light."

"The army saved us; there is no way to deny this and history can't be changed," the man said.

Asked by The Associated Press, the Presidency's press office declined to say who had produced the video.

"Brazil has become the laughing stock of the world," said 67-year-old Carmelena Nassar in Rio. "I am here to defend the future of my children and grandchildren. We cannot return to that period of tortures and murders we already experienced

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 01, 2019 2:02 pm

1964: Brasil & CIA
A historical account of the build up to the Coup of 1964, and CIA involvement in it.

This article “Brasil & CIA” originally appeared in CounterSpy, April – May 1979, pp. 4-23 and has since passed into the public domain. We believe it to be a rare & valuable document of the period, with particular historical relevance today. More information on involvement in the Coup from since-declassified U.S. Government documents can be found at the National Security Archive.

by Peter Gribbin

In the rush to consolidate its role as the new leader of the so-called Free World, the U.S. government saw as a major task the containment of countries which, during the Second World War, had begun to pursue an independent course of development. If and when change was to occur, it was to be of a made-to-order variety, directed from Washington. To this end, the establishment of powerful, centralized police forces in Asia, Africa, and especially Latin America became a top priority.

The person the Eisenhower administration charged with organizing a task force on police training was Byron Engle.1 He was chosen because of his experiences training Japanese police after WW II and setting up a police advisory board in Turkey. Funding for the new police program supposedly came from the State Department, even though Engle had been with the CIA since 1947. This prompted FBI head J. Edgar Hoover to complain that the police program was just one more CIA cover.2

When the Kennedy administration moved into Washington, Engle’s program took on new life. The cabinet-level Counter-Intelligence (C-I) Group was headed by Maxwell Taylor, a former general who was later named U.S Ambassador to South Vietnam. The C-I Group along with the CIA was responsible for creating the Special Forces (Green Berets); new training in counter-insurgency at military schools from the National War College on down; and new courses at the Foreign Service Institute, all designed to make members of the State Department, the CIA and the military branches knowledgeable in counter-insurgency techniques. In addition, a special Committee on Police and Police Training was set up under the direction of U. Alexis Johnson, who has worked hand-in-glove with the CIA throughout his career. Johnson later became deputy ambassador to South Vietnam, but in his present capacity he appointed Engle as head of the new, expanded police program. After all, hadn’t Engle once trained 100,000 Japanese police in only two months?3

In the Fall of 1961, just as Joao Goulart was taking over the presidency, the United States began an expanded influx of CIA agents and AID officials into Brazil. AID Public Safety advisers like Dan Mitrione were responsible for “improving” the Brazilian police forces. Engle sent CIA officer Lauren J. (Jack) Goin to Brazil under the cover of “adviser in scientific investigations.” Before coming to Brazil, Goin had set up the first police advisory team in Indonesia which was instrumental in the CIA-backed coup which culminated in the documented killing of over three-hundred thousand Indonesians. He had also served with Engle when the first police advisory team was created in Turkey.4

Economic Background

The Goulart regime of 1961-1964 represented the “fundamental contradiction between a government’s responsibility to the citizens who elected it, and the obedience to the demands of foreign creditors expressed in the IMF stabilization program.”5 A government which refuses to make any gesture toward meeting their conditions frequently finds its international credit for imports cut off which, in turn, increases the likelihood of a CIA-induced, right-wing coup.

A country in the throes of a balance of payments crisis is usually unable to obtain needed credit unless “significant policy changes are made.”6 For example, new loans may be obtained only through a change away from nationalist economic policies toward measures favoring foreign investment. As is being increasingly borne out by other Third World countries, Brazil’s democratic system at the start of the 1960s proved unequal to the difficult challenge posed by the foreign exchange constraint. Since Goulart was elected by a “populist” coalition of voters spanning class lines, the party system itself discouraged strategies that might put any significant group at a disadvantage. In this atmosphere, the coup of ’64 became a sine qua non for new U.S. credit.

Previously, in 1958, President Juscelino Kubitschek had been forced to come to an agreement with the International Monetary Fund on certain stabilization measures in order to secure a $300 million loan.7 (His predecessor, Getulio Vargas, had committed suicide in 1954. Behind him he left a document in which he blamed outside forces for helping to create the circumstances that drove him to take his life: “The foreign companies made profits of up to five hundred percent. They demonstrably deprived the state of more than a hundred million dollars by false evaluations of import goods.8) But the president of the Bank of Brazil refused to go along with the government’s proposed credit squeeze which would have caused a depression in the private sector. After floundering around for the greater part of 1958, instituting half-way measures unacceptable to the IMF, Kubitschek broke off negotiations and gave up hope for the American loan. He managed to obtain the needed foreign credit by means of a short-term, high-cost loan from private sources abroad. But his successor, Janio Quadros, inherited a full-scale debt repayment crisis that could no longer be postponed.

Quadros immediately came to terms with the IMF and his foreign creditors. He abolished the “exchange auctions” which the Brazilian government, by auctioning off its foreign exchange reserves to the highest bidder/importer, had previously used as a source of revenue.9 Certain exchange controls (subsidies) were established for “necessary” imports, effecting a devaluation of the Brazilian cruzeiro by fifty percent. The IMF was still not satisfied, however, and by July of 1961 it succeeded in forcing Quadros to abolish all exchange controls and to peg all exchange transactions at the (free) world market rate.10

By meeting the IMF’s demands, Quadros was able to negotiate new credits and reschedule payments due with his U.S. and European creditors. Inflation still raged, however, and when Quadros limited credit (like Kubitschek before him) he came up against strong political counterpressures. Hoping to win popular support and a new mandate to lead the country, Quadros resigned after only eight months in office.

Although some sources saw his resignation as being forced upon him by the CIA, Quadros had, in fact, been the U.S. government’s last hope for bringing their brand of stability to Brazil within a democratic framework. In the New York Times of August 26, 1961, the mood of the State Department was described as “one of fear that the departure of President Quadros from Brazil’s political scene, if it is not reversed, would plunge the country into serious political difficulties threatening its stability and interfering with the financial and economic stabilization program.”

Quadros’ successor, Joao Goulart, whose political strength rested on the close ties he had fostered with the unions while Minister of Labor under Vargas, was to the left of the Brazilian political spectrum. The real threat — to industrialists, the army and foreign investors — was the likelihood that under Goulart organized labor would become the dominant political force in Brazil.11 If Quadros could not carry through his stabilization program, there seemed even less to hope for, in that respect, from Goulart.

During Goulart’s presidency, the contradictions inherent in Brazil’s post-war development reached the breaking point. Goulart had inherited the accumulated problems of fifteen years of inflation and foreign borrowing which none of his predecessors had successfully tackled. Brazil’s last effort at economic stabilization within a democratic framework was made in 1963. The Three-Year plan, drawn up by Minister of Finance, Santiago Dantas, and Minister for Economic Planning, Celso Furtado, was made with one eye on the Brazilian electorate and the other on the IMF.12

On the one hand, this plan promised to carry out tax and agrarian reforms while resuming a high rate of growth. Simultaneously, however, it sought to curb inflation which was a precondition for receiving new credits and/or deferral of payments due. In 1963, this crushing debt repayment burden threatened to eat up 45 percent of Brazil’s export earnings.13 When the plan was presented to the IMF, the latter wanted more stringent conditions. These were: devaluation of the cruzeiro; exchange reform which meant abolishing subsidies on the import of wheat and petroleum; and, restrictions on the budget deficit (which translated into a cutback in government services) and on wage increases. These restrictions were designed to contract the money supply and depress the costs of goods and labor. Cheaper goods and labor (at the expense of the workers) would make Brazilian products more competitive on the world market. But the contradictory elements of the Three-Year Plan soon exploded.

Brazil was able to head off imminent disaster when the Agency for International Development (AID) agreed to release $400 million on the condition that the government stick to its austerity program.14 The government’s program was doomed to failure, however, because of a proposed 70 percent wage increase to government employees — the military among them — whose support was necessary if Goulart was to stay in power. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Goulart gave in to the wage increase and held off on the proposed stabilization. The U.S. immediately suspended its aid disbursements.

Goulart further exacerbated American hostility towards him when he signed the Profit Remittance Law.15 This law, which infuriated foreign investors, provided that profit remittances could be calculated only on the amount of capital originally brought into the country, and not on the (much larger) unremitted past profits which had been reinvested in Brazil. U.S. distaste for Goulart was expressed in the cutting-off of aid to his government while at the same time giving aid to certain conservative state governors (Carlos Lacerda in Guanabara and Adhemar de Barros in Sao Paulo) with whom it thought it could do business.

The final act of Goulart’s futile attempt to placate both foreign and domestic interests was played out in the first quarter of 1964. Early in the year, Goulart held discussions on yet another exchange reform and rescheduling of Brazil’s foreign debt with a three-man team from the IMF. But this attempt to come to terms with his creditors fell through when, in a gesture towards the Left, he announced the expropriation and redistribution of privately owned land and the nationalization of private oil refineries. Unfortunately, these moves did more to mobilize the Right than they did to gain support from the Left. On April 1, 1964, the military quickly deposed Goulart and installed its own caretaker government.

The subsequent fifteen years have shown that with the overthrow of Joao Goulart, democracy in Brazil came to a screeching halt. After a shaky twenty years, basic political rights were abandoned. Provisions of the First Institutional Act drawn up after the coup created a cassacao, or political death for ten years. These emergency powers soon gave way to a Second Institutional Act. The Fifth Institutional Act shut down Congress, suspended habeas corpus for political activity, and gave full autocratic power to the president.16 Labor laws enacted after the coup rescinded virtually all job-related rights: the right to strike, to negotiate directly with the employers instead of the state, and to establish trade union representation within factories.17 The destruction of democracy in Brazil was evidence of the impossibility of serving two masters. Goulart was never able to reconcile the legitimate demands of domestic pressure groups with the external economic constraints of Brazil’s creditors. As a final ironic twist, Goulart’s refusal to succumb to foreign pressures only served to irritate undemocratic forces inside Brazil to the point where they saw it in their interest to get rid of democracy and Goulart in one fell swoop.

Imperialism’s Internal Allies: Brazil’s National Enemies

In the fall of 1961, just as Joao Goulart was assuming the presidency, the United States began to make contact with his right-wing opposition. At the same time, the CIA began a multifaceted penetration of Brazilian society designed to influence that country’s internal politics. Lincoln Gordon, U.S. ambassador to Brazil, was appointed the same day that Goulart’s predecessor, Janio Quadros resigned. Soon after his arrival in October, Gordon met with a right-wing admiral named Silvio Heck. Heck informed Gordon of a poll of the armed services which revealed that over two-thirds of the enlisted men opposed Goulart. Heck also hoped that when it came time to oust Goulart “the U.S would take an understanding view.”18 Although Gordon later determined that Heck’s figures were exaggerated, he never once warned Goulart or his advisers of this conspiracy.

The CIA, for its part, took more than a passive interest in helping right-wing military forces come to power in Brazil. The overthrow of Goulart and the destruction of democracy in Brazil was effected through the manipulation of diverse social groups. Police, the military, political parties, labor unions, student federations and housewives associations were all exploited in the interest of stirring up opposition to Goulart. Yet, while Washington’s original intent may have been to replace Goulart with the strongman General Castello Branco, the guaranty of the coup’s longterm success demanded an increase in U.S. material and training for the Brazilian security forces which continues to this day.

The military coup took as its first president Humberto Castello Branco, a man who had a long and close relationship with the United States military. During the Allied invasion of Italy in 1945, a number of prominent Brazilian officers participating in the campaign became exposed to American military ideas and tactics.19 Castello Branco’s roommate in Italy was a CIA-coup engineer, then-Lieutenant Colonel Vernon (Dick) Walters. In 1964, Walters was the U.S. embassy’s military attaché, and the man most closely connected with Brazil’s military leadership.

Since the end of World War II, Washington had used its role as policeman of the so-called Free World to justify expanding its influence in the Brazilian forces. Military planning between the two countries was coordinated by a Joint Brazil United States Military Commission (JBUSMC). In 1949, the Pentagon helped Brazil set up and staff the Escola Superior de Guerra (Advanced War College), a carbon copy of the U.S. National War College.20

The Advanced War College is responsible for national security studies, development of military strategy, and ideas on nation building — the last being taken from the Pentagon and the U.S. Army’s experience in reconstructing postwar Japan.21 To this day, the college has graduated over three thousand civilians and military managers indoctrinated in a right-wing military ideology and the belief that only the armed forces can lead Brazil to its proper destiny as the great power of Latin America.22

Another Brazilian army general who was instrumental in the coup was Golbery do Couto e Silva. Like Castello Branco, Couto e Silva was a member of Brazil’s military elite who became enamored of U.S. military thinking while a member of the Allied expeditionary force in Italy in 1945.23 The Brazilian army’s “intellectual gray eminence,” Couto e Silva was particularly influential in the formation of the Advanced War College, popularly known as the “Brazilian Sorbonne.” At one point the head of Dow Chemical’s Brazilian section, Couto e Silva became head of Brazil’s first national intelligence service, the SNI, after the coup in 1964.24

In the early 60s, the now-retired General Couto e Silva became the chief of staff at the Institute for Social Research Studies (IPES, in Portuguese). The leading inspiration at IPES was Glycon de Paiva,25 a mining engineer from the state of Minas Gerais. To avoid detection, IPES posed as an educational organization that donated money to reduce illiteracy among poor children. IPES’ real work, however, was organizing opposition to Goulart and maintaining dossiers on anyone de Paiva considered an enemy.

Making the rounds of Brazil’s major industrialists, de Paiva was able to appeal to their interests by translating his visceral hatred of communism into a simple message they could understand: Goulart wants to take away from you that which is yours. In this way, de Paiva was able to drum up close to $20,000 a month in donations.26

One immediate target of IPES’ anti-Goulart campaign were housewives, whom de Paiva recognized as being receptive to warnings about the threat that communism posed to the Brazilian family, and to the values of society in general. He set up women’s societies in all the major cities. In Rio de Janeiro it was called the Women’s Campaign for Democracy (CAMDE).27 During the week of the coup in March 1964, IPES organized a huge march against Goulart. In Sao Paulo 10,000 people joined a March of the Family with God for Freedom. Sao Paulo women presented a manifesto on behalf of Christian democracy, while at the same time the Archbishop of Sao Paulo forbade his bishops from participating in the march because he said it had been funded by the U.S. advertising agency, McCann Erickson.28

De Paiva’s major concern, however, was the threat posed by Goulart’s openness towards the Left. In this respect, Couto e Silva’s role in keeping files at IPES was twofold. On the one hand, he put paid agents in the Brazilian military to make sure that key men throughout the services remained loyal to the Brazilian “nation” and not to Goulart. At the same time, IPES placed paid informers in factories, schools, and government offices to report on supporters of Goulart. Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, received special attention as de Paiva was convinced that Goulart had many supporters there. Before Couto e Silva was finished, IPES had files on 400,000 “enemies” of Brazil.29

Another part of the CIA’s effort to create anti-Goulart sentiment in Brazil was the rigging of elections. Working through a front group called the Instituto Brasileiro de Acao Democratica (IBAD), the CIA channeled money into local political campaigns. IBAD, in turn, passed the money through its two branches, Democratic Popular Action (ADEP) and Sales Promotion, Inc.30 In the 1962 elections, IBAD not only funded more than one thousand candidates but recruited them so that their first allegiance would be with IBAD and the CIA. At every level, from state deputies up to governorships, the CIA stacked the ballots in favor of its candidates.

In February, 1964, the CIA was nearly “burned” by a parliamentary investigation into its violation of election laws in 1962.31 The CIA had spent close to $20 million, but a scandal was averted by three developments: five of the nine members of the investigating committee had themselves received CIA funds; three of banks involved — First National City Bank, the Bank of Chicago, and the Royal Bank of Canada — refused to reveal the foreign sources of the money deposited in the IBAD and the ADEP accounts; and lastly, Goulart, still hoping to appease Washington, saw to it that the final report was laundered.

The CIA also manipulated certain members of the student movement. The benefits of having assets in the universities, however, were not realized until after the overthrow of Goulart. Though largely ineffectual before the coup, the Grupo de Acao Patriotica (GAP) was later used to spy on members of the national student union (UNE). GAP was founded by Aristoteles Luis Drummond whose hero was the right-wing Admiral Silvio Heck.32 During a radio talk show he did in Rio de Janeiro, Drummond expounded on GAP’s determined defense of liberty and property, which he claimed only the military could safeguard. Not surprisingly, the interview was rebroadcast by the Voice of America. Later on, the CIA supplied Drummond with 50,000 books and Cold War pamphlets on the communist menace and, more to the point, diatribes against the UNE. Still, GAP’s following was small and whenever Drummond put up posters saying “GAP with Heck,” he made sure it was in the dead of the night.

In the four years following the coup, however, Drummond and GAP came to play a key role in the new junta. For example, during a student demonstration in May of ’68, protesting the discriminating cost of education, a military jeep was overturned and set on fire. The next morning, Drummond was asked to speak about the incident with President Costa e Silva. Boarding a military aircraft, Drummond was flown to Brasilia where he spent an hour with the president identifying leaders of the demonstration and assuring Costa e Silva that they were communists who did not represent the majority of students.33

Police Operations

As opposition to the military junta increased, control of the state apparatus became synonymous with increased surveillance, arrests, and torture of those engaging in political activity. In response, Couto e Silva, the chief of staff at IPES, took his hundreds of thousands of files to Brasilia to set up the first national intelligence service, the SNI.34 As with the creation of DINA in Chile, Brazil’s SNI was set up immediately after a CIA-backed military coup. Inevitably, the SNI turned to its more powerful counterpart in the North. In police barracks all over Brazil it was common knowledge that many officers took money from, and reported directly to, the CIA stations. In return, the CIA and the SNI began to push the police for results. Hard-pressed for incriminating evidence on subversives, the police concluded that nothing made a detainee more willing to talk than a little torture. Besides, working closely with the CIA opened one up to special stores of equipment. Everything from tear gas to field telephones (used to administer electric shocks) could be delivered immediately from the Panama branch of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD). Requesting such material through normal channels might take months.

Yet, the information on dissidents in Couto e Silva’s files was inconclusive, and the processing of prisoners was cumbersome. An alternative resource had to be found. The sense of limitations on the part of the Brazilian police soon gave rise to vigilante groups which sought to appease the fears of Brazil’s new leaders and their U.S. backers. One of the men who acted on these concerns was Henning Albert Boilesen, president of a liquid gas company. The suspicion that Boilesen was in the pay of the CIA grew when he began soliciting money from wealthy industrialists for a new organization called Operacao Bandeirantes (OBAN).35 OBAN united the various military police intelligence services into one paramilitary organization which knew no limits.

Esquadraos da Morte (Death Squads) were not a new phenomenon in Brazil. Before the coup they had been a source of extra income for off-duty policemen. If a thug needed a rival eliminated, he could arrange for a member of a Death Squad to get the job done. Despite salary increases from the AID, six years after the coup Death Squad executions by off-duty police personnel were still taking place. And now, a new wrinkle had been added. The “Ten for One” dictum meant that for every killing of a Death Squad member, ten people would die. When a Sao Paulo police investigator was killed in 1970, nearly twenty people were executed by the police.36

U.S. AID officials knew of and supported police participation in Death Squads. In Uruguay, a CIA operations officer, William Cantrell, used the cover of an AID Public Safety Advisor to help set up the Department of Information and Intelligence (DII).37 Cantrell’s chauffeur, Nelson Bardesio was himself a member of the Death Squad in Montevideo. Under interrogation by Tupamaros guerrillas in 1972, Bardesio testified that the DII served as a cover for the Death Squad. Bardesio’s testimony further revealed that a Brazilian diplomat offered to set up radio communications between Brasilia and Montevideo. Uruguayan intelligence officials, claimed Bardesio, received Death Squad-type training in Brazil. The living link between the two countries’ Death Squads is Sergio Fleury, a top officer of the political police in Brazil. A leader in the elimination of the Brazilian left, Fleury has been identified by hundreds of political prisoners as the man who supervised their torture.38 Through his work in the Death Squads, Fleury’s infamy has spread from Sao Paulo to all of Brazil and on to Uruguay. On at least two occasions, he met with groups of Uruguayan police through CIA contacts.39

The systematic use of torture was also condoned if not encouraged by U.S. AID officials. Police in Brazil once speculated on what the Public Safety Advisor Dan Mitrione would do if he were witness to the torturing of a prisoner. One said he would leave. Another asked, “Where, the country?” “No,” said the first, “leave the room.”40 To this day, the U.S. Public Safety Program in Brazil has assisted in the training of over 100,000 federal and state police personnel. Moreover, 600 high-ranking officers have received training at the now-defunct International Police Academy (IPA) on the campus of Georgetown University in Washington DC.41 The United States is also responsible for the construction, equipping, and development of the curriculum and faculty of Brazil’s National Police Academy, its National Telecommunications Center; and the National Institute of Criminalistics and Identification.42

In the actual torturing of prisoners, the military and civilian police worked hand in hand. It was a common practice for prisoners to be taken from a prison run by the civilian police to one run by a branch of the military and then back again to a facility run by the police. CENIMAR, the navy’s intelligence section, had its main prison and torture center in the basement of the Ministry of the Navy, near the docks of the harbor in Rio de Janeiro. U.S. Navy officers based at the naval mission often heard screams from across the courtyard. But none of them — not even mission commander, Rear Admiral C. Thor Hanson — ever raised the matter with their hosts.43

From the CENIMAR facility, prisoners were shipped across Guanabara Bay by motor launch to a prison on the Isle of Flowers. Inside the low white buildings were interrogators who specialized in torture. The staff there was made up of members of the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS). The island’s commander was Clemente Jose Monteiro Filho, a graduate of the School of the Americas (commonly referred to as the escuela de golpes, the school of coups) at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone.44 The leader of interrogation and torture was Alfredo Poeck, a navy commander who had taken a three month course at the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg in 1961.45

A common torture routine consisted of a preliminary beating by a flat wooden paddle with holes drilled through it called a palmatoria. This would be followed by a more concentrated application of electric wires to the genitals designed to elicit information from the victim. If this method failed, the prisoner was subjected to another round with the palmatoria — often for six hours at a time.46 Today, Brazil’s terror technology has advanced beyond the electric prod and the wooden paddle. Testimony from political prisoners verified by the Brazilian College of Lawyers lists among the newest inventions a refrigerated cubicle called a geladeira. Nude prisoners are boxed in the geladeira for several days at a time and frequently doused with ice-cold water. All the time, loudspeakers emit deafening sounds. One prisoner described this as a “machine to drive people crazy.”47

The graduates of CIA-connected police programs in the U.S. are an undeniable concern to the Brazilian people. CounterSpy, speaking to this concern, is presenting the names of these graduates during the 1961-64 periods:

Dates indicate when the person was in the U.S.

Abreu, Antonio Candido (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Ferreira, Rubens Jose (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Affonso, Leonel Archanjo (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Firmo Sereno, Joao (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Almeida, Eudes Batista (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Hostin, Jose Mario (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Almeida, Jose Tabosa (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Lage, Raimundo Valerio Dias (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Andrade, Neylor Vasconcellos (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Mafra, Heitor Martins (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Araujo, Jose Eduardo (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Nascimento, Ricardo Frazao do (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Araujo, Taltibio Delivalle y (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Nogueira, Hever da Silva (1/15/63-2/15/63)

Arnaut, Vilmar Leal (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Oliveira, Alceu Drummond (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Barbosa, Joaquim (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Pereira, Paulo Fernandes (1/15/63-4/15/63)

Boffa, Carlos Alberto (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Ribeiro, Arlindo Bento (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Brandao, Raul (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Rosa, Helio Pestana (1/15/63-4/15/63)

Costa, Jose Luiz (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Saraiva, Iaci Cruz (1/15/63-2/15/63)

Da Costa, Ismar Concalves (1/15/63-4/15/63)

Silva, Paulo Souza da (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Dantas, Walter (1/15/63-4/15/63)

Silva, Wilson Gomes da (7/15/63-10/15/63)

De Abreu, Eudes Coutinho (1/15/63-4/15/63)

Silveira Filho, Paulo Agemiro da (7/15/63-10/15/63)

De Almada, Antonio Soares (4/15/63-7/15/63)

Sousa, Saulo Nunes (4/15/63-7/15/63)

De Arruda, Firmiand Pacheco (1/15/63-4/15/63)

Souza, Dilson de Almeida (1/15/63-4/15/63)

Fernandes, Antonio (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Teixeira, Dioran (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Fernandes, Oezer Carvalho (1/15/63-2/15/63)

http://www.brasilwire.com/1964-brasil-cia/ (continued)
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blindpig
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 01, 2019 2:04 pm

1964: Brasil & CIA (continued)

Labor Operations

In this final section we will examine how CIA’s subversion of Brazilian labor leaders and other trade union officials helped to topple Goulart. As such, we are making available to the people of Brazil the names of those persons who participated in special training sessions in the U.S. from 1961-1964. These courses were run by the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) which, according to Philip Agee, is a “CIA controlled labor center financed through AID.”48 Before going into the names, however, it is important to trace the history of U.S. labor’s cahoots with American foreign policy in Latin America.

Since the middle of the 1950s, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations — once they had merged to become the AFL-CIO — have taken on an increasingly active role in the implementation of American foreign policy. When the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) was established as an anti-communist rival to the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), the “Free World” acknowledged that Latin America would become the exclusive domain of the AFL-CIO in its Cold War counter-offensive against its perceived nemesis, Soviet Expansionism.49

ICFTU’s affiliate in the Western hemisphere was the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT). In both ideology and practice, ORIT mirrored the AFL-CIO, which both funds and profits from its little sister to the South. ORIT’s “prime goal is to fight Communism and to promote ‘democratic trade-unionism.’ It preaches reform within the existing capitalist system, denying the existence of class antagonism…. ORIT points to the U.S. as an example of the rewards that the system can heap upon the working class and organized labor.”50 The principle sources of ORIT’s funding have been the AFL-CIO, ICFTU’s International Solidarity Fund, and other U.S. agencies. In 1961, its annual budget amounted to $125,000, excluding the grants.51 The CIA has exercised considerable control over ORIT. In the early 60s, Morris Paladino was ORIT’s Director of Education, Director of Organization and Assistant Secretary General. At the same time, Paladino was also the CIA’s principal agent in ORIT, working out of the CIA’s International Organizations (IO) Division in Mexico City.52

Another creature of the AFL-CIO’s work in the international arena is the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). Inaugurated in 1962, AIFLD’s board of directors testifies to the commonality of interests shared by the CIA and America’s industrial and labor elite. AIFLD’s executive director until 1966 was Serafino Romualdi, former Inter-American representative for the AFL-CIO. Other board members include AFL-CIO chief George Meany; Joseph Beirne, head of the Communication Workers of America and a collaborator in CIA labor operations through the Post, Telegraph and Telephone Workers International (PTTI); J. Peter Grace, an ex-president and present chairman of the board of AIFLD, and head of the W.R. Grace Company which has extensive interests in Latin America. Other business leaders who hold or have held executive positions include Charles Brinckerhoof, chairman of the board of the Anaconda Company; William M. Hickey, president of the United Corporation; Robert C. Hill, director, Merck and Company; Juan C. Trippe, chairman of the board, Pan American World Airways; Henry S. Woodbridge, chairman of the board, Tru-Temper Copper Corporation.53 A new member of AIFLD’s board of directors was Nelson Rockefeller who joined shortly before his death. Aside from this illustrious crew, executives rounding out AIFLD’s leadership come from Gulf Oil International, Johnson and Johnson International, Owens-Illinois, and members of the Institute of International Education and the Fund for International Social and Economic Education, both recipients of funding from CIA fronts.54

The extent to which AIFLD is under the aegis of the CIA is indicated by the fact that Serafino Romualdi, while at AIFLD, was still an agent of the CIA’s International Organizations (IO) Division. Through the IO Division, Romualdi and William Doherty — former Inter-American Representative of the Post, Telegraph and Telephone Workers International (PTTI) and now AIFLD’s Social Projects Director — exercised day-to-day control of AIFLD for the CIA.55

Unlike ORIT’s out-front role in promoting pro-Western trade unionism, AIFLD is dedicated to “strengthening the democratic labor sector in terms of … technical assistance and social projects … primarily in the areas of education and training, manpower studies, cooperatives and housing.”56 William Doherty is less equivocal when he points out that AIFLD is an example of the desirability of cooperation between employers and workers. He thus emphasizes AIFLD’s main goal: to dispel the hostility of Latin American workers toward U.S. corporations.57

A less optimistic but more realistic appraisal of AIFLD’s role is given by Philip Agee in his book, Inside the Company. Speaking of its creation in 1962, he states that AIFLD is “Washington’s answer to the limitations of current labor programs undertaken through AID as well as through ORIT and CIA stations.” The problem, says Agee, was “how to accelerate expansion of labor organizing activities in Latin America in order to deny workers to labor unions dominated by the extreme left and to reverse communist and Castroite penetration.”58

“AID programs,” says Agee, “are limited because of their direct dependence on the U.S. government…. ORIT programs are limited because its affiliates are weak or non-existent in some countries…. The CIA station programs are limited by personnel problems, but more so by the limits on the amount of money that can be channeled covertly through the stations and through international organizations like ORIT and ICFTU.”59

Under the official cover of “adult education,” AIFLD sets up social projects such as workers’ housing, credit unions and cooperatives. AIFLD’s major task, however, is similar to ORIT’s in that it seeks to organize anti-communist labor unions in Latin America. To this end, AIFLD set up training institutes which would carry on the teaching of courses presently being given by AIFLD members. And although administrate control of the training institutes in Washington would be by AIFLD, it was hoped that the institutes themselves would be headed by salaried CIA agents under operational control of the local CIA station.60

A logical outcome of AIFLD’s obsession with anti-communism was the direct participation of its trainees in the overthrow of Joao Goulart. Even before Goulart came to power, AFL-CIO leaders were critical of growing communist strength in both the labor movement and in Juscelino Kubitschek’s government. In 1956, Romualdi, along with labor attaché Irving Salert and U.S. ambassador James C. Dunn, arranged to have Brazilian labor leaders visit the U.S. AIFLD’s goal was the “development of a core of labor leaders who, by commanding the enthusiastic support of the rank and file, could turn back Communist attempts to capture the Brazilian labor movement.”61

The 1960 elections saw Janio Quadros elected president and Goulart vice-president. During this time, Romualdi began to court Carlos Lacerda, the right-wing governor of Guanabara, the capital of which is Rio de Janeiro. When Quadros attempted to halt Brazil’s raging inflation by limiting the supply of credit, pressure against him mounted. In August of ’61, after only eight months in office, Quadros unexpectedly resigned. By doing this, he hoped to rally the nation behind him and thus give himself new popular support. But Lacerda, acting on the advice of Romualdi, saw to it that the expected communist call for a general strike would be defeated. Speaking to the opening session of the ORIT convention being held in Rio, Lacerda said he would resign in order to lead “from the streets” the fight against Quadros.62 During the convention, Romualdi and AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer William F. Schnitzler pressured the labor leaders into boycotting the proposed strike.63

When the call for a general strike was issued on August 26, the Maritime Workers, the Central Committee of the Railway Unions and the Trade Union Committee for the Defense of Democracy, representing over four million workers, prevented their members from honoring the strike, thus causing its failure.64

When news of ORIT’s complicity with Lacerda’s anti-government plans became known, Quadros’ Minister of Labor threatened to outlaw ORIT in Brazil. Only Quadros’ resignation kept him from issuing the decree.65

ORIT’s relations with Quadros’ successor were even worse. Early in 1962, an ORIT delegation headed by General Secretary Arturo Jauregui, Mexican Senator Manuel Pavon and Romualdi went to Brasilia to confer with Goulart. After waiting the whole day to speak with the president, the delegation left without even having had a chance to see Goulart. When Goulart came to New York later in the year, he innocently asked the AIFLD director, “My dear Romualdi, when are you coming to visit me in Brasilia?”66

Goulart’s popularity steadily declined as inflation ate away the wages of Brazilian workers. Between 1958 and 1963, the cost of living increased by over 600 percent.67 To counter the combined criticism of industry, commerce, the military and the Church, Goulart began to take his case to the workers and oppressed people of Brazil’s countryside. But Romualdi and his allies had other plans.

To undermine Goulart’s support in organized labor, ORIT, AIFLD, and the American embassy worked to break up the left-dominated CGT (General Workers Command), the nation’s largest progressive labor organization. Their efforts culminated at the Third National Labor Congress of 1962. A U.S. labor specialist flown in especially for the occasion plotted strategy for the “democratic” trade union leaders. They convinced this minority bloc to pull out of the gathering, thus undermining the CGT’s efforts to unify labor.

Meanwhile, the Movimento Democratico Sindical (MDS), under its motto “God, private property and free enterprise,” received AIFLD aid and advice in sponsoring meetings and setting up trade-union courses. In addition, the Instituto Cultural do Trabalho (ICT) — AIFLD’s local affiliate partially financed by U.S. business concerns — trained labor personnel and disseminated anti-communist propaganda. In response to growing radical peasant movements in the rural Northeast, AIFLD initiated a series of training and aid programs for reformist groups and leaders.68

The close ties between AIFLD and the CIA went beyond the use of AIFLD trainees in CIA-sponsored coups. It is the CIA’s desire to continue its penetration of labor unions as a means of silencing one of the main foci of opposition to the U.S. presence in Latin America. In Brazil, the CIA channeled $30,000 to the International Federation of Petroleum and Chemical Workers (IFPCW) through its conduit the Andrew Hamilton Foundation.69 It was AIFLD’s plan to get the IFPCW to affiliate with its anti-communist IFPCW counterpart in North America.

As a measure of the success of its payoff, sixteen major petroleum unions in Brazil failed to unite in a National Federation of Petroleum Workers which the CIA opposed. AIFLD was able to get these unions to align with the conservative IFPCW by awarding financial aid to unions taking such a course. At one point, the IFPCW representative in Brazil, Alberto Ramos, wrote to one A. Noguria, “I have with me 45 million cruzeiros (almost $17,000) for you to distribute to the unions for campaigns in accordance with our plans.” An itemized payoff sheet attached to the note listed the following recipients: $875.00 to Dr. Jorge Filho of the Ministry of Labor; a bonus of $312.50 to a reporter for favorable newspaper coverage; and $140.63 to two labor leaders for helping the IFPCW defeat an opposition candidate for union office. However, because of these revelations, the IFPCW was forced to end its Brazilian organizing efforts.70

In the fall of ’63, Romualdi and AIFLD vice-president Berent Friele — “an old Brazilian hand belonging to the Rockefeller entourage” — met with one of Goulart’s chief opponents, Adhemar de Barros, governor of Sao Paulo.71 De Barros told the two men of plans already under way to mobilize police and military contingents against Goulart. When he complained that the U.S. Embassy was not listening, Romualdi wrote to the embassy’s labor attaché, John Fishburn. “The Embassy’s reaction,” says Romualdi, “was, of course, noncommittal.”72

Even before his pleas to the embassy fell on deaf ears, Romualdi had decided that “a substantial sector of labor’s rank and file were fed up with the Goulart regime.”73 Starting in 1963, AIFLD “trained in Washington a special all-Brazilian class of thirty-three participants.”74 After travelling to Western Europe and Israel with Romualdi, they returned to Brazil. Upon arrival, some went to the countryside to organize and conduct seminars. Others went to Rio, Sao Paulo and various industrial centers. Here then are the names of those persons who participated in CIA-directed labor training courses in the U.S. from 1961-1964:

Dates indicate when the person was in the U.S.
* designates participation in the AIFLD training session in Washington DC in the first three months of 1963

Abate, Hugo (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Luiz, Jose Martinho (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Abbud, Jose (7/15/61-9/15/61)

Machado Filho, Antonio Rodriguez (8/15/63-10/15/63)

Abrita, Antonio (8/15/63-10/15/63)

Magnani, Fabio (8/15/63-10/15/63)

Abritta, Ernane Souza (8/15/61-11/15/61)

Maluf, Edmundo Amin * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Almeida, Gilson Dias de (6/15/63-9/15/63)

Manzoni, Antenor (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Almeida, Jose Gomes de * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Marcassa, Joao * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Amante, Francisco Hegidio (7/15/61-9/15/61)

Marinho, Dominiciano de Sousa (6/15/62-9/15/62)

Araujo, Paulo Henrique * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Marques, Ivo Bento * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Barbosa, Jose Sebastiao (7/15/63-9/15/63)

Mello, Jose Gabriel de (8/15/61-10/15/61)

Barbosa, Onofre Martins (8/15/62-10/15/62)

Mello Jr., Theodore Narciso (5/15/63-7/15/63)

Bareta, Nelson (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Moreira, Joao Balbino Goncalves (6/15/62-9/15/62)

Barreto, Benjamin Bittencourt (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Moreira, Pedro Martins (8/15/61-10/15/61)

Barreto, Vincente de Paulo (5/15/63-7/15/63)

Mueller, Cezar Francisco (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Barros, Luiz Capitolino (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Nascimento, Luiz (8/15/61-3/15/62)

Bastos, Carlindo Martins (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Nascimento, Zozimo Gomes * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Bastos, Thodiano Conceigao da Silva * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Nascimerto, Djalma Paiva do * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Bayer, Wilfredo Marcos (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Neves, Jose Ferreira (8/15/61-11/15/61)

Bottega, Abilio (6/15/62-9/15/62)

Nina, Celso Afonso (8/15/63-10/15/63)

Braga, Nelson (5/15/63-7/15/63)

Nogueira, Paulo * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Branco, Aparicio de Cerqueira (7/15/62-10/15/62)

Oliveira, Deodato (7/15/61-9/15/61)

Branco, Eliseu Castelo * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Oliveira, Edward Ximenes de (8/15/61-11/15/61)

Brasiel, Wanderly Pimenta * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Oliveira, Elieser da Silva * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Busse, Ralf (8/15/62-10/15/62)

Oliveira, Jose Luiz de (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Carvalho, Antonio Nelson (10/15/62-12/15/62)

Oliveira, Solon de * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Carvalho, Aureo * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Oliveira, Vbirajara Ferreira de (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Castanheira, Bento * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Paiva, Carlos de * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Cerqueira, Jose de Arimateira (7/15/61-9/15/61)

Paiyao, Miguel Santos de (1/15/61-4/15/61)

Cesar, Jose Oliveira (8/15/61-11/15/61)

Paula, Elison Galdino de * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Contesino, Erico Antonio (7/15/61-9/15/61)

Pereira, Antenor (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Correa, Jose Benedicto (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Pereira, Vitalino Alexandre (10/15/63-12/15/63)

Costa, Fortunato Batista de (6/15/63-9/15/63)

Pinto, Geraldo Servulo (10/15/62-12/15/62)

Costa, Jose Alives da (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Priess, Carlos Fernando (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Crocetti, Mario Domingos * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Provensi, Mario Jose (8/15/61-10/15/61)

Cruz, Serafim Ferreira da (11/15/60-12/15/60)

Queiroz, Martinho Martins (7/15/61-11/15/61)

Cunha, Euclides Veriato da (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Rego, Ormilo Moraes (8/15/63-10/15/63)

Cunha, Joao Manoel (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Reimer, Getulio (8/15/62-10/15/62)

Da Silva, Pedro Guedes (7/15/60-10/15/60)

Reinaldo, Bernardino da Silva (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Dantas, Antonio Cavalcanti (6/15/63-9/15/63)

Reis, Leopoldo Miguel Dos (7/15/61-9/15/61)

De Silva, Manoel Francisco (11/15/60-12/15/60)

Rezende, Osvaldo Gomes (8/15/62-10/15/62)

Dias, Irineu Francisco (4/15/61-7/15/61);

Ribeiro, Adair (7/15/61-9/15/61)

Dimbarre, Alfredo (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Rebeiro, Nelio de Carvalho (8/15/63-10/15/63)

Diogo, Nelson (6/15/63-9/15/63)

Ribeiro, Vbaldino Fontoura * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Faraco de Morias, Hermenegildo (8/15/61-10/15/61)

Rocha, Hildebrando Pinheiro (6/15/63-9/15/63)

Faria, Geraldo Pio de * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Roque Netto, Sebastiao Jose (8/15/61-10/15/61)

Ferreira, Alcides * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Santos, Etavaldo Dantas dos (6/15/63-9/15/63)

Ferreira, Jose Felix (10/15/63-12/15/63)

Santos, Reinaldo dos (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Ferreira, Sonia Apparecida (5/15/63-11/15/63)

Scoz, Elzide (10/15/63-12/15/63)

Florentino, Primo Berto (10/15/63-12/15/63)

Silva, Alvimar Macedo (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Fonseca Filho, Tristao Pereira da (6/15/62-9/15/62)

Silva, Avelino da (8/15/61-10/15/61)

Fonseca, Valdenor Flores da (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Silva, Edir Inacio da (10/15/62-12/15/62)

Francisco, Alvise * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Silva, Francisco Narciso da (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Freitas, Jose Reis (10/15/63-12/15/63)

Silva, Helio Jose Nunes da (6/15/63-9/15/63)

Gevaerd, Cezlos Jose * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Silva, Horacio Arantes (6/15/62-9/15/62)

Gil, Waldomiro (8/15/62-10/15/62)

Silva, Humberto Ferreira (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Giro, Guilherme (6/15/62-9/15/62)

Silva, Ivan (6/15/63-9/15/63)

Gomes, Silvio (10/15/62-12/15/62)

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Gomes, Vicente de Paula (10/15/63-12/15/63)

Silva, Julio Trajano da * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Goncalves, Darci Manoel (6/15/63-9/15/63)

Silva, Paulo da Cruz (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Goncalves, Osmar H. (7/15/61-9/15/61)

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Guimaraes, Benedicto Luiz (8/15/61-11/15/61)

Silva Sobrinho, Jose Domingues (8/15/62-10/15/62)

Hauk, Helmuth (8/15/63-10/15/63)

Silveira, Jose Bernardino da (8/15/61-11/15/61)

Helfenstrein, Werno (8/15/61-10/15/61)

Silveira Jr., Norberto Candido (9/15/61-12/15/61)

Leite, Antonio Pereira (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Sousa Barbosa, Onessimo de (10/15/63-12/15/63)

Leite, Floriano Gomes (8/15/61-10/15/61)

Souto, Carlos Ferreira (7/15/61-9/15/61)

Lenzi, Carlos Alberto Silveira (5/15/63-7/15/63)

Souza, Adelino Rodrigues de (6/15/62-9/15/62)

Lima, Jose Bezerra de * (1/15/63-3/15/63)

Torreko da Costa, Carlos Coqueijo (3/15/62-5/15/62)

Lima, Manoel Barbosa (6/15/62-9/15/62)

Vianna, Gilberto Luiz (7/15/63-10/15/63)

Lirani, Julio (8/15/61-10/15/61)

Waidt, Nilo (8/15/61-10/15/61)

The role of AIFLD’s trainees in the coup was made clear by the CIA’s William C. Doherty, AIFLD Director of Social Projects at the time. At an AFL-CIO Labor News Conference in July 1964, Doherty noted that the trainees “were very active in organizing workers…. As a matter of fact, some of them were so active that they became intimately involved in some of the clandestine operations of the revolution [Washington’s code-word for the coup] before it took place on April 1. What happened in Brazil … did not just happen — it was planned — and planned months in advance. Many of the trade union leaders — some of whom were actually trained in our institute — were involved in the revolution [see above], and in the overthrow of the Goulart regime.”75

AIFLD had succeeded in delivering the Brazilian labor movement from Communist leadership. Its supposed goal of creating an independent, democratic labor movement, however, was quickly abandoned. Two and a half years after the coup, AFL-CIO union leaders who went to Brazil under AID’s exchange program returned with a devastating indictment of conditions for workers and unions in Brazil. In a New York Times dispatch from Rio de Janeiro (November 23, 1966), James Jones of the United Steel Workers of America stated that “The leaders of unions here have the greatest fear I have ever seen in my life. They are afraid to raise their voices on behalf of their workers for fear of police reprisals.”76

In fact, AIFLD leaders supported the authoritarian measures taken by the military junta and provided rationales for its policies. After one of Serafino Romualdi’s principal contacts, Adhemar de Barros, was deprived of his political rights for ten years, Romualdi stated equivocally that “it is still too early for a final judgement on the success or failure of the Brazilian 1964 revolution [sic!]”77 To cement its solidarity with the new regime, William Doherty appeared on the same platform with Brazil’s president, General Castello Branco, in April 1966 to help lay the foundation for an AIFLD housing project in Sao Paulo. During his speech, Doherty declared that it was “appropriate that the ceremonies were taking place on the second anniversary of Brazil’s democratic Revolution [sic].”78

Conclusion

The denial of all political rights and the suppression of working class efforts to gain a more equitable share of Brazil’s enormous natural wealth give the lie to the country’s “economic miracle” that foreign investors proclaim.79 Whatever gains Brazil can speak of are realized by only a small elite. Furthermore, the markets which she can boast of are those for raw materials, agricultural products and manufactured goods. These markets are all export-oriented and thus depend on the fluctuating prices of the world market. When we add to this the cheap cost of Brazilian labor, which is a prerequisite for keeping these goods competitive, is it any wonder that Brazil’s per capita GNP is one of the lowest in Latin America?80 Clearly, the cost of fueling Brazil’s “economic miracle” is more than its people can tolerate.

Since the military coup of 1964, there has been a decline in the real wages of Brazilians amounting to almost 40 percent.81 Brazil’s gross foreign debt for 1978 is expected to reach a spectacular $40 billion, with interest and amortization payments totalling $8 billion.82 The reason for the seeming paradox between a country so rich in natural resources yet one whose people suffer life-long misery is quite simple, however: for capitalists, both Brazilian and foreign, the masses are looked upon as costs, not customers: the lower their real wages, the higher the profits from selling to the local upper class and the international market.83

If cheap labor and an absence of political opposition have been considered Brazil’s major investment advantages since 1964, events of recent years suggest that the attractiveness of Brazil to foreign investors may be on the decline. In 1978, Brazilian autoworkers paralyzed the industry with a major strike.84 In 1969, bank robberies by revolutionary groups in Sao Paulo alone amounted to over $1.5 million.85

Brazil’s rulers themselves have had to assume a “get-tough” attitude toward the U.S. in the wake of State Department reports on human rights violations. In order to gain credibility amongst their local backers, the Brazilians showed how badly they were miffed: by canceling in March, 1977 a 25-year-old military assistance treaty between Washington and Brasilia. At the same time, Brazil turned down a $50 million loan credit for the purchase of military supplies because of human rights demands attached to it by the U.S. Congress.86 In September, 1977, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry announced the termination of a Brazilian-American military commission and a naval commission established in 1942 to coordinate World War II efforts. Also canceled were a 1967 pact governing the use of armaments imported from the U.S. and a 1952 agreement for U.S. participation in aerial mapping of Brazil.87 Of the March rejection, chief of staff General Moacir Barcelos Potyguara stated that the decision would cause no problems in Brazil’s military preparedness.88

Unfortunately, this cavalier attitude will not effect the long-term military relations between the two countries. The March, 1977 announcement was to take place one year later. No mention was made of rejecting that which is already in the pipeline to Brazil. At the least, Brazil should benefit for years to come from its friendship with the U.S. Furthermore, U.S. opposition to Brazil’s planned purchase of West German nuclear reprocessing technology seems to have subsided. In a recent visit to Brazil, Vice President Mondale backed away from criticizing the country’s plans to build a uranium reprocessing plant capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.89

As for Brazil’s new president, Joao Baptista Figueiredo, and what lies in store for the Brazilian people, a few words must be said. For the unsuspecting, last month’s appointment of Figueiredo as president appeared to usher in a new era of liberalization for that country’s political situation. Pledging to continue the reforms (which included the closing of Congress for four months in 1977) initiated by his predecessor, Ernesto Geisel, Figueiredo declared that it would be his “unswerving purpose” to make Brazil a democracy. He guaranteed freedom of expression for the “many segments of Brazilian public opinion.”90 But for those who have even the slightest familiarity with the man who is Brazil’s fifth military head of state since the armed forces carried out a CIA-backed coup in 1964, Joao Baptista Figueiredo is to be watched closely.

His background speaks to the intimate role the CIA has played in making Brazil one of the most repressive and, not surprisingly, one of the “safest” investment climates in Latin America. After the ’64 coup, the CIA helped Brazil set up its first national intelligence service, the SNI. Figueiredo became the director of its Rio office. Later he was named head of the military police in Sao Paulo, after which he became then-President Emilio Medici’s chief of staff. Before coming to Brasilia in 1974 to direct the SNI, Figueiredo commanded the Third Army in Porto Alegre. Given the documented penetration and usurpation of the SNI and the police forces by the CIA, can there remain any doubt that with Figueiredo’s ascendancy to the executive office, Langley truly has their “man in Brazil”?

In an effort to dress up the seamy history of their new president, the National Renewal Alliance, the Government party, hired the largest advertising agency in Brazil to change Figueiredo’s public image. The agency, Al Cantro Machado, which works closely with the huge New York ad agency, Doyle, Dane & Bernbach, replaced Figueiredo’s dark glasses with clear, metal-framed ones, got him to tone down on insults such as “For me the smell of horses is better than the smell of people,” and, finally, succeeded in projecting him as almost a populist, anti-establishment figure.

But for the people of Brazil, the media blitz around “election” time contrasts sharply with the harsh conditions under which they have lived since the ’64 coup. With the creation of the SNI and the imposition of successive Institutional Acts, the democratic freedoms Brazilians once enjoyed have been destroyed. The danger of living in South America’s oldest police state, however, has not deterred them from struggling to achieve basic human rights. As Figueiredo took office on March 15, over 200,000 industrial workers were on strike in Sao Paulo demanding a wage hike of 78 percent to keep pace with Brazil’s astronomical rate of inflation, up 44 percent over last year.91

Contradicting his liberalization pledges and new image, Figueiredo, after only a week in office sent troops into Rio de Janeiro on Friday March 23rd. The troops seized the union headquarters and arrested 1,600 workers. Although the workers were released over the weekend, the Ministry of Labor unilaterally called for new union elections and issued a decree which stripped a group of union officials of their posts. The duly-elected head of the metal, mechanical and electrical workers’ union, Luiz Inaco da Silva has been prohibited from running for reelection or participating in union activity. Although Inaco has denied that the strike was called to test the promised liberalization of the Figueiredo regime, the manner in which it was dealt with makes clear the government’s intolerance of even legal opposition.

It is in the wake of this strike-breaking that Figueiredo’s statement about “fair-play” between Brazil’s legislative and executive branches must be evaluated. During his inaugural address, he stated that “The game is just beginning and as soon as I am in office the ball will belong to me. If the politicians play well, fine. But if they play badly, I will put the ball under my arm and leave the field.92 If this warning was ambiguous at the time, Figueiredo’s actions of last week [March 1979] have clarified any uncertainty that people may have had. Under the new president, the future of Brazil’s 116 million people bodes ill. For, without the slightest hesitation, Figueiredo has removed democracy from the realm of political possibilities in Brazil and has tucked it away in his desk drawer where it will continue to gather dust as it has for the past fifteen years, to be brought out again at the next showing of Brazilian “liberalization.”

CIA Officers in Brazil as of August, 1978

Burton, Stewart D. (born: 5 April 1928)

Burton has served in Brazil on three previous occasions: from 1952-1955 at the Consulate General in Sao Paulo as a Vice-Consul with the rank of S-11; from 1962-1964 at the Consulate in Curitiba as a “political officer” with the rank of R-5; and from 1967-1970 at the Consulate General in Rio de Janeiro as a “political officer” progressing from R-4 to R-3. As of August, 1978, Burton was at the Embassy in Brasilia under the cover of “First Secretary.”
Graves, R. Martin (born: 1 July 1937)

Graves, also, has had previous experience in Brazil. In 1967 he was stationed in Recife as an Economic Officer with the rank of R-6. From 1968 to 1969 he served at the then-Embassy in Rio de Janeiro as a Political Officer with the rank of R-5. At the end of 1969 he was transferred to Sao Paulo where he served for three years as a Political Officer. After a stint in Saigon and back home at the State Department, Graves was reassigned to the Embassy in Brasilia as a Political Officer in January, 1976. In August, 1978 he was transferred to the Consulate General in Rio de Janeiro.
Neves, Antonio L. (born: 15 June 1931)

Neves first came to Brazil in 1962 after seven years in the Department of Army as an “analyst.” His first assignment was at the then-Embassy in Rio de Janeiro as an Attaché with the rank of R-6. He served for four years in Brazil, after which he was assigned to Rome, and then the State Department in Washington. He reappeared at the Consulate General in Rio de Janeiro in August, 1978.
Edger, David N. (born: 20 June 1945)

Edger taught public school in 1967-1968 before serving as an “educator” in the Department of Army for five years. Upon joining the State Department in January, 1973, he was assigned to the Embassy in Santiago, Chile as a “political officer” with the rank of R-7. As of August, 1978, he was working in the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia. His position is that of Second Secretary.
Mallet, John W. (born: 10 April 1945)

Mallet’s government experience consists of two years as a “program analyst” with the Department of Army from 1972-1974. When he joined the State Department in 1975, he was assigned to the Embassy in Santiago as a “political officer” with the rank of R-7. As of August, 1978, he has been at the Embassy in Brasilia working under the cover of Second Secretary.
CIA Collaborators in Brazil as of August, 1978

The following U.S. government employees have collaborated or worked with the CIA in a functional capacity:

Arenales, Alfonso (born: 1 March 1926)

Arenales joined the State Department in 1957 where he served as an “intelligence research analyst” for two years. He has served in Iran, Rio de Janeiro and the Dominican Republic. It should be noted that during Arenales’ three years in the Dominican Republic (1964-67), Lyndon Johnson and the CIA overthrew the democratically elected president Juan Bosch; invaded the island with over 40,000 U.S. Marines; and sent in Brazilian troops to crush the popular resistance movement. Arenales is presently serving in the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia as a Consul.
High, George Borman (born: 25 July 1931)

High joined the State Department in 1956 and served for two and a half years as an “intelligence research analyst.” He has served in Angola and Lebanon (where he was an “Arab language-area trainee” at the Foreign Service Institute field-school). Back at the State Department, he served as the desk officer for South Africa, Angola-Mozambique, and Madagascar, respectively. He has served in Ecuador and Argentina, and has been detailed to the Army War College. As of August, 1978, High was at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, serving as a Consul for Ministerial Affairs.
Povenmire, Dale Miller (born: 6 June 1930)

Povenmire joined the State Department in 1957 with the rank of R-8. In 1958 he was stationed in Santiago as a “political and economic officer.” He spent the next three years at the State Department as an “intelligence research specialist.” His next assignments were in Zanzibar and Paraguay. In 1966, Povenmire was back at the State Department as an “international relations officer.” Two years later, he became a representative at the National Military Command Center of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. He was then assigned to Venezuela and Portugal. As of August, 1978, he was the “labor officer” at the Consulate General in Sao Paulo.
References

1. A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, p. 47.

2. Ibid., p. 49.

3. Ibid., p. 51.

4. Ibid., pp. 71-72.

5. Cheryl Payer, The Debt Trap: The IMF and the Third World, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974, p. 44.

6. Ibid., p. 15.

7. Ibid., p. 149.

8. Langguth, Hidden Terrors, p. 64.

9. Payer, Debt Trap, p. 145.

10. Ibid., p. 150.

11. Langguth, p. 71.

12. Payer, p. 152.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 153.

15. Ibid., p. 153.

16. Langguth, p. 145.

17. Helen Shapiro and Steven Volk, “Global Shift: Brazil Steals the Show,” North American Congress on Latin America, Report on the Americas, Jan.-Feb. 1979, p. 25.

18. Langguth, p. 85.

19. Penny Lernoux, “Fascism in Brazil,” Inquiry, November 27, 1978, p. 13.

20. Langguth, p.95

21. Lernoux, “Fascism in Brazil,” p. 13.

22. Ibid., p. 16.

23. Ibid., p. 13.

24. Ibid., p. 13.

25. Langguth, p. 85.

26. Ibid., p. 86.

27. Ibid., p. 90.

28. Ibid., p. 108.

29. Ibid., p. 87.

30. Ibid., p. 90.

31. Ibid., p. 102.

32. Ibid., p. 89.

33. Ibid., p. 154.

34. Ibid., p. 120.

35. Ibid., p. 123.

36. Michael Klare and Nancy Stein, “Police Terrorism in Latin America,” North American Congress on Latin America, Latin America and Empire Report, Jan. 1974, p. 21.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Langguth, p. 244.

40. Ibid., p. 140.

41. Klare and Stein, “Police Terrorism,” p. 21.

42. Ibid.

43. Langguth, p. 162.

44. Ibid. p. 163.

45. Ibid., p. 96.

46. Ibid., pp. 164-165.

47. Lernoux, p. 14.

48. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, New York: Stonehill, 1975, p. 601.

49. Hobart A. Spalding, Jr. “U.S. and Latin American Labor: The Dynamics of Imperialist Control,” in Ideology and Social Change in Latin America, June Nash, Juan Corradi and Hobart Spalding, Jr. editors, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1977, p. 66.

50. Ibid., p. 62.

51. Ibid., p. 63.

52. Agee, Inside the Company, p. 237.

53. Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy, New York, Random House, 1969, p. 420.

54. Spalding, “U.S. and Latin American Labor,” p. 67.

55. Agee, p. 244.

56. U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on American Republic Affairs, Survey of the Alliance for Progress, Labor Policies and Programs, 90th Congress, 2nd Session, July 15, 1968, pp. 5-9.

57. Radosh, American Labor, p. 418.

58. Agee, p. 243.

59. Ibid., p. 244.

60. Ibid., p. 245.

61. Serafino Romualdi, Presidents and Peons: Recollections of a Labor Ambassador in Latin America, New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1967, p. 278.

62. Ibid., p. 285.

63. Ibid., p. 286.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid., p. 287.

67. Ibid., p. 288.

68. Spalding, pp. 70-71.

69. Radosh, p. 432.

70. Ernest Garvey, “Meddling in Brazil: The CIA Bungles On,” Commonweal, February 9, 1968, pp. 553-54.

71. Romualdi, Presidents and Peons, p. 289.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid.

75. See Radosh, p. 427.

76. See George Morris, CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy, New York: International Publishers, 1967, p. 95.

77. Romualdi, p. 290.

78. Radosh, p. 427.

79. Payer, pp. 143-44.

80. Ibid., p. 144.

81. Paul M. Sweezy, “Corporations, the State and Imperialism,” Monthly Review, November, 1978, p. 9.

82. See Shapiro and Volk, “Global Shift,” p. 25.

83. Sweezy, “Corporations,” p. 9.

84. Shapiro and Volk, p. 26.

85. Joao Quartim, Dictatorship and Armed Struggle in Brazil, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, p. 169.

86. New York Times, 11 March 1977, p. A-1.

87. Washington Star, 20 September 1977, p. A-1.

88. New York Times, 11 March 1977, p. A-1.

89. Washington Post, 23 March 1979, p. A-20.

90. New York Times, 16 March 1979, p. A-3.

91. Washington Post, 27 March 1979, p. A-10.

92. New York Times, 16 March 1979, p. A-3.

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 02, 2019 2:29 pm

This has the look and feel of AOC/'anything but communism'. Nonetheless...

*************************

Popular Brazil Front: priority is to build national development project
In a note, the group says that the focus is on reinstating in the political struggle a popular, feminist and anti-racist proposal
Essay
Privacy Policy | Sao Paulo-SP), March 31, 2019 at 4:21 PM

Image
Militants participate in the opening of the conference of the Popular Brazil Front / Photo: Guilherme Gondolfi

This weekend, the 30th and 31st of March, the 3rd National Conference of the Popular Brazil Front (FBP) took place. The event was held at the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF), in Guararema (SP), and was attended by approximately 300 militants. The proposal of the meeting was to discuss the construction of a broad front of resistance against the government of President Jair Bolsonaro (PSL). The former president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff (PT), was one of those present at the opening of the conference .

After the end of the meeting, the FBP released a letter with the main points discussed. In one of the passages, the parties, movements and popular organizations that make up the front affirm that "in view of the consolidation of the global multipolarity framework in the system of nations, imperialism reacts by seeking to reaffirm its hegemony through the most varied forms of attacks, Latin America, producing a global environment that has served the growth of the far right. "

According to the text, "before the offensive of ultra-liberal and reactionary sectors, we will need to combine popular organization with movements and actions that include any sectors, social movements and civil society entities that are mobilized in defense of democracy, democratic freedoms, rights civil and political rights of the Brazilian people and national sovereignty. "

Check out the full note:

The Popular Brazil Front (FBP), at its Third National Conference, held on March 30 and 31, 2019, at the ENFF, in Guararema (SP) brought together representatives of national entities and state delegates, from various organizational spaces that debated the Brazilian crisis and updated the political tasks of democratic and popular forces.

The Popular Brazil Front is the historical fruit of the mobilization and articulation of struggles and flags of the social and workers' movements, a continuation of other experiences that have fulfilled, each in its time, the role of articulating and mobilizing the struggle for democracy and rights of the Brazilian people.

The FBP in the fight against further setbacks

At the international level the situation has worsened. It is clear that the capitalist system undergoes a crisis and seeks a transition to new forms of exploitation, often even reinforcing that capitalism is incompatible with democracy.

Faced with the consolidation of a global multipolarity framework in the system of nations, imperialism reacts by seeking to reaffirm its hegemony through the most varied forms of attacks, especially in Latin America, producing a global environment that has served the growth of the far right.

This has directly reflected on the Brazilian crisis. The coup process in 2016 unfolded in the Temer Government and its anti-popular measures, in the unjust imprisonment of President Lula and in the election of a candidate aligned with the imperialist, rentier, and surrender sectors. The Brazilian Government, once haughty and constructive of peace, today represents a submissive and economically, socially and geopolitically posture to US imperialism.

The Bolsonaro Government is an authoritarian Government. It presents an agenda of ultraliberalism economic, ultraconservative with curtailment of individual freedoms, allied to the repression and criminalization of popular struggles and mobilizations.

The main agenda of the Bolsonaro Government at this time is the Pension Reform. In practice, this proposal ends with the right to retirement and to de-structure social security, reaching the working class as a whole, especially the elderly, rural, women and black people.

The Bolsonaro government aggravates the disastrous measures of the Temer Government. The result of this is the great unemployment in Brazil, the end of labor rights and the attacks on the workers' organization, this aggravates a marked situation in the big cities due to lack of public and social policies, a great increase of violence and stagnation of our economy, deepened by EC 95/2016, of the Ceiling of Expenses.

The so-called "Moro Anticrime Package" means the increase of the measures of exception, seeking to legitimize the Lava Jato, restricts and criminalizes the struggle of the workers and the popular movement, including the right of demonstration, on the other hand, increases the incarceration of the population and the genocide of the mostly black youth. It is clear that we have on the agenda the need to defeat the Pension Reform and move forward in the construction of a national development project that can answer these and other issues.

It is a question of putting the need for a popular, feminist, anti-homophobic and anti-racist project at the center of the political struggle, guaranteeing the development and national sovereignty and hegemony of the popular forces. A project focused on the sustainability of life, not profit. This requires a strength, an accumulation in the programmatic debate and, at the same time, the accumulation of organized popular forces.

The challenges of the FBP in the current conjuncture

The strengthening of the Popular Brazil Front and the action of the Fronts, the political parties, trade union centrals and social movements that compose it are essential elements.

Important issues were raised during the work of the Third Conference that we wish to deepen in the strategic debate of the FBP and to our dialogue with other democratic and popular forces, especially with the Fearless People's Front and Central Forum.

strengthening and maintaining our historical and programmatic accumulation is not contradictory to the need to advance the construction of a broad field of resistance.

Faced with the offensive of ultraliberal and reactionary sectors, we will need to combine popular organization with movements and actions that include any sectors, social movements and civil society entities that are mobilized in defense of democracy, democratic freedoms, civil and political rights of the Brazilian people and national sovereignty.

We must challenge ourselves to seek other forces in the construction of a general strike against the Social Security reform, bigger and stronger than that achieved against the labor reform, through the accumulation of our dialogue and collective work, which we will seek in the coming months to deepen.

To survive its own crisis, the capitalist system undergoes a crisis and seeks new forms of exploitation. We need to better understand issues such as: the new labor relations, including reproductive and care work, transnational financial capital, risks to democracy, challenges of the information and communication technology revolution, and new strategies of democratic resistance.

In the coming months, our priority will be to defeat the destruction project of Public Welfare.

The Free Lula Campaign is a fundamental agenda that requires effort and responsibility of the FBP. The arrest of Lula is a political and arbitrary act, we must reinforce the actions and mobilizations of denunciation of a year of political imprisonment, as well as continue articulating and mobilizing the resistance in all Brazil.

Likewise, Venezuela's defense is the defense of a symbol of resistance in Latin America. We must strengthen the culture of peace and sovereignty of peoples. The agendas in defense of Peace and in defense of the sovereignty of the peoples threatened by imperialism count with the support of the FBP.

The Defense of Democracy, Sovereignty and Social Rights are permanent guidelines of the FBP. We will be together in the defense of education, alongside students and teachers, defending schools without gagging. We defend a society without any type of exploitation, oppression and discrimination, seeking to guarantee the rights of women, blacks, indigenous people, lgbt's, quilombolas and workers.

Guararema, March 31, 2019.

Edition: Tayguara Ribeiro

https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2019/03 ... -nacional/

Nonetheless, 'Popular Front'..."We need to better understand issues such as: the new labor relations, including reproductive and care work, transnational financial capital, risks to democracy..." So will these learn from communists or snitch on them? In the US we know the answer.
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 05, 2019 4:48 pm

Brazil: Over 200 Lawmakers Form Bloc to Defend Indigenous Rights Threatened by Bolsonaro

Image
An Indigenous man protests against the transfering of healthcare services from the federal level to municipal governments, in Brasilia, Brazil, March 26, 2019. | Photo: Reuters

Published 5 April 2019 (3 hours 18 minutes ago)

Six progressive parties have joined forces to fight against the Brazilian far-right's racist agenda.


A total of 219 lawmakers and 29 senators launched a new campaign on Thursday as part of Brazil's Joint Parliamentary Front in Defense of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a progressive initiative aimed at opposing the Parliamentary Farmers' Front, the "ruralist group" which is linked to local agribusinesses.

The progressive parliamentary group will be led by its promoter, Joenia Wapichana, the first indigenous woman to hold a seat in the Chamber of Deputies.

"The Joint front aims to face the setback that Indigenous peoples are already suffering," she said and added that "its mission is to safeguard the Indigenous peoples' constitutional rights and place their issues in both the legislative agenda and the policy making process."

The group is made up of the Sustainability Network (Rede), the Socialism and Liberty Party (Psol), the Workers' Party (PT), Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), the Communist Party (PCdoB) and Democratic Labour Party (PDT), all of which are expected to ensure that the Indigenous peoples are heard.

Despite the support of multilateral agreements, one of which is the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention from the International Labour Organization (ILO), their objectives will be difficult to achieve as the Brazilian legislature has been traditionally controlled by anti-indigenous, anti-poor and pro-business lawmakers.

Primeira deputada Federal indígena no Brasil lançou hoje a Frente Parlamentar Mista para defender direitos dos povos indígenas no Congresso Nacional https://t.co/f3lVBuU8v5 Fotos: @MidiaNINJA e @aureacarolinax pic.twitter.com/aGqg3inaIJ

— Comissão Pró-Índio (@proindio) April 4, 2019
"Brazil's first Indigenous federal deputy launched the Joint Parliamentary Front to Defend the Rights of Indigenous Peoples at the National Congress."

"The Brazilian constitution orders to listen to the communities and the ILO-Convention 169 states that any legislative or administrative process or measure must be supported by a free, prior and informed consultation process with indigenous peoples, so that they can bring out their concerns," the congresswoman stressed.

The Joint front plans to focus its inmediate attention on the fight against the municipalization of indigenous health, which is a proposal whereby President Jair Bolsonaro seeks to eliminate the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health, a federal institution aimed at improving the living conditions of the rural communities.

The defense of the indigenous territories and the National Indian Foundation, which is a governmental body that establishes and carries out policies related to the indigenous peoples, are also expected to be at the progressives’ agenda.

"We occupy the 13 percent of the Brazilian territory, where there are more than 305 Indigenous peoples living. We are more than one million inhabitants," congresswoman Wapichana said, recalling that Indigenous peoples have been taking care of almost 20 percent of the Amazon basin.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bra ... -0009.html

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Over 1,000 Physicians Give Up Bolsonaro's 'More Doctors Program'

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A Cuban doctor says goodbye to her patients at the Kubitschek Airport in Brasilia, Brazil, Nov. 22, 2018. | Photo: EFE

Published 4 April 2019

The Brazilian government's plan failed to repair damages caused by previous policies which led to the departure of Cuban doctors from the country.


About 15 percent of the Brazilian doctors who entered President Jair Bolsonaro's program More Doctors Program (MDP), set up he ended the Cuban doctors' program, gave up in the first three months, Folha de Sao Paulo reported Thursday.

According to the local media, at least 1,052 out of 7,120 Brazilian doctors, who took over between December 2018 and January 2019, have already left the position. In addition, 1,397 more Brazilian doctors, all of whom were trained abroad and started activities last week, are expected to leave.

The Brazilian physicians’ average stay ranges from one week to three months. The main reasons for quitting are their desire to work in better places, receive specialized training and attend medical residency.

Although this dropout situation was already expected, the resignation rate worries health authorities because there is no date planned for replacing these vacancies, which is leaving health facilities without professionals.

"We are already hopeless," Maria Dalva dos Santos, Health Secretary in Embu-Guacu, a municipality at the Sao Paulo Metropolitan Region, told to Folha and detailed that eight MDP places, which were previously occupied by Cuban professionals, “have no physician now... one of the vacancies was assigned to a doctor who came to work only one day and did not show up again."

The Brazilian Health Ministry data also showed that 31 percent of the MDP resignations happened in cities which have 20 percent or more people living in extreme poverty. They are followed by capital cities and metropolitan regions, which account for 20 percent of the dropouts.

"In smaller cities, resignations may be more related to working conditions and life quality... however, in larger cities, [resignation rates] are related to the labor market," Mario Scheffer, a professor at the Sao Paulo University’s Medical School told Folha and explained that "what used to guarantee permanency was the special features of the contracts applied to the Cuban doctors, who were banned from practicing medicine outside the More Doctors Program."

"Bolsonaro is inhuman and incompetent", Erika Kokay, a Worker’s Party congresswoman says regarding the resignations at the More Doctors Program.

These spatial imbalances in the provision of public health services were timely alerted by multiple voices, who warned about Bolsonaro's abandonment of the poor.

In Nov. 2018, Brazil's former Health Minister Alexandre Padilha said the departure of Cuban doctors would be "tragic" and would have a "direct impact on the population welfare."

"How sad this county is," Fatos do Dia, an independent Brazilian channel, said Thursday and called Bolsonaro's approach to health an "adventurous policy."

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ove ... -0011.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 12, 2019 2:09 pm

O Processo / The Trial – A Review
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After it premiered at the Berlinale to a 7 minute standing ovation and won numerous festival awards, a series of pre-screenings for Maria Augusta Ramos’ ‘O Processo’ (The Trial) were held in Brazil ahead of its May 17 theatrical release. The documentary records the illegitimate impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, a process which was the principal attack of a coup which is still ongoing, supported by an alliance of Brazilian elites, international capital and the North Atlantic powers which serve it.

An audacious and monumental work, it is difficult to recall a similar event captured from this proximity, in this sharp focus, and with such palpable tension. 2003’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised which gave a semi-accidental fly-on-the-wall view of the attempted 2002 Coup in Venezuela, is a distant relative. However, O Processo is a very different kind of film, its DNA that of a courtroom drama.

It begins with infamous scenes of the congressional vote on April 17, 2016. Outside in the sun, metal isolation fencing separates pro-impeachment and anti-coup protesters along Brasilia’s iconic esplanade. During the session, Rousseff allies PCdoB’s Jandira Feghali, PSOL’s Jean Wyllys and PT’s Wadir Damous and Maria de Rosario’s defiant votes against the coup are juxtaposed with those of fascists such as Jair Bolsonaro and his son Eduardo, who dedicate it to Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the DOPS commander responsible for the brutal torture of Dilma during her 3 years in jail from 1970-73. Surrounded by an all male group of baying ruralists, grizzled ultraconservatives and young white “classical liberals” it is the most chilling moment of the film, and a window to the rotten heart of the process.

O Processo is both essential to Brazil’s internal conversation (and to any eventual reconciliation), and to warn the outside world, as this kind of procedural coup or “Lawfare” becomes a common means to remove elected governments and leaders.

Confusion and frustration at lack of international repercussion as the story unfolds is touched upon by a visiting French politician. In the years prior, English language media in particular was far too easily influenced by the narratives of the pro-impeachment opposition which, and by no means accidentally, dovetailed with those of Wall Street. For example one of the most commonly repeated tropes following the 2014 election result was that Rousseff had won by a “razor thin” margin, intentionally casting doubt upon her mandate. This was despite her scope of victory equalling that of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney.

The film thus provides a fresh opportunity for international media who called it wrongly in 2015/16, or who didn’t call it at all, for whatever reason, to issue their mea culpas. Brazilians expected help, it never came.

One thing that must be emphasised is that the impeachment threat was present well before the 2014 election. At that time it was already evident that should she go on to win, the opposition had no intention of allowing Rousseff to complete her second mandate. With her defeated PSDB opponent Aécio Neves immediately calling his supporters to the streets and vowing to make it impossible for her to govern at every turn, the election of Eduardo Cunha to lower house leader enabled that strategy.

With Dilma and PT without majority in either house, she was at the mercy of the most conservative congress since the 1964-85 dictatorship, 2/3 of which are unelected, and many of whom were facing corruption charges of their own. Not only that, many had been bribed for the impeachment vote itself. The facts of the case were irrelevant to its outcome, and her impeachment was a fait accompli once Eduardo Cunha accepted the petition request from a furious right wing who had been kept out of Government for 13 years by PT’s electoral success.

The commission hearings, upon which most of the film focuses, were the only realistic opportunity to halt the proceedings against Rousseff. Overseeing the commission was PSDB Senator Antonio Anastasia, thus effectively eliminating any chance of a fair trial.

Under a veneer of legality and constitutionality, the process was one of bribery, blackmail and violence. Car Wash (Lava Jato) the biggest anti-corruption operation in history, somehow brought the country’s most corrupt individuals to power, as did its blueprint, Operation Clean Hands (Mani Pulite) in 1990s Italy.

The film manages to convey that despite Dilma not being implicated or charged in Lava Jato, it provided a pretext for her impeachment as if she was. Enabled by Rousseff-endorsed changes to the law intended to facilitate the pursuit of corruption, Lava Jato in turn damaged the economy so sharply that it provided another pretext, with the exacerbated recession and resulting unemployment used as auxiliary by supporters and corporate PR whenever doubt was cast upon the impeachment case itself.

dilmaprocesso

One notable aspect is how the film humanises otherwise silenced or vilified PT politicians. Senator and PT national President Gleisi Hoffman describes the party as under a systematic mediatic and judicial assault, intended to eviscerate its capacity to organise or govern. Its headquarters in various cities were vandalised, raided by Police and even shot at during this period, somehow generating zero media sympathy.

Hoffman and other main protagonist Senator Lindbergh Farias, were both under fierce personal attack from far right groups during the process. Gleisi maintains an admirable calm, even when faced with the arbitrary overnight arrest of her husband during the senate commission hearing, which looked designed to intimidate and sully her reputation at the precise moment she was the public face of Rousseff’s defence.

Farias, likening Rousseff to Josef K from Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, presents the primary documentary evidence of the coup plot and its intentions during the hearings. The first was the recording of Senator Romero Jucá’s conversation with businessman Sergio Machado where they discussed the plan for a coup to bring Temer to power, a “grand national agreement” for Dilma’s removal which would include the media, supreme court, and even the guarantee of support from the military if called upon.

Second, and no less significant, Farias produced “Bridge to the future”, Temer’s PMDB neoliberal policy document. The manifesto, parts of which appeared to have been translated from English, included proposals for unprecedented cuts to public sector investment, worker rights and pensions, including the effective legalisation of slavery and a 20 year, constitutionally protected freeze on public health and education spending. Any future Government would need to fight to reverse that constitutional amendment in order to implement any kind of social democratic programme. Rousseff’s own “Passport” to the future proposal in 2013 was to have channeled all proceeds from Brazil’s enormous subsalt oilfields to fund a revolution in public education and health. Temer’s “Bridge” to the future, on the other hand, proposed gutting of public systems and cut-price selloffs, access to those fields for foreign Oil companies, without requirement of Brazilian involvement, and tax free. This opening up of Brazil’s Petroleum sector had been long pursued by PSDB’s José Serra in collaboration with Chevron and the US State Department. State Dept’s effective point man for the coup, PSDB’s Aloysio Nunes, repeatedly tries to shut down Farias description of its contents, accusing him of defamation (Nunes flew to the US for meetings with former Ambassador to Brazil and head of Western Hemisphere affairs Tom Shannon, along with Wall Street representatives, just hours after Rousseff’s suspension). Farias correctly argues that nobody could win an election in Brazil with this platform, and yet it was imposed without one, after 4 consecutive rejections at the ballot box.

Despite being Rousseff’s Vice, Temer removed all trace of her government, placing the defeated conservative opposition of PSDB, and heir to the dictatorship’s ARENA Government, Democratas, at the heart of his new coalition.

Dilma’s resolve, even nonchalance in the face of what was happening to her is occasionally startling on the big screen. Faced with this battle, gone was the persona of pragmatic managerial technocrat during the previous 5 years, and back was the “Guerreira” in her supporters hearts.

This manifests at a key moment when a PSDB senator breaks down into nervous laughter at Rousseff’s curt rebuttal of his claim that the synthesised street protests for impeachment which provided its sheen of public support, were “spontaneous”. Rousseff explained politely that organisers were receiving money from the disgraced architect of her impeachment, Congressional President Eduardo Cunha, a factual statement to which there was no response.

Though dense by nature, the film is not without laughs and Ramos deftly plays with the tragicomedy and preposterousness of the process. There are candid moments of gallows humour amongst Dilma’s team, and unintentionally in the deeply uncomfortable performances of lawyer Janaina Paschoal, a strange individual, who was paid 45 thousand reais ($15k) by PSDB to present the case for impeachment.

Special mention must go to attorney general José Eduardo Cardozo whose exasperation at the developing farce is both earnest and melancholic, captured in phone calls during late night drives to and from the Parliament buildings. His response to Paschoal’s emotional meltdown during her final summing up was that “it was usual for someone to have a crisis of conscience” after an act like this.

As for the eventual case itself, the commission rapporteur, Antonio Anastasia had used the same supplementary credit techniques (fiscal peddling) himself while Governor of Minas Gerais from 2010-2014, as had most other State Governors and Federal Governments. It is essentially a way of delivering budgetary advances to a ministry or department, to be returned later. Though theoretically in breach of regulations, it had never been punished and was common practice, nor was it classed as a crime of responsibility, without which there could be impeachment. No extra money was spent, there was no allegation of personal enrichment or corruption on Rousseff’s part, nor any evidence that she even gave the instructions to issue the supplementary credit. In a final cruel twist, the technique is legalised days after her final removal and continues to be used by Temer’s post-coup Government.

At one point, conceding in a behind the scenes meeting that they no longer had the vanguard on streets they once enjoyed, Hoffman and the rest of PT’s inner circle err complacency and strategic mistakes, looking to pin their strategy to a promise that if Rousseff is reinstated they’ll launch an immediate plebiscite for political reform, echoing what she offered the population in response to the June 2013 protests. That long forgotten proposal was ultimately brought down by her eventual usurper, Vice President and US informant Michel Temer, of “opposition in Government” PMDB, foreshadowing what was to come. Indeed there was worry at the time that this type of strategy for removing Dilma would be attempted in 2013, with the June protests used as justification.

With hindsight there is sometimes a naive innocence detectable in the PT’s thinking. Following his indictment they discuss Eduardo Cunha’s panic to protect his wife and daughter from any charges, and the resulting potential for him to inform on Temer and other members of the coup-government. At that point, what is striking is that Farias and the rest seem to still have some faith in the Lava Jato operation to deliver the impartial prosecutions that it was ostensibly set up to do, faith which certainly does not exist today. Ultimately Cunha struck a deal, his wife and daughter were spared by US-backed Lava Jato’s Prosecutor Judge Sérgio Moro, despite having been found culpable, and nothing of note came of Cunha’s expected “super testimony”. Temer refused to resign and the well-evidenced charges against him were shelved a year after he took office, along with that against a score of PSDB figures: rapporteur to Rousseff’s impeachment committee Antonio Anastasia, foreign minister Aloysio Nunes, his predecessor José Serra, 2018 Presidential Candidate Geraldo Alckmin, and alleged operator of PSDB bribery schemes Paulo Preto.

In contrast, 2003-2011 President Lula, Dilma’s predecessor, who features sporadically through the film, was sent to jail for 12 years in April 2018, while leading all polls for the October election. He had been denied habeas corpus by the Supreme Court over the allegation that he received an apartment and reforms on it as a bribe after he left office. The Supreme Court made its decision under the shadow of a threat from the military of potential repercussions should he be freed, a statement which was read deadpan on Globo’s Jornal Nacional in the hours before the vote. In Lula’s case, as farcical as Dilma’s, prosecutors were unable to produce any documents or physical evidence that proved he owned the apartment, or even that he had even been there. Lula’s prosecution was carried out through informal collaboration with the US Department of Justice, in clear violation of Brazilian law.

One thing the film really illuminates is the brazenness of aligned interests and close relationship between the key coup players. Even if they had been more self-aware, it would have been difficult to disguise when captured at close range in such a matter of fact documentary format.

It is telling that Temer himself does not once appear in the film, aside from in chants for his immediate removal.

The film draws to a close with protest and police repression outside Congress, juxtaposed with violence and chaos inside while Senate voted to repeal workers rights enjoyed by Brazilians since the 1940s. These scenes emphasise that, despite the process having the sheen of constitutionality – the main defence of its plotters and supporters – no coup that is backed by a mechanised Military force on the streets, violently crushing any resistance to it, can or should be described as “soft”.

It should be remembered that aside from conservatives and fascists, some in the center and on the left saw the impeachment and decapitation of PT as a political opportunity. It remains the only left of centre party ever to govern Brazil.

A text sequence at the close describes the coup itself, not in terms of the impeachment, but through what the coup government did immediately after taking office, the character of what had happened quickly becoming clear. Decimation of the public sector, education, workers rights, the pension system, science and technology – subjugation to foreign capital, to the strategic interests of the United States and allies, all in exchange for return to power and protection of privilege for Brazilian elites, entreguistas or comprador class, the post-colonial social strata whom Eduardo Galeano called the “commission agent bourgeoisie”.

This was the “coup against the Brazilian people” of which Rousseff had warned.

With some shouts of “Free Lula” echoing around the theatre, attendees filed out in a subdued shock, the sensation akin to a punch in the stomach.

O Processo/The Trial is a powerful document of a profound injustice which has sent a country backwards on a dangerous course, a film that will live forever as a self-contained record of Brazil’s 2016 Coup d’état.

http://www.brasilwire.com/o-processo-the-trial-review/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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