Pitt Latin American Series

Military Officers and Dictatorship in Brazil, 1960-80

Maud Chirio

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780822986126
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Between 1964 and 1985, Brazil lived under the control of a repressive, anticommunist regime, where generals maintained all power. Respect for discipline and the absence of any and all political activity was demanded of lower ranking officers, while their commanders ran the highest functions of state. Despite these circumstances, dozens of young captains, majors, and colonels believed that they too deserved to participate in the exercise of power. For two decades they carried on a clandestine political life that strongly influenced the regime's evolution. This book tells their story. It is history viewed from below, that pays attention to the origins of these actors, their career paths, their words, and their memories, as recounted not only in traditionally available material but also in numerous personal interviews and unpublished civilian and military archives. This behind-the-scenes political life presents a new perspective on the nature and the internal operations of the Brazilian dictatorial military state. This book is a translation, with expanded material for English-language readers, of Maud Chirio's original Portuguese-language work, A política nos quartéis: Revoltas e protestos de oficiais na ditadura military brasileira, which was awarded the Thomas E. Skidmore Prize by the Brazilian National Archives and Brazilian Studies Association.

CHAPTER ONE

Conspiracies

1961–1964

If we don’t educate our children and grandchildren, then the communists will. They are our great enemy. Nothing important happens in this country without action by the communists. There is red dust in the eyes of the people and a large proportion of the leaders of Brazil.

—GENERAL MILTON TAVARES DE SOUZA

The coup d’état of April 1964 has long seemed an oddity in the history of the Republic of Brazil. First, because the image of the Brazilian Army in Latin America at the time was one of legalism and respect for the authorities. Unlike its counterparts in Argentina, Brazil’s neighbor and historical rival, the Brazilian military had not exercised power directly on behalf of its own institution since the 1890s. To be sure, the country had experienced numerous armed uprisings, and no break with the rule of law had ever occurred without the backing of the Military High Command or significant sections of the armed forces. To be sure too, since the Revolution of 1930 at least, generals had operated behind the scenes at the highest levels and in the ministries of the republic, but neither the central authorities nor the machinery of state had been subordinated to the military for any length of time. Just a few years prior to the coup, senior officers still reveled in that reputation. In Brazil there would be no caudillo or dictator heading a “totalitarian dictatorship” of the kind seen in “poxy little South American republics,” General Castelo Branco declared at the Superior War School in September 1955. He would go on to be the first president of the actual dictatorship. He also said that a “professional armed forces mentality” prevailed over a “militia mentality” sustained by the “volatility of a political mindset that wavers constantly between taking power and preserving it.” “If we adopt this regime, what comes in by force, will be kept in place by force and removed only by force. What a backward and reactionary objective! And then there will be no escape.”¹ Castelo Branco was speaking in a particular context: that of the presidential election campaign in the run-up to the November 1955 vote that brought Juscelino Kubitschek, heir to Getúlio Vargas, who had died a year earlier, to power. Part of the Brazilian Right, both civilian and military, was already organizing to prevent his becoming president but this putschist state of mind was far from that of the majority, and respect for the ballot box prevailed among General Staffs and the officer corps as it did among the general population. To everyone’s surprise, even the putschists themselves, less than ten years later almost nothing was left of this legalist tradition and identity.

Indeed, the second surprise of 1964 was the ease with which the rebels seized power. Not only did the army break with its tradition of republican legalism but, to begin with, its initiative met only extremely limited resistance. João Goulart appeared to fall like a ripe fruit: neither the lower ranks of the armed forces, despite having given assurances of their support on numerous occasions, nor the trade unions, nor people on the Left, took to the streets or took up arms to try to prevent it. Opponents of the coup went to ground then opted for silence or exile. At the same time, the urban middle classes, half the political elite, and the business community were noisily exultant, giving the coup d’état all the hallmarks of a concerted and consensual initiative by conservatives, whether civilian or military.

When the republic collapsed like a house of cards, it evidently provoked soul-searching and even an identity crisis within the Brazilian Left. It has subsequently inspired a large number of studies focused on a simple but often crucial question in recent-history research: “How was it possible?”² What changes in military and civilian thinking and behavior, what structural alterations to Brazilian society permitted such a break with legality that the army took power? These questions and, arguably, this anxiety are the motives behind the present study of the 1964 coup d’état and the political and party restructurings that followed. We will not revisit all the debates over the origins and causes of the putsch here but will confine our research to a specific and key issue: how the military came to subscribe en masse to the prospect of a coup d’état.

BUILDING THE CONSENSUS

Many factors enabled the putschists to achieve easy and speedy victory. It is our hypothesis that the lack of any real military resistance and, indeed, the confidence and enthusiasm with which the overwhelming majority of officers regarded the overthrow of João Goulart played a major role. We believe also that the building of this consensus, which conflicted with the constitutional requirements of the military institution, was of fairly recent date, that is, later than 1961. The liberties taken with democratic principles by some of the military Right were nothing new. Since the end of the Second World War, the nomination of any candidate connected to the legacy of Getúlio Vargas had resulted in sporadic military revolts and challenges from sections of the conservative National Democratic Union or UDN. We might, for example, recall the remark by Carlos Lacerda, an eminent member of the UDN and darling of the military Right, regarding the possibility of Vargas returning to power in 1951: “As a senator, he must not run for president. As a candidate, he must not be elected. If elected, he must not take office. If he is in office, we must resort to revolution to prevent him from governing.”³ Nor was virulent anticommunism new in Brazil, particularly in the armed forces. Last, João Goulart had been despised for at least a decade when his move to the Ministry of Labor during the second Vargas government (1953–54) entrenched accusations that he was in cahoots with the unions and promoting the “communization” of Brazil. He had been accused ever since then by the UDN, the conservative press, and the military Right of workerism, demagoguery, and sympathy for the Peronist “syndicalist republic” in neighboring Argentina.

Nevertheless, this self-confident military Right was unable to prevent Vice President Goulart from coming to power in August–September 1961 after the unforeseeable resignation of the extravagant Jânio Quadros—albeit not for want of trying. Quadros left office on August 25. On August 30, the three armed forces ministers (General Odílio Denys for the army, Admiral Sílvio Heck for the navy, and Brigadier Gabriel Grün Moss for the air force) put out a manifesto accusing Goulart of being compromised by his involvement with the unions, of betraying the authentic interests of the working classes, and of being complicit with “international communism,” particularly by promoting the infiltration of its agents into the machinery of state. In the ministers’ words, “[the] support, protection, and encouragement” Goulart would give to the “agents of disorder, disunity, and anarchy” in Brazil would inevitably lead to “chaos, anarchy, [and] civil war,” with the armed forces—the main bulwarks against such a state of affairs—unable to resist since they would already have been “infiltrated and tamed” and then “transform[ed] into simple communist militias as has happened in other countries.”⁴ The ministers were, however, unable to garner sufficient support within their own forces to achieve their goals: the legalist resistance of the military, particularly the Third Army in Rio Grande do Sul, together with that of the Labor Party and within it of Leonel Brizola, governor of Rio Grande do Sul, forced the rebels to back down. Yet by March 1964, when the Left had been in power for two and a half years and Goulart believed he had set up a “military apparatus” meant to allow only loyal generals to hold senior troop commands, he appears to have been abandoned by the entire institution.

A shortage of suitable sources means the scale, mechanisms, and key causes of this abandonment are difficult to access as subjects of research. Military unit archives for the post-1945 period are not open to researchers and hold the internal reports that are the only means of providing an accurate description of who in each unit supported, resisted, or abandoned the coup. Also out of reach is the opinion of the military, which had no public space for expression and was surveyed by the General Staffs only rarely or in partisan fashion. The main available source is in fact the statements of the military personnel themselves, both at the time and today, in the form of published testimonies or those taken down by researchers and journalists: since the mid-1970s publishers and the media have given considerable space to officers’ memoirs.⁵ It should be noted that until the 1990s studies did not focus on the discourse and practices of the protagonists, particularly the military putschists. The recollections and even discourse of the military were (and, for certain audiences, remain) suspect and disparaged: collecting them and, especially, making them part of the interpretation of events is often seen as a kind of political betrayal, a betrayal of memory, if not the “moral pollution” of the researcher.⁶ These memoirs only really entered the academic space when, thirty years after the coup, researchers at the Contemporary Brazilian History Research and Documentation Center (CPDOC-FGV/Rio de Janeiro) published officers’ testimonies using a systematic interviewing approach.⁷ The novelty of the undertaking lay not so much in the fact that putschist officers were given the chance to “speak out” as from the fact that the army no longer had a monopoly on the production of its memory: beginning to create a scientific corpus of oral sources that offered the “military take” on the coup d’état and the dictatorship has allowed it to be included in the construction of a historical narrative.

These military witness statements must, of course, be used with a degree of caution. They give information only about the military personnel who make them, leading players perhaps, but not the only ones in the conspiracy against and overthrow of the civilian president;⁸ most come from senior officers under the military regime; last like any testimonies, they are reconstructions and distortions, particularly in the context of the “memory war” under way since the end of the dictatorship.⁹ Even so, they are a vital resource for research into the precise methods of constructing unanimity in the military or at least a broad consensus within the officer corps.

Did this consensus really exist, however? The first factor adding grist to the mill was the small number of sanctions meted out immediately after the coup. While the “cleanup operation” that ensued primarily concerned the military institution—it was far and away the main body of public servants affected—the 1,013 troops disciplined by the regime’s first “institutional act” were merely a drop in the ocean of the institution as a whole. In the army, 252 sergeants and subofficers were expelled from their force, discharged, or retired, out of the nearly 59,656 who held these ranks (i.e., 0.4 percent).¹⁰ Proportionately, eight times as many army officers were disciplined but this was still only 264 (3.3 percent) of the nearly 7,929 the institution included at the time, according to figures from the Boletim do Exército. Only army generals were significantly affected, with a quarter being disciplined. Navy and air force personnel were proportionately more affected, particularly the rank and file and subofficers, although the figures do not suggest mass involvement in politics or resistance to the putsch.

The small scale of this intra-institutional crackdown may be interpreted in various ways. First, it is possible that sergeants and subofficers openly resisted the coup d’état but the new authorities opted for a moderate response. There are several reasons that this hypothesis is unlikely, the first being that, while traces of skirmishes can be found in a few sources, there is nothing to suggest the existence of any large-scale armed resistance.¹¹ Furthermore, had the latter existed, it is highly likely that it would have been emphasized in the victors’ memoirs as evidence of the communist convictions of the armed forces’ lower ranks. Last, several authors have called attention to the high level of tension and animosity between the Left and the military Right at the time, expressed in instances of violence since the 1950s, suggesting that the penalties would have been harsh.

The second hypothesis is that the majority of military personnel accepted or supported the coup d’état. What cannot be known, however, is whether this consent was the result of a need to obey the chain of command, a group mentality or a more enthusiastic commitment. The sources have little to say about this: written documents are, in fact, extremely rare and later testimonies (published memoirs, interviews with journalists or researchers) generally come from service personnel who are clearly identified with one camp or another and are justifying their choice rather than recounting their memories, which, in any case, are reconstructions. Barely any are moderate, nonpartisan, or even guarded. On the basis of a limited number of interviews, Lausimar Zimmermann concludes that sergeants essentially accepted the putsch rather than actively supporting or resisting it, so as to comply with the orders of officers of intermediate or senior rank, the majority of whom were, for their part, in favor.¹² The vast majority of officers’ testimonies depicts a reckless and impatient youth, the core of the discontent, which drew an apathetic and negligent military elite along in its wake. For General Cordeiro de Farias, “With very few exceptions, the generals kept their heads down. They were all hostile to the government but they did not have the courage to express their positions. [By contrast] there was a far higher number of senior officers—lieutenant-colonels and colonels. The great bulk, however, was made up of young officers—lieutenants, captains and majors. The difference in behavior was obvious. While the generals and senior officers held back, the young soldiers were impetuous, intense, and determined to throw themselves into the fight.”¹³ It must be noted, however, that the overwhelming majority of testimonies available are from officers who either supported or agreed with the coup at the time. There is nothing straightforward about how this political aspect should be interpreted: are the sources biased because researchers and journalists were less interested in the losers than the winners who, in addition, had more networks, resources, and space for self-expression within the armed forces? Or is it in fact the sign of mass support for the putsch? It is hard to say. At most, we can state that, in the testimonies, the barracks’ “enthusiasm” and “fervor” are linked to their proximity to urban centers, which may have facilitated internal military communications and access to the civilian media’s anticommunist propaganda. It is true, however, that there is a dearth of information about the peripheral regions. Rio has a special place since the Military Club, on the one hand, and the military schools (Officer Improvement School [Escola de Aperfeiçoamento de Oficiais, EsAO] and Army Command and General Staff School [Escola de Comando e Estado Maior do Exército, ECEME]), on the other, were spaces in which political expression by young officers was tolerated.¹⁴

What happened to the Brazilian armed forces between September 1961, when João Goulart came to power relatively easily despite the surprise, and despite a right-wing Congress and the openly hostile military ministers (although he did have to broker a deal whereby his inauguration only went ahead in exchange for a restored parliamentary system that drastically truncated his powers); and March 1964, when the arrival of a column of troops from the plateaus of Minas Gerais forced him to flee into exile? Awareness of the international context in the years after the Cuban Revolution and, even more, the revelation of its Marxist-Leninist nature, the North American cultural and military offensive and the extremely polarized political climates of Latin America tend to make this U-turn appear natural. And yet, in the spring of 1961, the Brazilian Army’s fate and ideological course was not yet set in stone: its political development was and would continue to be the result of doctrinal innovations, contacts with political and economic circles, and outside influences, which constructed a politically oriented reading of the national and global situation and the legitimate ways of confronting it.

Initially, observers and researchers identified a single guilty party, which had invented and disseminated a new military doctrine, with which the South American Right had been injected and brainwashed since the beginning of the Cold War. The guilty party was, of course, the United States, with its National Security Doctrine (NSD), a major offensive weapon in the “psychological warfare” being waged in Latin America. From the end of the 1970s, the NSD was considered the official ideology of Southern Cone dictatorships to the extent that they were known as “National Security Dictatorships.”¹⁵ The NSD was based on the notion of imminent war against an omnipresent enemy (primarily communist), an external and, above all, internal armed conflict of a psychological and all-encompassing nature since it affected not just the armed forces but also entire societies and machineries of state. The certainty of war meant that all political systems, economies, education, the mass media, and social policies, in short, all public institutions and policies, had to be reassessed in terms of the impending conflict. This program for restructuring states and societies entered the Southern Cone armed forces from the higher military schools which had been modeled on the U.S. National War College in the early hours of the Cold War. In Brazil, it was from the Superior War School (Escola Superior de Guerra, ESG), founded in 1949, that army officers Cordeiro de Farias, the first head of the school, Castelo Branco, future president of the dictatorship, and Golbery do Couto e Silva, geopolitical expert and post-1964 éminence grise, theorized and disseminated their version of the NSD.¹⁶

South American historiography from the 1990s to 2010 subsequently queried the dogma of a single, unique, and omnipresent NSD, imported from the United States. This was first the result of a closer analysis of individual national cases, which revealed fragmentary, partial, and differentiated appropriations of the National Security Doctrine depending on the country and understood as the result of its history. In Brazil, while the War School’s theoretical output often resorted to a highly specific “national security” jargon—“Permanent National Objectives” had to be met by a “National Strategy” com...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction. The Unusual Face of the Brazilian Dictatorship
• Chapter One. Conspiracies: 1961–1964
• Chapter Two. Continuing the Revolution: 1964–1965
• Chapter Three. Consolidation and Divergences: 1966–1968
• Chapter Four. Shaking the Ground: 1969
• Chapter Five. At the Heart of the System: 1970–1977
• Chapter Six. The Final Campaign: 1977–1978
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names