Returning to Brazil, plans for a military coup were initiated shortly after João Goulart became President in August 1961. The military were wary of his populist rhetoric and appeal, and angered by his efforts to raise minimum wages of civilian laborers. Concerns of the US business community were enhanced when the Chamber of Deputies passed a bill placing conditions on foreign investment and limiting remittance of profits on the grounds that they were "bleeding the Brazilian economy." Though Goulart, a faithful member of the Brazilian elite, was anti-Communist, US labor leaders and Embassy officials were alarmed at his involvement with labor and peasant organizations and appointment of Brazilian Communists to staff positions; "an openly Communist course," the CIA warned. The appropriate Cold War context had been spelled out by JFK, shortly before assuming office (see p. 73).

By early 1962, Brazilian military commanders had notified Kennedy's Ambassador, Lincoln Gordon, that they were organizing a coup. At JFK's personal initiative, the US began to lend clandestine and overt support to right-wing political candidates. The President's feeling, in agreement with Gordon and the US business community, was that "the military probably represented the key to the future," Ruth Leacock concludes. Robert Kennedy was dispatched to Brazil in December 1962 to influence Goulart to "confront the communist problem," as the US Embassy put it. RFK informed Goulart that the President was seriously concerned about the infiltration of "Communists and anti-American nationalist leftists" into the government, the military, the unions, and student groups, and about the "ill treatment [of] American and other foreign private investors." If Goulart wanted US aid, Kennedy said, he must see to it that "personnel in key Brazilian positions" were pro-American, and impose economic measures that the US recommended.

Relations remained tense, particularly over the austerity plan that the Kennedy Administration demanded as a condition for aid, and its admonitions about left-wing influence. In March 1963, the CIA again reported plans for a military coup; US corporate executives were, by then, privately urging a total US aid cutoff to expedite the coup plans. In August, US Defense Attaché Vernon Walters warned the Pentagon that Goulart was promoting "ultranationalist officers" in preference to "pro-democratic pro-US officers" (the two terms presumably being synonymous). Relations harshened further under the Johnson Administration. Senator Albert Gore informed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then considering US aid, that he had heard that "all of the members of the Brazilian Congress who advocated the kind of reforms which we have made a prerequisite for Alliance for Progress aid are now in prison." Ambassador Gordon cabled Washington that the US should increase military aid for Brazil because the military was essential in the "strategy for restraining left wing excesses of Goulart government." Meanwhile the CIA was "financing the mass urban demonstrations against the Goulart government, proving the old themes of God, country, family, and liberty to be as effective as ever," Philip Agee noted in his Diary.

Recall that aid to the military is standard operating procedure for overthrowing a civilian government. The device was also used effectively in Indonesia and Chile, and tried in Iran in the early 1980s, the first stage in what later became (suitably recrafted) the Iran-contra affair.⁹

On March 31, the generals took over, with US support and plans for further action if necessary "to assure success of takeover." The Generals had carried out a "democratic rebellion," Gordon cabled Washington. The revolution was "a great victory for the free world," which prevented a "total loss to the West of all South American Republics" and should "create a greatly improved climate for private investments." "The principal purpose for the Brazilian revolution," he testified before Congress two years later, "was to preserve and not destroy Brazil's democracy." This democratic revolution was "the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century," Gordon held, "one of the major turning points in world history" in this period. Adolf Berle agreed that Goulart was a Castro clone who had to be removed. Secretary of State Dean Rusk justified US recognition for the coup regime on the grounds that "the succession there occurred as foreseen by the Constitution," a statement that was not "entirely accurate," Thomas Skidmore judiciously observes.

US labor leaders demanded their proper share of the credit for the violent overthrow of the parliamentary regime, while the new government proceeded to crush the labor movement and to subordinate poor and working people to the overriding needs of business interests, primarily foreign, reducing real wages by 25 percent within 3 years and redistributing income "toward upper-income groups who were destined to be the great consumers of the Brazilian miracle" (Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who sees the brutal repression and attack on living standards as "an essential prerequisite for a new cycle of capitalist growth within the Brazilian domestic economy"). Washington and the investment community were naturally delighted. As the relics of constitutional rule faded away and the investment climate improved, the World Bank offered its first loans in 15 years and US aid rapidly increased along with torture, murder, starvation, disease, infant mortality -- and profits.¹⁰

⁹ See ch. 5, n. 5. Agee, Inside, 361-2.

¹⁰ Parker, Brazil; Leacock, Requiem; Skidmore, Politics; Hewlett, Cruel Dilemmas. See also Black, US Penetration.