There, most of the kids were white. And it was clear that these white people ran the country. In the streets around her were people with dark or black skin, mostly descended from slaves, and still obviously treated like second-class citizens. She was part of a third group, a community of more recent immigrants that was classed somewhere between the white and black people—allowed to ascend to the middle class, but always treated with a healthy dose of ridicule. The kids called her “Japa”: São Paulo has a large Japanese community, and she was often confused with Brazilians of Japanese descent, who were higher on the racial ladder than the blacks. And she knew there was a fourth race somewhere far away, although she had little contact with them: Brazil’s indigenous people, who were discussed as though they were barely human.
Other things were new to her. Brazil had only one language—Portuguese—and it came from Europe, not from Brazil. White colonizers had brought it with them, and it had functionally annihilated all the local languages. This was very different from Indonesia, of course, which spoke to itself in a hurricane of intermixed indigenous languages that had essentially blown Dutch away before she was born. And there was just one religion—Christianity. The colonizers had brought it, and Brazil’s local traditions were practiced only in the jungle far away, somewhere she knew she wasn’t expected to go. It was all very different from Indonesia, which had five or six religions, depending on how you counted.
It was pretty obvious what Ing Giok was supposed to do: study hard, move up toward the part of society occupied by the white people, and adopt their manner of doing things. She was a smart girl, and so she did well.
The Tan family did not realize until they arrived in 1962 that Brazil was in political crisis. At least, it surely looked that way to the United States. By far the largest country in Latin America and for a long time Washington’s most important ally in the region, Brazil appeared to be wobbling away from the US orbit. This didn’t just trouble the North Americans—it troubled much of Brazil’s elite, too. Unlike in Indonesia, Washington’s officials here did not have to adjust to a vastly different local culture and then plant the seeds of an anticommunist movement. In Brazil, they were able to work easily with conservative political forces that had emerged from Brazil’s own history.
The Portuguese arrived in this part of South America around 1500, and like so many other places in the colonial world, it was named for one of its first raw material exports: brazil wood, or pau brasil.4 This huge chunk of South America, twice the size of the European Union, technically ended up in Portuguese hands because of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas—or, rather, when the Pope drew an arbitrary line down a very badly drawn map to split the New World between Spain and Portugal. The indigenous population who fell into the newly designated Portuguese territories lived differently from those who lived in modern-day Mexico or Peru. There was no large, centrally governed empire like the Aztec or Inca, but smaller, more self-sufficient groups. In the very early years, Europeans made tentative alliances with these tribes, intermarrying and fighting and losing battles and forming new alliances and being captured only to escape and send (largely true, if sensational) accounts of cannibalism back to Europe. The most famous European to relate this experience survived only by crying and begging for his life, leading the locals to believe he was too weak and pathetic to be worth eating. He became a best-selling author.5 By the time the Europeans had subdued the native population, they decided that indigenous Brazilians, who were dying from disease and brutal enslavement, did not provide enough free labor for the extraction of natural resources for export.
So Brazil imported almost five million human beings from Africa, far more than the United States did, and equal to almost half of all slaves brought to the Americas. Just as in the US, enslavement in Brazil was unimaginably cruel. In addition to the whip, stocks, and iron collars studded with spikes to prevent escape, slave owners affixed iron masks, which prevented the slaves from committing suicide by shoving earth into their own mouths.6
When it came to independence from Europe, most other countries in Latin America threw Spain out in violent revolutions in the early nineteenth century. But in Brazil, the Portuguese royal family fled Napoleon’s invading forces and set up shop in Rio de Janeiro in 1807, bringing the capital of the empire to the colonies. Thousands of Europeans did their best to set up a royal court in Rio, and they established a local monarchy, which ruled until 1889 and still has some (unofficial) influence today.
Soon after the liberation of African-descendant Brazilians, in 1881, the largest country in South America promptly embarked upon a policy of explicit branqueamento, or whitening. The idea was to bring in white immigrants, and to breed the African blood out of the population through “miscegenation.” Newly freed slaves were intentionally left languishing in poverty, rather than paid to work in the new system. This approach was also what brought Ing Giok’s Japanese classmates to São Paulo. Brazilians deemed the Japanese, which they categorized as the “whites of Asia,” the most desirable Asian immigrants.7 This racism remained public and paramount, with cultural organizations producing posters to “show” that a Japanese man and a Brazilian woman would produce “white” offspring.8
More conservative in outlook than its neighbors, Brazil looked more to Washington than to Spanish-speaking Latin America. From the fall of the monarchy to the middle of the twentieth century, Brazil enjoyed a “special relationship” with Washington, and would often play the role of conciliator between the US and Spanish-speaking Latin America. In 1940, Brazil became the first Latin American nation to sign a military staff agreement with US military officials in Washington. The State Department saw Brazil as the “key to South America,” because of its size and mineral wealth. In 1949 the Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG) was founded, modeled after the US National War College, where some Brazilians had trained.9
Outside the military, this special relationship began to fall apart at the beginning of the Cold War. President Eurico Gaspar Dutra (in office 1946–51) did everything he could to join Washington’s anti-Soviet campaign, including breaking off relations with Moscow and banning the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), the strongest communist party in Latin America.10 But President Dutra also believed that the United States was standing in the way of Brazil’s economic development. The US, the only available source of capital for Brazil’s huge public investment needs after World War II, refused to grant the loans Dutra’s government requested, surprising Washington’s wartime ally. The two countries also clashed over the cost of coffee, an extremely important Brazilian export. But the greatest source of friction between the two largest countries in the hemisphere was the question of US corporate involvement in the oil sector—Brazilian lawmakers wanted to favor local petroleum companies, while Washington insisted US firms be allowed to operate in the country. By 1949 Brazilians felt exasperated by apparent gringo indifference to Brazil’s economic position, and in 1950 Dutra issued a public rebuke when he politely declined to assist the US in Korea.11
When Getúlio Vargas, a longtime force in Brazilian politics, returned to the presidency in 1951, relations with the US only worsened. He had been a dictator in the 1930s and ’40s, but had reinvented himself as a democratically elected populist. Although Vargas had a history of fiercely repressing communism in his own country, and Brazil supported John Foster Dulles’s cherished anticommunist declaration at the Caracas Conference just before the Guatemala coup, after another fight over aid he too concluded the US was opposed to Brazilian economic development, and announced the country would support colonial freedom struggles at the UN (by this point in the Cold War, this was an obvious affront to Washington’s policy).12 Vargas also proposed a tax on excess profits that would clearly affect foreign investors and then oversaw the creation of Petrobras, a state-owned oil monopoly. The reaction in the United States to all of this was predictably hostile.13 The New York Times reported that “competent opinion” was that Brazil could never raise the money required to extract i
ts own petroleum, so that effectively, “what the government did was to bury deep in the ground whatever oil reserves Brazil has.”14
Not only for these reasons, the Escola Superior de Guerra began plotting to remove Vargas, with US support.15 But it never happened. Soon after a decree to double the minimum wage caused outrage among Brazil’s elite, everything came crashing down on its own.
Carlos Lacerda, the most prominent critic of President Vargas in Brazil, was attacked by gunmen while walking in Copacabana; he survived with a bullet wound to the foot, while a military officer accompanying him did not make it. It soon emerged that the attempted assassination may have been ordered by someone in the president’s own bodyguard force. The military was definitely coming for Vargas now, and they were going to succeed. Rather than let that happen, Vargas wrote a final letter to the country, then shot himself in the chest on August 24, 1954, upturning politics forever from beyond the grave.
The victor of the election that followed in 1955, Juscelino Kubitschek, was a pro-US centrist and economic nationalist. Nonetheless, Washington viewed him with suspicion. During his campaign, the United States Information Service doubled its budget for “programs to educate Brazilians on the dangers of communism and communist-front organizations.”16 US officials also sought to expose ties between the banned PCB and the Soviet Union. The Communist Party endorsed Kubitschek, or “JK” for short (almost all Brazilian presidents get nicknames), causing him even more problems—despite the facts that the small PCB was illegal and JK disavowed its support.
As president, JK built things. He undertook an ambitious infrastructure program and built a new capital, Brasília, from scratch in the middle of the country. Still, the Eisenhower administration refused to agree to an important long-term assistance program for Brazil, specifically because they didn’t want to boost Kubitschek’s popularity.17
But it was the ascendance of JK’s vice president, a young, left-leaning bohemian named João Goulart, often referred to simply by his childhood nickname, “Jango,” that really concerned the North Americans. As the former labor minister for Vargas, Goulart had introduced the explosive bill to double the minimum wage in 1954. He was firmly a member of Brazil’s elite political establishment, a millionaire landowner and devout Catholic. But Goulart’s proposed reforms set off alarm bells in Washington. This was not little Cuba, they reasoned. This was one of the world’s biggest countries. If Jango was not stopped, warned US Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, Brazil could become “the China of the 1960s.”18
Gordon, a former professor at Harvard Business School, had worked on the Marshall Plan before absorbing Modernization Theory and helping design the Alliance for Progress.19 He was an old friend of Richard Bissell, the Frank Wisner CIA recruit who had designed the plans to assassinate Lumumba and take Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.20 When Gordon arrived in Brazil in 1962, he recognized quickly that hyper-megalopolis São Paulo was a lot like his native New York, in that it “had an elite class—the four hundred families that dominated the city’s social and economic life—but also had a large class of immigrant families, like his own, striving to realize the American Dream.”21 The democracy Brazil set up after World War II was very limited. Striking was illegal. Because of literacy requirements, a majority of the population (mostly black, very poor Brazilians) was barred from voting; Jango and his supporters wanted to change this, just as a growing civil rights movement in the US was putting pressure on Washington to repeal racist voting restrictions there.
Goulart served as vice president under JK from 1955 to 1960. Then in 1960, he ran to serve as vice president again, this time under Jânio Quadros, a theatrical provincial politician backed by the right-leaning UDN party. Despite his conservative leanings, Quadros managed to alienate the Kennedy administration right off the bat. He admired neutralists like Nasser in Egypt and Nehru in India, but he didn’t even want to go as far as to be neutral. Brazil would remain pro-West, he said, but the country also wanted to look more to the South, to become a leader of the Third World. He certainly did not want to turn resolutely East, but he did want to improve economic relations with the socialist world. For Kennedy, even this much was dangerous.22
This seemed like an obvious case of “Do what I say, not what I do.” Quadros asked, “Why should the United States trade with Russia and her satellites but insist that Brazil trade only with the United States?”23 He announced Brazil would participate in the upcoming conference of Non-Aligned Countries in Belgrade, the meeting that grew out of Sukarno’s 1955 Bandung Conference. He never made it. Just months into his term, Quadros awarded Che Guevara the Cruzeiro do Sul, Brazil’s highest award for foreigners. This was pragmatism, not ideology—he hoped Havana could help facilitate trade with socialist countries. Carlos Lacerda, now one of the country’s most influential people, began denouncing Quadros everywhere he could. The president abruptly resigned. He expected that the military and widespread popular support would sweep him back into power. They didn’t.24
Brazil sent another representative to the first meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Yugoslavia in September. A wildly diverse set of political leaders pledged to pursue peace and development while on a middle course between the poles of Washington and Moscow. But João “Jango” Goulart, who became president after Quadros resigned, had more pressing problems. Jango and his Brazilian Labor Party were always viewed with deep suspicion by the elite and the military, but he was considered acceptable as the number-two man to the union-busting Quadros. Jango as president, however, was seen as well-nigh unthinkable. Lacerda, some outlets in the (largely conservative) media, and part of the military hoped to block him from taking power at all. But on September 7, 1961, the grinning forty-three year old, impeccably dressed in a blue suit, arrived to be sworn in as president.
From day one, he had almost no political capital. His fatal mistake, considering the posture of the elite, the military, and the United States, was to seek to remedy this by shoring up support among previously neglected sectors of Brazil’s population, rather than among its political insiders. This had never been done successfully before. Jango backed a set of reforms, called the “reformas da base,” which would change Brazilian politics considerably. They would extend voting rights to all Brazilians, while unrolling a literacy program around the country. And Goulart backed land reform, despite the fact that he—like much of Brazil’s political class—was actually a latifundista, or large landowner, himself. Even he knew this was a gamble. Sustaining this kind of a program meant relying on support from grassroots movements, unions, and the organized left.25
Goulart also alienated the military high command with reforms that would affect them more directly. He wasn’t just proposing to extend the vote to illiterates—he also wanted to allow lower-ranking soldiers to cast ballots. Current law dictated that they could not do so while serving. The idea that he was appealing directly to the lower ranks made the high-ranking officers, who tended to be more conservative than their left-leaning subordinates, very suspicious. If he was ignoring their authority over the lower orders, they could convince themselves, perhaps he wanted to overturn their authority entirely. In Brazil, the threat of rebellion from below had terrified elites for five centuries, and they always responded—successfully—with violence.
It didn’t take Kennedy’s White House long to respond, either. Jango went to visit Washington in early 1962, and it seemed to go OK, though he failed to get any concessions on aid or trade. On July 30, however, Kennedy had a meeting with Ambassador Gordon, which was recorded. The two men agreed to spend millions on anti-Goulart plans for elections that year, and to prepare the ground for a military coup to, as Gordon put it, “push him out, if it comes to that.”
Gordon said, “I think one of our important jobs is to strengthen the spine of the military. To make it clear, discreetly, that we are not necessarily hostile to any kind of military action whatsoever if it’s clear that the military action is—”
“Against the left,” Kennedy finish
ed.26
Gordon: “He’s giving the damn country to the—”
“Communists,” said Kennedy.
“Exactly.”
After Gordon’s July meeting with JFK, CIA money began pouring into Brazil. The Agency sent agent Tim Hogan under “deep cover,” and he began “organizing farmers and labor.”27 Kennedy’s administration initiated a “counterinsurgency” assessment, authored by General William H. Draper Jr., which came to the conclusion that “every effort should be made” to provide US training for the local Army.28 Years before this, Draper had come to the conclusion that Brazil was the perfect model for the use of the military to fight internal enemies and modernize economies in the Third World.29 The White House also sent in Vernon Walters, a military attaché with deep ties to Brazil’s military, to represent Washington publicly alongside Gordon.30
It did not matter that Jango actually sided with Kennedy when the US detected Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. Jango publicly backed the blockade of the small island and told Walters, in private, that he would understand if the North Americans bombed the place.31 For Washington, he represented the threat of communism in their own hemisphere. Under Kennedy, US activity in Brazil was different from what had been done in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s. There were no large, noisy interventions with Uncle Sam’s hand quite obviously pulling the strings. The US carefully nurtured powerful anticommunist elements, and let them know they would have support if they were to act.
It was also a major departure from JFK’s promises to the Third World, and from the original intent behind the Alliance for Progress. That program was now widely seen as an imperfect cover for traditional US policy in the region, not only because Washington continued intervening throughout the region. One of JFK’s best biographers put it this way,
The Jakarta Method Page 12