This was far from the only occasion when a group of courageous priests protected people from violence and from arbitrary acts of the security forces.81 The undeniable evidence that the military were routinely torturing people led a group of Catholic bishops to join the opposition and to use the Church’s communication channels to disclose internationally what was going on in Brazil. In 1970 the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church in Paris displayed a handcuffed Christ on the altar with a tube in His mouth and a magneto82 on the top of the cross. Above the cross the words ‘Ordem e Progresso’83 were inscribed. In May 1969, Father Antônio Henrique Pereira Neto was kidnapped, tortured and killed in Recife. He was the personal assistant to Dom Helder Câmara,84 the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, internationally recognized for his work in human rights. Father Peireira Neto’s death was the first time in Brazil that a priest had been murdered for political reasons.
When it became clear the left-wing forces were really prepared to take up arms, the dictatorship showed all its savagery. In January 1969, Carlos Lamarca, an officer from the Fourth Infantry Regiment based in São Paulo, robbed an army weapons deposit and escaped in a van full of rifles, submachine guns and ammunition. Mr Lamarca had left the army to join guerrillas of the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (VPR), one of several left-wing revolutionary movements created since the coup. Some of these organizations were tiny, very few of them had the strength or the structure to confront the military, and most of their members came from the Communist Party, which had been eliminated without resistance in 1964. The vast majority of these movements chose armed resistance.85
Mr Lamarca intended to organize a guerrilla base in the interior. He was killed by the army in 1971 near the tiny village of Buriti Cristalino, in the backlands of Bahia – the hamlet had four streets, mud and straw houses, a marketplace and around two hundred inhabitants. Carlos Marighella, another important leader of the revolutionary left, used urban guerrilla warfare and planned to confront the dictatorship with columns of guerrillas from all over the country, converging on the south of Pará. Carlos Marighella had fought against the Estado Novo, had been a deputy in the Constituent Assembly of 1946, and formed the largest group of opposition to the military – the National Liberation Front (ALN).86 He was also a football enthusiast, loved samba, and was an amateur poet. In 1969, in São Paulo, he was shot to death in a military ambush.
Carlos Marighella’s death marked the beginning of the military offensive against the revolutionary left. The death of Carlos Lamarca marked the beginning of the left’s decline. By 1976 opposition groups had been decimated. During the dictatorship there were a series of armed attacks, to which the military reacted by intensifying repression and adopting a policy of extermination. Opposition moves included bank robberies, attacks on armoured cars, companies, weapon stores and the installation of guerrilla bases. The most spectacular feat of the revolutionary left was the kidnap of the American ambassador, Charles Burke Elbrick, in Rio de Janeiro in 1969. The kidnap was planned by two young militants – Franklin Martins and Cid Benjamin – from the Dissident Movement of the University of Guanabara, a minuscule but daring organization. In return for the ambassador’s release they obtained the freedom of fifteen political prisoners.87 This type of action had far-reaching repercussions. It made the armed struggle, the practice of torture and the existence of political prisoners – all of which were denied by the military – into international news, and undermined the dictatorship.
There were also forceful movements in rural areas. The Guerrilha do Araguaia – a guerrilla group – was made up of about a hundred guerrillas, including some rural workers. They ended up in a massacre.88 Between 1972 and 1974 the armed forces sent approximately 4,000 men to the Parrot’s Beak region in the southwest of Pará. In October 1973 the government issued orders for no prisoners to be taken. The sending of military and police forces to areas where it was thought there were guerrilla training bases was one source of repression; the landowners in the south of Pará were also known for their brutality. Apart from Pará, which was a sort of epicentre for violence against rural workers, consistent throughout the dictatorship, rural repression during the dictatorship occurred mainly in two critical periods. The first was during the years immediately preceding and following the 1964 coup, and the second was from 1975 to the mid-1980s, when the violence reached its peak, with approximately 1,100 murders.89 The majority of these deaths occurred during land disputes, during which the local landowners hired local thugs and paramilitary militias, although they counted on the collusion (or omission) of the state. In many of these cases there was no investigation and the criminals were not even identified. In those that were investigated the circumstances of the crime were never fully clarified.
But nothing can be compared to the crimes committed by the dictatorship against Brazil’s indigenous peoples. The most important document denouncing these crimes – the Figueiredo Report – was produced by the government in 1967. It then disappeared for forty-six years, allegedly destroyed in a fire. In 2013 the report was found, virtually intact. Twenty-nine volumes containing 5,000 pages were found – of the thirty volumes with 7,000 pages contained in the original. In order to write it, Attorney General Jader de Figueiredo Correia and his team had travelled more than 16,000 kilometres and visited 130 Indian reserves in the country.
The report was terrifying: Indians were tortured with appalling cruelty and entire tribes murdered by landowners and state agents. Mr Figueiredo’s investigative work was a considerable feat. The report included accounts by dozens of witnesses, presented hundreds of documents, and identified every crime that he unearthed: murders, Indian women and girls forced into prostitution, ill-treatment, slave labour, and the misappropriation of Indian land and funds. It reported the hunting of Indians with machine guns and dynamite thrown from aeroplanes, the inoculation of isolated groups with the smallpox virus, and donations of sugar laced with strychnine.90 The Indians living in areas the military had decided were strategic for their occupation of the whole of Brazilian territory, according to the plan conceived by the Research and Social Studies Institute and the National War College, paid a very high price indeed.
SHUT UP!
In 1973 the composer and musician Francisco Buarque de Hollanda (Chico Buarque) and the film director Ruy Alexandre Coelho Pereira (Ruy Guerra) wrote a play called Calabar: In Praise of Treason.91 The play cast doubt on the official version of Brazil’s independence and was put on to coincide with the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of independence organized by the dictatorship. The play was banned the day before the first performance. The writers were informed that the censor would not allow any mention of the name ‘Calabar’, and therefore the whole play had been censored.92 As a result the producers went bankrupt.
This was by no means an isolated case. Censorship was the fastest growing of all the government’s activities. It was used to control the flow of information, public opinion and cultural production, as well as to manipulate the coverage of events and the interpretation of the national reality. The censorship of ‘moral content’ had existed since the 1946 Constitution, and was exercised by the Entertainment Censorship Division (DCDP). The military government simply expanded the role of the division, transforming it into an instrument of repression that banned any anti-government ideas and cultural manifestations.93 Scenes were removed from films, or else the movie was banned altogether; popular songs were mutilated or forbidden and plays were vetoed by the authorities, sometimes on the eve of their first performance, as was the case with Calabar.
A law implementing advanced censorship was passed in 1970, requiring all editors to send the original texts and books to Brasília before publication. But in practice the law was impossible to implement due to the huge number of censors that would be required: in 1971 alone 9,950 new books were published. But the press was gagged and journalists were pursued and imprisoned. Works were removed from art exhibitions, such as from the IV Salão de Arte do Distrito Federal and the I
Salão de Ouro Preto, in 1967, and from the Bahia Biennale in 1968. The country’s leading popular singers, including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Nara Leão, Geraldo Vandré, Odair José and Chico Buarque all went into exile. The government kept a close watch on intellectuals and university professors, many of whom were forced into early retirement. A group of ten researchers at the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz94 were forbidden to work in Brazil, and one of the country’s leading historians, Caio Prado Jr, was arrested.
To avoid censorship, those in the cultural world had to invent strategies of resistance, between the lines, making the most of any tiny opportunity to protest. These were ‘the stratagem of the weak’,95 small acts of rebellion that would burst unexpectedly on the scene. Perhaps the first of these, a protest in front of the Gloria Hotel in Rio de Janeiro on 18 November 1965, was born of this need for stealth. At the time, the II Extraordinary Inter-American Conference of the Organization of American States (OAS) was being held at the hotel. Although the protest became known as the ‘Gloria Eight’, in fact there were nine protesters present. These included the journalists and writers Antonio Callado, Márcio Moreira Alves and Carlos Heitor Cony; film directors Glauber Rocha, Mário Carneiro and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade; recently dismissed Ambassador Jayme de Azevedo Rodrigues; set designer Flávio Rangel and poet Thiago de Mello. As soon as President Castello Branco got out of his car to enter the hotel to preside over the opening ceremony, the protesters waved banners with phrases written in gigantic letters: ‘Down with the dictatorship’, ‘Bienvenidos a nuestra dictadura’ (‘Welcome to our dictatorship’) and ‘Viva la liberdade’ (‘Long live freedom’). They were all arrested. The government received hundreds of protests against the arrests, from intellectuals and artists including Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia.96
The military was soon to learn that arresting intellectuals or silencing artists was not always simple. In February 1968 the theatre where Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was being performed was closed down, and the leading actress, Maria Fernanda Meirelles Correia Dias, was banned from acting for thirty days. The reaction was overwhelming. There was a strike in protest against censorship that closed all theatres in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo for seventy-two hours, and an unforgettable vigil was held on the steps of the Rio de Janeiro Opera House. Among those who participated were the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, composers Chico Buarque and Vinicius de Moraes, popular TV host Chacrinha, playwright Nelson Rodrigues, actors Paulo Autran, Cacilda Becker and Tônia Carrero, film director Glauber Rocha, architect Oscar Niemeyer, literary critic Otto Maria Carpeaux, and painters Emiliano Augusto Cavalcanti de Albuerquerque Melo (Di Cavalcanti) and Djanira da Motta e Silva.97
The arts were a thorn in the dictatorship’s side. In 1970 the artist Antonio Manuel exposed his own body at the opening of the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art. The installation was entitled The body is the work. It was provocative and had been refused by the jury. Years later the artist declared: ‘At the time the body was in the front line. It was submitted to the violence of street protests and to the torture of political prisoners by the military regime.’98 The same year Cildo Meireles created his work Insertions into Ideological Circuits, which invited the spectators to participate in a type of artistic guerrilla warfare, writing information and critical opinions on the labels of Coca-Cola bottles and banknotes, which were passed from hand to hand. The same year, at the exhibition Do Corpo à Terra, which opened at the Palácio das Artes in Belo Horizonte, Cildo Meireles burned chickens alive in a work called Tiradentes: Totem-monument to the political prisoner, which denounced the torture and murder of those who opposed the military government. Artur Barrio threw bloody bundles of animal bones and meat into the Arrudas river that flows through the capital of Minas Gerais, in an allusion to the crimes of the dictatorship – the bundles suggested human bodies cut into pieces and abandoned anonymously in the open. The event attracted around 5,000 people and ended with the arrival of the military police and the fire brigade who forced those present to accompany them to the police station.99 The cartoon strip Rango – a starving character created by Edgar Vasques – became a symbol of criticism of the military. But it was Henrique de Souza Filho (Henfil) who best demonstrated that the power of communication of cartoons is vital for the political struggle, due to the speed and clarity with which they transmit ideas and opinions. The concision of his texts, the caustic criticism and the levity of his lines gave life to the famous trio Capitão Zeferino, Graúna and the goat Francisco Orelana. They formed an indignant, ironic and anarchic threesome from the Bahia scrublands and reflected both the poverty and the courageous resistance of the Brazilian people.100
The canção de protesto (protest song) was the first attempt by popular composers to create systematic criticism of the dictatorship. Setting the cosmopolitan sophistication of Bossa Nova aside, the canção de protesto rooted political denunciation and resistance in the everyday cultural life of Brazilians. The establishment of a direct relationship between art and social context, and the belief in the revolutionary power of singing, led to the incorporation of broad political themes into music during the 1960s. These popular compositions incorporated a wide variety of aesthetic and musical components, such as Geraldo Vandré and Théo de Barros’s Disparada (1966); Terra de ninguém, by the Valle brothers (1965); Padeirinho and Jorginho’s Favela (1966); Gilberto Gil’s Procissão (1968); Carlos Lyra and Nélson Lins de Barros’s Maria do Maranhão (1965); O comedor de gilete, which Carlos Lyra wrote in partnership with Vinicius de Moraes (1964), and Sidney Miller’s A estrada e o violeiro (1967).101 Tropicália emerged in 1968, the musical movement that brought together popular singer-composers including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Torquato Neto, Capinam, Rogério Duprat and the revolutionary rock band Mutantes. Tropicália invaded the theatre, visual arts and cinema. Stylistically, it was a combination of traditional popular songs, international pop and avant-garde experiments, evoking stereotyped images of Brazil. A tropical paradise undermined by political repression, social inequality and poverty would illustrate the Tropicália movement.
Some Tropicália singer-composers incorporated elements of rock, especially from the Beatles, into their songs. The movement influenced a parallel group of musicians, Clube da Esquina (Corner Club), associated mainly with Milton Nascimento, whose new and quite sophisticated songs evoked images of disappearances, the death of friends and the suppression of freedom. Romantic songs – seen by some as a form of kitsch – sold in record numbers. They were constantly played on the radio, exposing themes such as racism and social segregation, the reality of the poor.102
Whatever form they took, many popular songs of the period aimed, in one way or another, to oppose the dictatorship, avoid the censors, irritate those in power, and combat the official narrative of events. After all, everything leaves a trace, nothing can be completely extinguished and no one disappears completely without someone remembering their name. As Chico Buarque foresaw:
O que hoje é banal
Um dia vai dar no jornal.
The banal of today
Will be in journals someday.103
18
On the Path to Democracy: The Transition to Civilian Power and the Ambiguities and Legacy of the Military Dictatorship
‘NAVEGAR É PRECISO’1
On 15 March 1985 the last general to govern Brazil, President João Figueiredo, refused to hand over the presidential sash to his successor and to ceremoniously walk down the ramp from the presidential palace according to protocol.2 Instead, he left the palace by a back door. Fewer than two months before, in January, in a television interview, he had expressed what was seemingly his own assessment of his term as president. Addressing the Brazilian people he said, ‘I want you to forget me.’3 President Figueiredo was ill-tempered, explosive and extraordinarily vulgar.4 By the time he left office, he had alienated virtu
ally everyone, including the group of generals who had supported his appointment six years earlier. His prestige was low. He was notorious for having been at the helm of the most unpopular administration in twenty years. Most significantly, his government had failed to free the Executive from the control of the military without endangering the developmental project the military had been implementing since 1964. This is what had been expected of his presidency.
President Ernesto Geisel and General Golbery do Couto e Silva had begun to gradually dismantle the dictatorial regime in 1975. Both were convinced that the emergency powers could be revoked without undue upheaval.5 The two generals, along with various other commanders in the armed forces, believed it was time for the military to relinquish the presidency. The wear and tear of political life and the requirement to guarantee Brazil’s domestic safety was taking a toll on the army and beginning to put the interests of the institution at risk. Furthermore, the years of dictatorship had seriously damaged the structure of the armed forces. Countless officers had been removed from the hierarchy of command, from the routine of training and from their professional environments, to work as policemen and interrogators. And worse: those who had remained in the barracks were envious. After all, torturers were being decorated with the Peacemaker’s Medal – awarded for acts of bravery or exceptional service to the army – and received regular promotions and salary increases. The bureaucracy created to administer the violence had taken over the armed forces and become the source of power in the military hierarchy.
The policy of controlled abertura,6 which started in 1975 during General Geisel’s government, could also be seen as a strategy to keep the opposition away from the presidency, to make certain that civilian allies of the regime would come to power. In 1977, when questioned by journalists about the instruments of control that had been created to maintain an authoritarian political system, President Geisel retorted, ‘Everything in the world, except God, is relative.’ And he added, ‘Relatively speaking, Brazil’s system is democratic.’
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