by Gerard Colby
Many members of the Sorbonne Group were sons of career officers. They were part of a military caste that saw itself as unique and different from the rest of Brazilian society.12 They prided themselves on their technical training and looked with disdain on the inefficiency of civilian rule. Every individual abuse or incompetency in government was taken as a sign of general corruption. These officers rejected the traditional emphasis on maintaining a balance of power in a region of shifting alliances; instead, they now accepted the Pentagon’s line that the Cold War required a permanent alliance with the United States and adoption of the Pentagon’s doctrine of “internal warfare.”13
The enemy now became the citizens of their own country—all Brazilians allied with the Left and even conservatives and nationalists who were reluctant to allow American corporations to dominate sectors of the economy or regions like the Amazon. The stress placed on nation-building by American counterinsurgency doctrine was replicated in the Brazilian Army Command and General Staff School well before the coup. And key to nation-building were law and order. Studying the U.S. Army’s basic manual, Brazilian and other Latin American officers learned that “stability and law and order are essential to the success of Cold War efforts.”14 Taken out of its American context of rule by the people through direct vote or vote by fairly elected representatives, “stability and law and order” could be redefined as martial law.
In those words were the seeds not only of Brazil’s 1964 coup, but of its 1968 “Supercoup,” and not only Brazil’s coups, but many other coups in Latin America. It was only natural, therefore, that President Kennedy’s $9 million reduction in U.S. military aid to Brazil in 1963 was viewed with alarm by the Sorbonne Group. The blame, of course, fell on Goulart. Goulart’s unwillingness to surrender Brazil’s national sovereignty over its own foreign policy was perceived as a Communist-inspired alliance with the Soviet Union and therefore treason. The minister of war was feeling enough heat from the generals to call Goulart’s foreign ministry and complain. “He asked whether we were trying to abolish his ministry. He said that the United States military mission had told him it might be very difficult to get aid and supplies for the next year unless Brazil supported the United States.”15 That was just before the coup.
Goulart saw it coming. Plans were announced to hold a huge anti-Goulart rally in Rio on April 12. The rally was to have been the start of the coup, Alberto Byington admitted to Berle, but Goulart’s efforts to mobilize the populace behind him forced their hand earlier.16
Goulart called for a counterrally by labor. Despite Governor Lacerda’s declaration of a holiday to lessen the turnout, 150,000 people showed up on March 13. They cheered Goulart as he signed decrees expropriating land along rural highways for redistribution to landless peasants and nationalizing Brazil’s private refineries. Goulart also announced that the marketing and distribution of petroleum products would be put in the hands of public agencies, not private companies like Standard Oil. This had been the demand of oil workers for years; they had been impatient with Goulart, who knew how nationalization of the refineries into Petrobrás would enrage Lacerda’s UDN party leaders, some of whom were investors in the refineries. He also knew that American oil companies would be furious. Standard Oil of California and Texaco had helped finance the Duque de Caxias refinery in Rio; another American company helped finance the terminal and oil-tanker docks in Santos near São Paulo for the refinery at Cubatão, used by the Pews’ Sun Oil Company. But he was heartened by the fact that now the oil workers cheered him despite his intervention against their strike in January. The workers cheered even louder when he called for amending the Constitution to permit payment for the expropriated lands and refineries with government bonds instead of scarce cash.
The generals, however, did not cheer. Three days later, Army Chief of Staff Humberto Castelo Branco approached U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon with a “white paper” rationale for a military uprising. Brazil had to be saved from itself, or at least from Goulart. What would be Washington’s reaction?
Gordon allegedly replied that President Johnson was prepared to recognize any rebel government on Brazilian territory that proclaimed itself in opposition to Goulart and communism and could hold out for forty-eight hours (a prescription similar to that given for the Bay of Pigs). He suggested that Minas Gerais, home of the Fourth Army, might be the best locale from which to launch such a rebellion.17
Encouraged by the U.S. ambassador’s support, General Castelo Branco assembled his fellow generals. Adolf Berle later described what happened:
“Using units he knew had been unhappy about Goulart’s probably projected dictatorship, he [the general] had worked out combined action with three of the four army groups … [and] was a little more than half certain that the other group … would go over to him.… He had also activated the political and other elements. A civilian demonstration of several hundred thousand was planned for Rio on April 2 as a preliminary but they could not wait for that.”18
These “other elements” included AIFLD agents in the labor movement, who maintained vital telephone lines during the coup despite a union’s call for a general strike,19 and who fire-bombed the Rio headquarters of the Brazilian Communist party.20 They also included the Research Group of retired military officers who had received several hundred thousand dollars from the Institute of Research and Social Studies (IPES).21
IPES, founded in 1961 by conservative businessmen with ties to American Power and Light and a São Paulo drug firm, was the major financial backer of and political guide to the principal overt sponsors of two huge anti-Goulart demonstrations that took place the last week of March, the Women’s Campaign for Democracy and the Women’s Civic Union.22 Behind IPES was J. C. King’s Clandestine Services, whose “Rio station and its larger bases,” the CIA’s Philip Agee noted in his diary, “were 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.”23 Marches were held in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo, the seats of government of two of the governors involved in the coup, banker Magalhães Pinto and Adhemar de Barros. American businessmen in close contact with the CIA were also involved.24
The head of this IPES network, General Golbery do Couto e Silva of IPES’s Research Group, would become chief of Castelo Branco’s intelligence service after the coup.
IPES was funded by U.S. subsidiaries, including American Light and Power and Rockefeller-affiliated DELTEC, which allegedly dipped into a $7 million cash reserve in the Bahamas.25 Another funder, according to historian René Dreyfuss, was Moreira Salles’s bank.26 U.S. Chargé d’Affairs Niles Bond later suggested that U.S. funds for IPES had probably “been passed to IPES through a middleman: Alberto Byington.”27
Back in Berle’s Manhattan town house, Byington fretted over the safety of his wife, whom he had sent to Rio by plane on the previous afternoon. Mrs. Byington carried a secret message to the plotters that Byington had successfully “bought on his own credit a shipload of oil to make sure the Brazilian navy would be able to function.”28 Standard Oil of New Jersey, which provided the Brazilian navy with its oil supplies, would keep the flow coming.29
The plotters had good reason to worry that oil storage facilities and refineries would be seized or blown up by the oil workers to foil the coup. Brazil’s oil workers had been at the forefront of the struggle to preserve Petrobrás, calling on Goulart to nationalize the private refineries, including those owned by Lacerda’s UDN entrepreneurs. The navy was crucial to the coup’s chances if the Northeast remained loyal to Goulart and army units were needed to be shipped there. Brazilian naval forces also would be needed to back up another option: a landing by U.S. Marines.
U.S. military intervention was considered in earnest following Ambassador Gordon’s visit to Washington for consultations in mid-March. General Andrew O’Meara, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, reportedly flew from his Panama Canal headquarters to Rio a week before the coup to assu
re Castelo Branco of U.S. aid. The Brazilian general had given U.S. Military Attaché Vernon Walters a document describing a rationale for the coup on March 17. General O’Meara wanted Castelo Branco to know that the Johnson administration was willing to drop paratroopers in any area Goulart attempted to hold.30
Things fell into place quickly after that. On March 27, Ambassador Gordon, acting on CIA reports, cabled Secretary of State Dean Rusk that it was his impression and that of “some well informed Brazilians” that Goulart was definitely opting “to seize dictatorial power, accepting the active collaboration of the Brazilian Communist Party.… If he were to succeed it is more than likely that Brazil would come under full communist control.”
Gordon noted that Petrobrás “is now taking over the five remaining oil refineries not already under its control.” He applauded the recent anti-Goulart demonstrations as having provided “an important element of mass popular showing, which reacts favorably in turn on Congress and the Armed Forces.” Gordon reported that five governors were now joined by a military group under Castelo Branco, who was assuming control “in all areas of the country.”31 Gordon asked that his report be passed on to top administration officials and higher-ups in the CIA, including J. C. King.
Two days later, Gordon sent Rusk another top-secret cable, warning that three hundred Brazilian marines had been unable or unwilling to break up a sit-in by sailors protesting the arrest of thirty other sailors who had spoken out in Goulart’s defense during a rally. Goulart returned from an Easter holiday at his ranch in Rio Grande do Sul ready to grant amnesty to the marines and the sailors. The subsequent march of the freed sailors through the streets shouting “Long Live Jango” (Goulart’s nickname) galvanized the military hierarchy into opposition against the government. To these men, Goulart was condoning mutiny against their own authority, an authority they believed predated the republic and was derived from the days of the Portuguese emperor when the armed forces were assumed to serve Brazil by being the state above politics and class interests. Twice before, during the general’s attempts in 1955 and 1961 to overthrow constitutional succession by elected civilians, the refusal of noncommissioned officers to obey illegal orders for a putsch had proved decisive. The generals and admirals were determined not to have that resistance succeed again.
The generals now spoke out against Goulart’s proposed constitutional reforms. “Resistance forces, both military and civilian [are] seeking [to] recover from unexpected setback and consulting feverishly on future courses of action,”32 Gordon cabled. Again, King was listed among the select few to receive Gordon’s cables.
King, however, was not content to remain so far from the action. He would not suffer being bypassed as he had in Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs. Brazil was his baby, his specialty since the days he headed Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary there and surveyed the Amazon for Nelson Rockefeller during World War II. His contacts among conservative businessmen, politicians, and military officers—once disdained by the CIA’s fair-haired Ivy Leaguers—now found their place in the Brazilian sun. He secretly flew to Brazil to be on hand when the coup took place. He arrived just in time. “Actually, King had been very quietly in Rio through the recent April revolution there,” Berle recorded a month later in his diary. “Some day we will get the story.”33
In the Pentagon and the White House, the story already had a title: “Operation Brother Sam.” Informants provided the CIA station on March 30 with news that the governors of São Paulo and Minas Gerais had “definitely reached accord” and that a coup was imminent “probably within the next few days. Revolution will not be resolved quickly and will be bloody. Fighting in North might continue for a long period.”34
The drama reached its climax on March 30, when Goulart told the pardoned marine sergeants that many of the resources for the mobilization against the government had “come from the money of the businessmen who received the illicit remission of profits that were recently regulated by means of a law. It is the money provided by the enormous international petroleum interests and [Brazilian] companies which are against the law I also signed giving a monopoly on the importation of oil to Petrobrás.”35 This oil policy impacted negatively on the fortunes of Refinaria Exploração de Petróleo União, whose principal stockholder, Rockefeller ally Walther Moreira Salles, would later be criticized for allegedly supporting the coup that was being planned.36 When Goulart made a similar televised appeal to the Brazilian people that day, the conspirators knew they had to act fast.
THE ALARM RINGS
The Situation Room in the White House responded immediately with Operation Brother Sam, the contingency plan to land U.S. armed forces in Brazil. At 1:50 A.M. on March 31, a U.S. Navy task force, ostensibly conducting maneuvers in the South Atlantic, received orders from the Joint Chiefs to move secretly toward Brazil and stand by off Santos, a port south of São Paulo, for orders from the U.S. Embassy.37
The task force consisted of eleven tankers, six destroyers, an aircraft carrier with jet fighter-bombers, and a helicopter carrier ready to fly in a U.S. Marines strike force.38 Six tons of small arms and ammunition were also readied at McGuire Air Force base in New Jersey for shipment by C-135 transports to the Brazilian governors and generals. State governors mobilized state militia units with officers trained by the CIA under the Agency for International Development’s (AID’s) “Public Safety” cover.
Ambassador Gordon and Vernon Walters knew that General Armoury Kruel was the key to success. He was the commander of the powerful Second Army in São Paulo. No coup could succeed in Rio or São Paulo without the Second Army. Under pressure from younger colonels who were in contact with King’s CIA operatives,39 Kruel demanded that Goulart break with the Brazilian Left. Goulart refused. At midnight, Kruel left São Paulo, and the Second Army was moving against Rio by 4 A.M.
It was a rout. Within a few hours, contingents of Castelo Branco’s Fourth Army had completed their march from Minas Gerais and taken Rio. When Alberto Byington’s wife arrived at the Rio airport from the United States, she found a large contingent of police waiting for her—not to arrest her, but as an escort under the command of her son-in-law.
Carlos Lacerda was triumphant. He had opted to hold out in the governor’s mansion until the Second Army arrived, calling for his supporters to defend the palace. Organized by the management of American Light and Power, the group that surrounded the palace had only one problem: no ammunition. Until, that is, a long black limousine arrived, its back seats replaced by containers carrying ammunition, which was distributed by a man speaking English.40
On June 18, a beaming Lacerda would appear before the Council on Foreign Relations to the applause of New York’s financial and academic elite; Adolf Berle would introduce him.
No such accolades would be given Pernambuco’s governor in the Northeast. After troops from the Fourth Army surrounded the governor’s mansion and fired on his supporters, killing two students, Governor Miguel Arraes was seized and imprisoned.
Meanwhile, Goulart disappeared from Rio. He flew to Brasília, where he immediately conferred with congressional leaders and denied reports he had resigned. At about 10 P.M., the White House learned that Goulart would not resign and would, if necessary, go to Rio Grande do Sul to lead the resistance.41 Intelligence sources confirmed that the president’s jet was fully fueled for a flight up to 5,500 miles and that no flight plan had been filed. The CIA was already on Goulart’s trail.
Goulart signed the decree he had announced in Rio a few days earlier that nationalized the distribution of petroleum products. This legally put Standard Oil out of business in Brazil. It was also one of Goulart’s last acts as president.
The Johnson administration’s anxiety over whether Goulart intended to put up a fight ended when the Brazilian president, facing reports of troop movements against him from Minas Gerais, flew out of Brasília around midnight. This left the government in the hands of his chief domestic policy adviser, Darcy Ribeiro. Ribeiro officiated over the closing
of the airport, pro-Goulart rallies at the University of Brasília, a failed general strike called by local unions,42 and a radio call to arms. Against the oncoming Fourth Army, his efforts were feeble.
The Congress convened in an agitated joint session protected by local tanks and troops. Ribeiro’s message that Goulart had not fled Brazil but had gone to Rio Grande do Sul was ignored. The presidency was declared “vacated.” An hour and a half later, Speaker Ramieri Mazzilli took the oath of office as next in line of constitutional succession. The coup had effectively been endorsed by the time the Fourth Army’s tanks arrived.
Ambassador Gordon signaled triumph with characteristic understatement. He had ordered the old Rio embassy’s air conditioners shut off to prevent smoke spreading in case of fire. Learning from street runners (much as Berle had twenty years earlier) that the army was in control, he turned to his staff, who were expecting some comment on this historic moment, and simply said, “Turn on the air conditioners.”
Outside, the CIA-financed “March of the Family with God for Liberty” became a huge million-strong victory parade complete with tons of ticker tape-like fluttering paper. Gordon observed that the “only unfortunate note was the obviously limited participation in the march of the lower classes.” This, clearly, was a victory for the shopkeepers, the professionals, the landlords, and the upper classes, “a great victory for the free world,” the only alternative to what otherwise would have been the “total loss to the West of all South American Republics.” Gordon cautioned the Johnson administration, however, not to share his hyperbole; “avoidance of a jubilant posture”43 was the watchword. Instead, Gordon advised that Johnson send a congratulatory telegram to the new acting president, Mazzilli, offering “America’s warmest good wishes.”44