Clerics, exiles, and academics: Opposition to the Brazilian Military dictatorship in the United States, 1969-1974

Latin American Politics and Society, Spring 2003 by Green, James N

ABSTRACT

Virtually no one in the United States raised objections to the 1964 military takeover of the Brazilian civilian government. In the early 1970s, however, the Brazilian regime had become associated with torture and the arbitrary rule of law. By the end of that decade, compliance with human rights standards had developed into a yardstick for measuring U.S. foreign policy initiatives in Latin America. This paper argues that between 1969 and 1974, a small group of dedicated church activists, exiled Brazilians, and academics introduced the issue of human rights in Latin America into the U.S. national body politic. A network of concerned activists fashioned a systematic campaign to educate journalists, government officials, and the public about the abuses taking place under the generals' rule. Their activities helped isolate the military regime and laid the groundwork for a broader solidarity movement with Latin American popular struggles in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs: I hope you're as happy about Brazil as I am.

President Lyndon B. Johnson: I am.

Mann: I think that's the most important thing that's happened in the hemisphere in three years.

Johnson: I hope they give us some credit, instead of hell.

-From a conversation taped at the White House, April 3, 1964 (quoted in Beschloss 1997, 306)1

Virtually no one in the United States protested the March 31, 1964, military takeover of the civilian government of Brazil, which the U.S. State Department supported. Likewise, few people mobilized a year later against the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. By 1970, however, the new Brazilian regime had become associated with torture and the violation of human rights. This was not the only regime that drew notice. In late 1973, dozens of solidarity groups sprang up in most major U.S. cities in response to the overthrow of Chile's democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and the brutal repression that took place after General Augusto Pinochet's rise to power. Less than a decade thereafter, national solidarity committees with hundreds of local affiliates supported the Sandinista revolution and the Salvadoran insurgency and mobilized massive demonstrations, direct-action sit-ins, and other protests against the Reagan administration's complicity with the counterrevolutionary forces in Central America. According to one analyst of that solidarity movement, "more than one hundred thousand U.S. citizens mobilized to contest the chief foreign policy initiative of the most popular U.S. president in decades" (Smith 1996, xvi). By the late 1970s, human rights violations had become a yardstick for U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

The catalysts for the change in official foreign policy initiatives often have been nongovernmental activists. Most scholars who have written about the importance of human rights discourse during the Carter administration (1977-81) point to groundbreaking work by activists against torture in Brazil in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and especially the flurry of political organizing related to reports of torture and repression in Chile after the 1973 military takeover. Lars Schoultz (1981, 6) rightly argues, "human rights conditions in these nations [of Latin America], particularly Brazil and later Chile, were the first to attract the attention of U.S. human rights activists." David P. Forsythe (1989, 142) concurs, emphasizing that "individuals associated with the National Council of Churches argued that it was their concern with torture in Brazil and American funding for foreign police training which, with the support of Senators Church, Abourezk, and others, had really started the renewed U.S. concern for human rights between 1969 and 1971."

Although Edward L. Cleary dramatically dates the beginning of the "human rights era in Latin America" as September 11, 1973, the date of the Chilean coup, he, too, documents earlier organizing for Brazil, after President Artur da Costa e Silva assumed dictatorial powers in December 1968, as critical to later efforts regarding Chile (Cleary 1979, 1, 141-43). Kenneth Cmiel (1999), in an overview of human rights politics in the 1970s, focuses largely on the activities of Amnesty International as emblematic of the shift that took place in the mid-1970s from grassroots organizing to Washington lobbying and media campaigns. His study, however, misses the details of the origins of human rights activities as they related to Latin America, and therefore emphasizes NGOs rather than less institutionalized groups that laid the groundwork for later organizations.

Following the lead of these scholars, this article documents and analyzes in detail the activities between 1969 and 1974 of the small group of dedicated church and left-wing activists, exiled Brazilian intellectuals, and Latin Americanist scholars who played such an important role in introducing the issue of human rights in Latin America into national political debates. In Europe, a parallel campaign against torture and human rights violations in Brazil and, later, other countries of Latin America developed during this same period, although that movement is beyond the scope of this article. In both the United States and Europe, Brazilian political exiles, allied at times with left-wing sectors of the Catholic Church and other forces, waged a relentless campaign to isolate the Brazilian government (Cavalcanti and Ramos 1978; Costa 1980; Rollemberg 1999; Serbin 2000, 91).