Unhappy Brazil
THE CAPITALIST ALTERNATIVE TO CUBA
By Joseph Hansen
Fidel Castro has said again and again that’ Latin America is | faced with no other possibilities but to follow the example of the Cuban Revolution or suffer the consequences of military dictatorship, There is no third possibility, he has emphasized, such as that held out by Wall Street's glittering "Alliance for Progress" or Romulo Betancourt!s eroded bourgeois democracy in Venezuela,
Castrots warnings have received dramatic confirmation in a num= ber of cases, The Frondizi government in Argentina, which attached itself to the “Alliance for Progress" and its hidden strings -- to line up against the Cuban people and their socialist revolution ~«was swept away by the military caste, the "gorillas," as they are called, A similar fate befell the Arosemena government in Eouador last July.
Now the lesson is being repeated before our eyes on the colossal scale of Brazil, a country bigger than the United States, with a population estimated at 75,000,000, and borders touching all the South American countries except Chile and Ecuador, a country of such
tere
importance in the Western Hemisphere that what happens there has big effect on all the others,
The counterrevolutionary coup dtétat carried out by the "gorillas" and their political mentors like Carlos Lacerda, the reactionary governor of Guanabara [see World Outlook April lo], is now in-process of being consolidated under the ministrations of the Big Brother to the North. Moreover the counterrevolutionary.: coup d'état, which aimed at perpetuating the feudal-like relations that make Brazilts countryside a living hell for her millions of peasants, has been certified as eminently "constitutional" by. no less an authority on . Brazilian law than the proprietor of the LJB Ranch in Texas, In fact unlike most judges, who sometimes take years to decide on the consti~ tutionality of a point in law, the clarity of the case was so appar~ ent to him that he wired his congratulations to the "gorillas" before the president of the country had reaohed exile.
This ruling by Johnson soon came under a cloud, Carlos Lacerda, who is recognized even by the White House as something of an authority on. gonstitutional government in Brazil, had this to say to Agence France Presse April ii:
“Tt would be dishonest to say that the institutional act published Thursday [April 9] by the military chiefs is not an authori-« tarian act [acte d'autorité], but I am optimistic and I believe that the new regime can liberate us from the political system of which we have been prisoners since the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas and which we were not able to break by conventional means,"::
Some of the State Department's Latin-American experts, distressed at the effect of President Johnson's swift acclaim of the counterrevolutionary coup d'état, have sought to find a scapegoat for his declaration, Thus Arthur Krock, who is often used by the State Department as.an unofficial channel to the powerful New York Times said in his column of ‘April 8: “An authoritative explanation given to this department is that the President and Mr, Rusk acted on recom mendations from Ambassador Lincoln Gordon in Rio de Janeiro and his ‘country team!. , . "
It is not without irony that. Lincoln Gordon has given almost revolutionary-sounding speeches in Brazil about the need for reforms and all that jazz connected with the “Alliance for Progress,"
President Johnson may not be quite so jubilant in public over the triumph of reaction in Brazil; but the last thing in the world he will do is disclaim the credit due him and Dean Rusk and his appointee Thomas C, Mann, now Washington's chief Latin-American policymaker,.for their good job in toppling Goulart and ending the hope for even the most modest reforms in Brazil in any other way except along the path blazed by the Cubans. Johnson needs that "victory" in Brazil for his election campaign, to steal the thunder away from the rightwing Republicans,
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Meanwhile the people of Brazil are beginning to pay the price for the counterrevolutionary coup d'état that was baptized and blessed by the White House,
Reports trickling through the censorship set up by the military junta (now relaxed -- for outgoing news) indicated that in the first days after the generals seized power, some 5,000 people were rounded up in Rio de Janeiro alone. and jommed into the reeking dungeons that go by the fair name of "prisons" in-that city. These hell. holes “were already so crowded and run.on such incredible levels that a desperate prison rebellion flared up there only a little more than | three years ag -
One report guessed at 7,000 in all of Brazil caught up.in the massive witch<hunt. The victims include prominent individuals of all kinds anywhere to the left of the medievalistic landholders, Union figures are prominent among the prisoners,
The military junta purged a congress already notorious for its reactionary coloration, throwing out some 40 deputies, People as prominent as Janio Quadros, the president who resigned because even his conservative program of “enlightened capitalism" was rejected by the oligarchy, have been deprived of all political rights for ten years,
After this, the junte settled on one of their own inner oircle~ to be president, and he was immediately rubber-stamped by the com placent congress after it was stripped of still more of the consti-+tutional powers that stand so high in the opinion of the president of the United States, The reactionary general placed in supreme power in Brazil April 11 is Humberto Castelo Branco, He was unani-~ mous choice of the military junta, that body of constitutional experts who issued a decree April 9 called an “institutional act" which calmly declared that their "revolution" was in itself the final authority, taking precedence over the old constitution.
Reliable reports as to the reaction among the workers and peas-= ants to these bitter events are not yet available. .It is possible that they are still reeling from the blow, particularly in the cities, and are not yet fully aware of exactly what happened,
This. element of surprise can for a time give the military caste'ts dictatorial regime an appearance of strength which it really does not have, This can become evident rather quickly in Brazil where raging inflation has accustomed the entire working population to constant battles’ to keep up with the athletic cost of living,
a is too early, however, to venture to predict whether the same pattern of political instability that has characterized Argentina, for instance, will be repeated in this.unhappy land, or whether Brazil will look more like Stroessnerts Paraguay.
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ALGERTANS