A country of nearly 200 million people where the six richest people own as much as the poorest 100 million, where the top 5% own as much as the remaining 95%.
1900-57 – Indigenous population drops from 1 million to less than 200,000. Western coloniser’s give them blankets infected with small pox and sugar laced with arsenic. Outright slaughter, crop burning, land evictions from ancestral territories, torture, rape etc etc.
Before the 1964 coup, Presidents Kubitschek, Quadros and then Goulart attempted to strengthen internal labour and peasant organisations as a counterweight to U.S. military interests.
1955 – CIA-backed coup fails.
1964 – The American Institute for Free Labour Development (AIFLD) carried out anti-communist propaganda campaign, worked diligently to split and discredit independent Brazilian unions and proudly supports the coup that definitively ended free unions in Brazil.
The CIA was able to bribe journalists and politicians, conspire with military factions, infiltrate and subvert the labour movement, engage in extensive propaganda campaigns. i.e. ignore sovereignty. Richard Helms, director of the CIA, by his own admission, said that US business in Brazil served regularly as a CIA cover.
The US Hanna Mining Company assisted in the overthrow of President Goulart’s government, funding anti-communist conferences and providing trucks for the ‘Minas Gerais’ troops that launched the coup. After the coup Hanna Mining settled the mineral rights dispute on their own terms also gaining exclusive harbour rights and other special privileges.
1960-70 – Top 5% increase their share of wealth from 44% to 50%. Bottom 80% have their share reduced from 35% to 27.5%. According to ‘Business Week’, the real wages of the lowest 80% “have been steadily dropping since 1964 – the year the Generals took over – despite a tripling of the gross national product to $80 billion.
1966-74 – Health share of budget falls from 4.29% to 0.99%. Escalating deaths from preventable diseases. From 1963-73, the defence budget tripled.
1968 – Government commission documents … “widespread corruption and sadism”. Indians forced to give way to state highway, mining and agribusiness projects.
1970s – 50% of Brazilian manufacture and sales and 59 of the largest 100 manufacturing companies are controlled by foreign capital – motor vehicles, pharmaceuticals, machinery, rubber, plastics etc.
1971 – 65% of the economically active population subsisting on $60 per month or less. Only 1% earn more than $350 per month, many of these earning $5,000 per month or more. In the North East hunger is an epidemic. Half the children born die before the age of 5.
1972 – On resigning from the Brazilian National Indian Foundation, Antonio Cotrim Soares says … “I am tired of being a grave-digger of the Indians. I do not intend to contribute to enrichment of economic groups at the cost of the extinction of primitive cultures.”
1973 – 6 Bishops sign a statement … “In Brazil, only 5% can buy what is produced… 80% practically buy nothing other than what they need to keep them from dying”.
Increased police training coincides with increased torture of political prisoners and murder of petty criminals. Death Squads reportedly composed of “off-duty policemen” – Jan Black “US penetration of Brazil” (p.146)
1974 – Jean-Pierre Clavel writes in the New York Times…”Secret steps were taken in Brazil in the early 1960s by a group of senior military and police officials to create a co-ordinated autonomous torture and death squad network to crush political opposition… illustrated lectures and demonstrations of torture were conducted using political prisoners as guinea pigs, by Operacao Bandeirontes, once described as an “advanced school of torture”. Subsequently, trained Brazilian torturers travelled to military academies in neighbouring nations to conduct courses in what is euphemistically called interrogation.”
1978 – London Sunday Times reports “The Indian Population of Brazil has been reduced from 3 million to less than 100,000 by disease, alcohol and demoralisation”. A former French army sergeant managing a nut plantation says “Je suis raciste… the Brazilians are white niggers, not a thought for tomorrow, all rhythm and shit. They’re kids. You’ve got to push them… the Amazon is white man’s country. Any European winds up boss.”
Fred Nunn in the Journal of Latin American Studies (IV,1,’72) says … “subject to U.S. influence on anti-communism, the professional army officer becomes hostile to any sort of populism.”
Children escaping from the massacres in the ghetto are rounded up, put into police trucks, transported to other states, dumped, and warned to stay away. Measures to help children are regarded as a menace… “In a recent typical case, a young teenager was arrested in Vitoria for trying to organise the city’s abandoned children into a work co-operative. After he was beaten and tortured, the boy was sodomised in the local prison.
US western partners Volkswagen (Germany), Rio Tinto Zinc (Britain) and Italy (Liquigas) all receive concessions in Brazil. Liquigas was allowed to buy 6 million acres of land in the heart of the territory of the Xavantas Indians. 60 Indians were killed in the eviction process.
Church medical assistance is discouraged and regarded as subversive. It caused the arrest, harassment and exile of numerous clergy in Brazil.
Terry Gilliam made a seminal futuristic film where shock police live in ignorant acts of brutality and their Orwellian bureaucratic masters at the Ministry decay in their own corruption. The poor have not organised against state terror and continue in the ghetto putting up with ever greater injustices. Many, including myself, wondered why the film was called Brazil. Once I’d learnt about Brazil’s system I knew why. As I write these lines in 1995, David Munro’s Channel 4 TV documentary on conditions in Brazil tells us that Brazil has taken its place in turn as the most spectacularly divided nation on earth. Right alongside the glitzy Rio party 35 floors above, the “Shoot Scene” takes place. Military police, sometimes plain-clothed, masked, or both, shoot to kill street children who dare to try and live outside the ghettoes.
The Police don’t like going into the ghettoes but will sound their guns on the periphery to let the locals know they’re there. Occasionally, they go in and massacre families, kids, old folks, the blind… and insane from lives of utter dispossession and subjugation at the hands of Global Resource Management protected by law and government.
Edward A Jesser Junior speaking to the American Bankers’ Association… “Quick and tough decisions can be made in a relatively short time in a country such as Brazil compared to the difficulty that there is in reaching agreement on what actions to take in a democracy”. Banks prefer dictatorships. Investment in the few and Police for the many. A “tough” decision would be something like using the Police to evict a tribe from their ancestral home, shooting them if necessary.
More security doesn’t stop “terrorism”. Lawrence Eagleburger, an American Senate / Business potentate, speaks for the US on terrorism at home and abroad. On terrorism from abroad (the TWA bombing) Lawrence says Bomb Libya, Iran, wherever. On terrorism from within, Lawrence says more surveillance, less civil liberties.
Eagleburger knows that the real answer is less rapacious Global Management by his peers and minions so that all have enough and are not forced to fight against starvation (or as Lawrence would have it, for Communism).
There’s no War on Drugs, and before the War on Drugs, there was no war on Communism. It’s always been the War on the Poor to keep them off the land that Eagleburger needs for export cash crops and minerals.
Brazil had an elected Government. The Americans arranged a Military Dictatorship for them instead in 1964, after failing previously in 1955 to do the same.
The key to Brazil, as with most, is stop arming dictators and start arming democracies. Profits for Americans would be smaller but security costs would be lower because the people would have land, shelter, food, clothing, education, resources and the opportunities to make a life for themselves. No more crime to put food on the table, a roof over your head or a school for your children.
But instead in Brazil today, courtesy of the shameful tactics of foreign “investors”, we have military police “dropping” children on the streets of Rio, the orphans of the Police’s ghetto massacres, victims of criminal State behaviour and, now with nothing, driven to crime themselves. Gangs do not come from nowhere, they are an act of survival.
People like to become free (from Americans) but then the police start shooting them back into the ghetto. But we could always stop arming the Brazilian Police. Free from foreign intervention, the local maniacs would take power but eventually, without foreign interference, the population would force the move towards democracy. More resources means less crime, less Police State, less tendency towards Orwellian society.
But Brazil, with our assistance, has moved into the Orwellian Age and joined much of Central and South America, West Africa, the Middle East and Indo-China. And for what? We get cheap bananas, Eagleburger gets another satellite to add to his fleet.
Eagleburger didn’t invent this system. He just inherited it and continues to refine it in the pattern laid out by his predecessors. The historical Brazilian chapter of back-door military rule ends when we stop Eagleburger and friends from arming the dictators and instead offer weapons to people with desires for democracy so they can defend themselves against the Militias.
In spite of this, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, born in 1945 into barefoot poverty in Brazil’s semi-arid back lands, learned to read aged 10, involved in the Unions from the age of 19 after an Industrial accident, elected President of the Steelworkers’ Union in 1975, jailed after leading the metalworkers’ strikes in São Paulo, involved in the start of the PT, the Workers Party in 1980, elected to Congress in 1986, and as President of Brazil from 2002-2010.
Lula’s economic policies significantly raise living standards with more than 20 million people rising out of acute poverty. IMF debts were repaid early and Brazil became the world’s eighth-largest economy. Lula leaves office in 2011 with a near 90% approval rating, won by creating very strong economic growth and social inclusion.
Lula’s successors Dilma Roussef (2011-2016) and Michel Temer (2017-2018) were removed on corruption charges, as was Lula in 2017.
On 22nd November 2019, two weeks after Lula’s release from prison, the Guardian takes up the story… “Lula spent 580 days in prison on controversial corruption charges he always claimed were politically motivated to stop him from running in 2018’s elections. Recent leaked conversations appeared to show Sergio Moro – the judge who convicted him – colluding with Lula’s prosecutors. Moro went on to join now-President Bolsonaro’s government as justice minister”. The Guardian continues … “Since the murder last year of Marielle Franco, a popular Rio de Janeiro councilwoman, several photos have emerged of the president posing with suspects in the killing, who are allegedly linked to shadowy paramilitary gangs.”
October 2018 – Amid economic downturn and escalating violence, Jan Bolsonaro elected as President. Pro-Evangelist (30% of the population), homophobic, tough on crime, pro-Market, believes Climate Change is a Marxist plot. Full support of Donald Trump. And as we see above, charges of corruption against him, should they ever be brought, would not be controversial.
Lula, now released from prison, vows to oppose him … “Bolsonaro has already made clear what he wants for Brazil: he wants to destroy all of the democratic and social conquests from the last decades.”
Once again, beyond fine words, we see the type of action supported by U.S. money abroad.
Before moving on to Venezuela, I present short summaries of Paraguay and Uruguay.