Brazils president on the grounds that he had not resigned, cabled the American Embassy in Montevideo that it would be useful if you could quietly bring to the attention of appropriate officials the fact that despite his allegations to the contrary Goulart has abandoned his office. 68

At the same time, the CIA station in Uruguay undertook a program of surveillance of Brazilian exiles who had fled from the military takeover, to prevent them from instigating any kind of insurgency movement in their homeland. It was a simple matter for the Agency to ask their (paid) friend, the head of Uruguayan intelligence, to place his officers at the residences of Goulart and other key Brazilians. The officers kept logs of visitors while posing as personal security men for the exiles, although it is unlikely that the exiles swallowed the story.69

In the first few days following the coup, several thousand Brazilians were arrested, communist and suspected communist all.70 AIFLD graduates were promptly appointed by the new government to purge the unions.71 Though Ambassador Gordon had assured the State Department before the coup that the armed forces would be quick to restore constitutional institutions and return power to civilian hands, 72 this was not to be. Within days, General Castelo Branco assumed the presidency and over the next few years his regime instituted all the features of military dictatorship which Latin America has come to know and love: Congress was shut down, political opposition was reduced to virtual extinction, habeas corpus for political crimes was suspended, criticism of the president was forbidden by law, labor unions were taken over by government interveners, mounting protests were met by police and military firing into crowds, the use of systematic disappearance as a form of repression came upon the stage of Latin America, peasants homes were burned down, priests were brutalized ... the government had a name for its program: the moral rehabilitation of Brazil ... then there was the torture and the death squads, both largely undertakings of the police and the military, both underwritten by the United States.73

In the chapters on Guatemala and Uruguay, we shall see how the US Office of Public Safety (OPS), the CIA and AID combined to provide the technical training, the equipment, and the indoctrination which supported the horrors in those countries. It was no less the case in Brazil. Dan Mitrione of the OPS, whom we shall encounter in his full beauty in Uruguay, began his career in Brazil in the 1960s. By 1969, OPS had established a national police force for Brazil and had trained over 100,000 policemen in the country, in addition to 523 receiving more advanced instruction in the United States.74 About one-third of the students time at the police academies was devoted to lectures on the communist menace and the need to battle against it.75 The bomb school and techniques of riot control were other important aspects of their education.

Tortures range from simple but brutal blows from a truncheon to electric shocks. Often the torture is more refined: the end of a reed is placed in the anus of a naked man hanging suspended downwards on the pau de arara [parrots perch] and a piece of cotton soaked in petrol is lit at the other end of the reed. Pregnant women have been forced to watch their husbands being tortured. Other wives have been hung naked beside their husbands and given electric shocks on the sexual parts of their body, while subjected to the worst kind of obscenities. Children have been tortured before their parents and vice versa. At least one child, the three month old baby of Virgilio Gomes da Silva was reported to have died under police torture. The length of sessions depends upon the resistance capacity of the victims and have sometimes continued for days at a time.

Amnesty International76

Judge Agamemnon Duarte indicated that the CCC [Commandos to Hunt Communists, a death squad armed and aided by the police] and the CIA are implicated in the murder of Father Henrique Neto. He admitted that... the American Secret Service (CIA) was behind the CCC.

Jornal do Brazil77

Chief of Staff of the Brazilian Army, General Breno Borges Forte, at the Tenth Conference of American Armies in 1973:

The enemy is undefined ... it adapts to any environment and uses every means, both licit and illicit, to achieve its aims. It disguises itself as a priest, a student or a campesino, as a defender of democracy or an advanced intellectual, as a pious soul or as an extremist protestor; it goes into the fields and the schools, the factories and the churches, the universities and the magistracy; if necessary, it will wear a uniform or civil garb; in sum, it will take on any role that it considers appropriate to deceive, to lie, and to take in the good faith of Western peoples. 78

In 1970, a US Congress study group visited Brazil. It gave this summary of statements by American military advisers there:

Rather than dwell on the authoritarian aspects of the regime, they emphasize assertions by the Brazilian armed forces that they believe in, and support, representative democracy as an ideal and would return government to civilian control if this could be done without sacrifice to security and development. This withdrawal from the political arena is not seen as occurring in the near future. For that reason they emphasize the continued importance of the military assistance training program as a means of exerting U.S. influence and retaining the current pro-U.S. attitude of the Brazilian armed forces. Possible disadvantages to U.S. interests in being so closely identified with an authoritarian regime are not seen as particularly important.79

The CIA never rests ... a footnote: the New York Times reported in 1966 ...

When the CIA learned last year that a Brazilian youth had been killed in 1963, allegedly in an auto accident, while studying on a scholarship at the Lumumba University in Moscow, it mounted a massive publicity campaign to discourage other South American families from sending their youngsters to the Soviet Union.80

28. Peru 1960-1965

Fort Bragg moves to the jungle

It was a CIA dream come true. A commando raid by anti-Castro Cubans upon the Cuban Embassy in Lima had uncovered documentary proof that Cuba had paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in Peru for propaganda to foster favorable attitudes toward the Cuban revolution and to promote Communist activities within the country.

This was no standard broad-brush, cold-war accusation, for the documents disclosed all manner of details and names-the culprits who had been on the receiving end of the tainted money; men in unions and universities and in politics; men who had secretly visited Cuba, all expenses paid.1 To top it all off, these were men the CIA looked upon as enemies.

The only problem-and it wasnt really a problem-was that some of the documents were counterfeit. The raid had certainly taken place, on 8 November 1960 to be exact. And documents had indeed been seized, at gunpoint. But the most incriminating of the documents, presented a month later with the authentic ones, had been produced by the experts of the CIAs Technical Services Division.2

It was a propaganda windfall. The story received wide media coverage in Latin America and the United States, accompanied by indignant anti-communist articles and editorials. The Wall Street Journal was moved to run an extremely long, slightly hysterical piece, obviously based on Washington handouts, strikingly unquestioned, which warned that mountainous stacks of intelligence data from the 20 nations stretching from Mexico to Argentina tell of a widening Communist push into the hemisphere .3

To be sure, the Cubans insisted that the documents were not genuine, but that was only to be expected. The affair was to cast a shadow over Castros foreign relations for some time to come.

The most propitious outcome, from the CIAs standpoint, was that within days after the disclosure the Peruvian government broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. This was a major priority of the Agency in Lima, as in most other CIA stations in Latin America, and led further to the Cuban news agency, Prensa Latina, being barred from operating in Peru. The news agencys dispatches, the Peruvian authorities now decided, were controlled from Moscow .4

A week later, there was further welcome fallout from the incident. The government enacted legislation making it easier to arrest members of the Communist Party, although this was repealed a year later. During its deliberations the Peruvian legislature accepted a sworn statement from one Francisco Ramos Montejo, a recent defector from the Cuban Embassy who had been present during the raid, who confirmed that all the documents were genuine. Ramos, who was now living in Miami and working for the CIA, added fresh revelations that there had been detailed plans for the assassination of Peruvian officials and for the overthrow of the government, and that arms had been smuggled into Peru from Bolivia and Ecuador, presumably for these purposes.5

Of such stuff is the battle for the hearts and minds of Latin Americans made.

The political history of Peru has been of the classic South American mold-an oligarchy overthrown by a military coup replaced by another oligarchy ... periodically punctuated by an uprising, sporadic violence from the forgotten below to remind those above that they ate still alive, albeit barely. Veteran Latin America newsman John Gerassi described the state of those below in the Peru of the early 1960s:

In Lima, [he capital, whose colonial mansions enveloped by ornate wooden balconies help make it one of the most beautiful cities in the world, half of the 1.3 million inhabitants live in rat-infested slums. One, called El Monton, is built around, over, and in the city dump. There, when I visited it, naked children, some too young to know how to walk, competed with pigs for a few bits of food scraps accidentally discarded by the garbage men ... [The peasants] chew cocaine-producing coca leaves to still hunger pains, and average 500 calories a day. Where there is grass, the Peruvian Andes Indian eats it-and also the sheep he kills when it gets so hungry that it begins tearing another sheeps wool off for its food. The peons who work the land of the whites average one sol (4 cents) a day, and ... labor from sunup to sundown.6