Toward Profound Change

The army is the people in uniform.

--General Benjamin Constant (1838-91), Co-Founder of the Republic of Brazil

In Latin America's biggest nation last week, the people in uniform performed a political revolution to match the military uprising that toppled Leftist President Joao ("Jango") Goulart. It was a revolt against Communism and confusion, against demagoguery, corruption, ruinous economic drift and national hopelessness. In a grim and solemn mood, the military announced that it was assuming unprecedented powers and taking over much of the responsibility of government for the remainder of Goulart's term.

Barely two days after Goulart fled to exile in Uruguay, an army colonel strode into the Congress in Brasilia with a message from the war ministry in Rio. His superiors, he informed congressional leaders, demanded a thoroughgoing purge, suspending the political rights and immunities of Congressmen suspected of being Communists, leftists or subversives. When Congress balked, the three military chiefs of staff simply decreed it. In an "Institutional Act," they set the hard ground rules under which the country will be administered until free elections are held in 1965 and a popularly elected President is inaugurated. Effective until Jan. 31, 1966, the decree:

>Empowers the government to cancel anyone's political rights for ten years, dismiss Congressmen, state deputies, city councilmen; fire any federal, state or municipal employee found guilty of acts against democracy, national security, and "the probity of public administration." In other words, out with the Communists and crooks.

>Enables the President to declare a state of siege without going through Congress.

> Gives the President sole power to present budget bills, and specifically forbids the inflation-minded Congress from voting more money than the President requests.

-- Forces Congress to vote within 30 days on any constitutional amendment submitted by the President, and reduces the margin for congressional approval from two-thirds to an absolute majority. --

Imposes another 30-day limit for congressional action on other presidential bills; if no action is taken within 30 days, the bills will be considered approved.

The military then ordered Congress to elect a new President within two days to replace Acting President Paschoal Ranieri Mazzilli. Congress quickly complied. By an overwhelming majority, a joint session of the Senate and the

Chamber of Deputies elected General Humberto Castello Branco, 63, an officer as highly respected for his intellectual ability as his soldiering, to become the new President. For two months the country's three military chiefs of staff will share the same powers as the President under the Institutional Act; after that President Castello Branco holds power alone.

Not This Time. The act was an astonishing document for Brazil, that gentle, patient giant of music, coffee and sunny beaches. It was doubly so in view of the Brazilian army's historic respect for constitutional civilian authority. Brazil's military has intervened before in times of crisis to save the country from its politicians: in the last 150 years the military has toppled one Brazilian emperor, one dictator, one acting President and two full Presidents. But never for the sake of power.

Always in the past, the soldiers stepped aside when the crisis had passed, and marched back to their barracks. Not this time--not after watch ing Brazil slide steadily down the abyss with Goulart and his far-leftist cronies.

Says one high army officer: "If the politicians think we risked our lives for ev erything to go on just as before, they are making a capital mistake."

That the military was determined to work a profound change was clear almost from the start. Acting President Mazzilli discovered as much when he lightly greeted General Artur da Costa e Silva, 61, the army's senior ranking officer, as "my dear minister." Replied the general crisply: "I would be honored to be your minister, Mr. President, but it so happens that I am not. I am the commander in chief of the armed forces which won a revolution."

Costa e Silva had the same message for Carlos Lacerda, the able but terrible-tempered governor of Guanabara state (mainly the city of Rio), who has high ambitions for the presidency in 1965. At one point last week, Lacerda began shouting at the general. Costa e Silva told him to lower his voice.

"This is a civilized meeting," reminded the general. "Let's keep it that way." "I hereby resign as governor," stormed Lacerda. "Tell that to the state assem bly," suggested the general. Lacerda stalked from the meeting, but a few days later issued a statement: "General Costa e Silva is a highly qualified man, just the kind that Brazil needs during such a difficult moment." Lacerda then announced that he was off to Europe or the U.S. for a two-month vacation.

Out They Go. Like a string of sand castles, the old political machines of the late Dictator Getulio Vargas and his heir, Jango Goulart, came tumbling down in ruins. No sooner was the Institutional Act proclaimed than the military summarily dismissed 40 Congress men, stripped them of all political rights for ten years; 60 other highly placed Brazilians also found their political rights suspended, among them Goulart, Quadros, Marxist Peasant League Organizer Francisco Juliao, and Leonel Brizola, Goulart's rabble-rousing brother-in-law, who fled to Uruguay.

Across Brazil, leftist governors, mayors and scores of lesser officials were sacked from office. A group of nine visiting Chinese Communists were marched off to jail as subversive agents; police confiscated their $100,000 bankroll. In some places the roundup degenerated into ugly brutality. In Pernambuco, police arrested the 70-year-old leader of the state Communist Party, clouted him on the head with a rifle butt, stripped him down to his blue shorts, paraded him around Recife with a red tie around his neck, then hustled him off to jail. He died soon after--of a "heart attack."

At one point last week, some 10,000 political prisoners had been rounded up --4,000 in Rio alone. In Guanabara Bay, a white luxury liner and grey navy transport were pressed into service as temporary jails. As the purges spread, the military clamped tight censorship on all news. Long-distance phone calls were monitored, government troops moved into wire service offices, edited stories and poked through files.

The excesses began to worry some Brazilians. But the vast majority seemed squarely behind the people in uniform. Suddenly everyone was scrambling to climb aboard the bandwagon. Union after union once dominated by the Communist-run General Labor Command began buying newspaper ads cheering the "victory of the glorious forces." One of the most radical divisions of Goulart's own Labor Party vowed to throw out "all extremist elements." By a 75 to 0 vote, the Minas Gerais state legislature kicked out three extremist congressmen; in Natal, the city council voted 25 to 0 to impeach their leftist mayor despite army suggestions that three or four dissenting votes would make it look better.

The rest of the hemisphere looked on the events in Brazil with mixed emotions. Venezuela, though unofficially pleased over Goulart's fall and the prospect of a Brazilian break in relations with Castro, was in a quandary. How could it square recognition of Brazil with its traditional policy of nonrecognition of governments that came to power through a military coup? In Chile and Peru, some papers fretted over the possibility of a repressive military dictatorship. Washington, which was the first to greet the new regime with "warm wishes," hoped the arrests would not go too far. "Brazil needed cleaning up," said one high official, "but not a witch hunt."

Soldier at the Top. Perhaps the best guarantee against that was Castello Branco, the man chosen as President. Brazilian Social Historian Gilberto Freyre once described him as "a soldier from head to toe, a military man without Prussian arrogance, and one of the greatest Brazilian intellectuals not just in the armed forces but in the entire nation." An up-from-the-ranks infantryman who led Brazilian troops in Italy in World War II, Castello Branco is a lover of good music, reads avidly in four languages, has lived in both France and the U.S., and is reported to have a deep social conscience about the problems that dog Brazil. Much of his career was spent in the poverty-stricken, drought-devastated northeast. He was not one of the first plotters of the revolt, and thought long and hard before lending his weight to it. "We have toppled a government of the extreme left," Castello Branco said after his election. "We will not form a government of the extreme right."

The job ahead is staggering. It is, as one Brazilian calls it, a "mandate for insomnia." Brazil's economy is an inflationary wreck, its politics a shambles. Reform will demand sacrifice. It will be up to Castello Branco and his government to justify the high price that Brazilians may have to pay.

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