Images of Brazil

...Even had the Goulart agrarian reform been ideal, it should rightfully, in priority, have followed a radical administrative and fiscal reform...

...Meanwhile, plus ça change The obstacles in the way of recovery and stability are truly enormous: 1.) a legacy of fiscal chaos inherited from Kubitschek and perpetuated by Goulart...

...The "constitutionalist" rebellion, therefore, may be to some a victory over the sinister forces of Communism...

...Now a clearer line of demarcation has been drawn, yet it seems to be our particular talent as a nation to polarize every situation in Latin America at the expense of subtlety and the Center-Left-and this sort of thing is likely to increase in intensity...

...but the battle lines are now clearly marked...

...Always badly led, ever divided between amateurs and professionals, perennially irresponsible, the Left now has every chance of becoming an "out" group...

...They are led by a pair of unstable and ambitious politicians, Carlos Lacerda and Adhemar de Barros, and their position rests heavily, one expects, on a discontented and exacerbated mass...

...It is not the Communists who have suffered from the rebellion...

...In the fluid nonsense of the Goulart era they had to share their "leadership" of the Left with a wide spectrum of opinion that ranged from a radical and mythical nationalism on the one hand to a thoroughly Peking-oriented Trotskyism on the other...

...Such hopes as there are must, one fears, come from new elements as yet invisible or occluded, from persons uncompromised by the radicalization and the confusion that began with Vargas' demise...

...Nor does the continued divisiveness of the country, which has yet to jell into a properly functioning federal system, bode much good for the future...

...and second, it has long had a bias toward constitutional limitation of its own power...

...the second, the human stuff of which it was built-not, of course, in a raw state, but as molded into bricks and trusses by unions, "movements," demagoguery and a mysterious force which the United States persists in calling "Communism"-God pity the solemn Czechoslovak apparatchiki who might have to manage it...

...This, at least, is the reason for its success and for the collapse of the Goulartists' call to "resistance.' The point is worth emphasizing, because of the elements that made the rebellion-the Army and a triumvirate of state governors-the latter give one no sense of having understood the message...

...His ingenuousness on Latin American affairs bears comparison only with that of the United States, with which he is, by a strange coincidence, in total accord...

...Like the Peronists in Argentina with whom they share a base of power, the politicized trade union, they will now pressure for a return to "normalcy," meanwhile radicalizing the base and agitating against whatever action the new government takes...

...In the second stage, figures like Adhemar de Barros, on whose formal administration and sheer opportunism it would be a shame to waste epithets, or Magalhaes Pinto, the representative of the basically non-political, all-reconciling Brazilian belief that God is himself Brazilian, will have their role to play, along with the parties and other sources of power, particularly the state governments they control...

...The true problem derived not from the lack of land but from a combination of a badly distributed rural population, poor agricultural methods, faulty rural education, defective communication, backward landowners and inadequate irrigation...

...Now one appreciated the comedy and the charm...

...For the time being the Left has been routed and must withdraw to lick its wounds...

...2.) a rampant demagoguery throughout the infrastructure of the unions, from Goulart's Vargas-inclined unions through Lacerda's anti-Communist crusades...

...Prediction being a sucker's game, one can only generalize three phases -but it is safe to say that, whatever happens on the surface, a struggle for power will go on underground...

...If, then, on its surface the rebellion is a "cautionary" move, a form of prophylaxis against confusion, what are its possibilities and who are the actors in the invisible drama whose first scene took place the day Janio Quadros resigned in 1961, and on which the curtain will presumably fall on election day in 1965...

...These were blown up by Kubitschek's folly and Quadros' dementia and were scattered to the four winds of a great nation by Goulart's sorry dereliction of duty and responsibility...

...But what about those who lack these basic necessities of Brazilian officialdom, those in need, those without connections...

...That this is probably due to having had a distinguished emperor in the 19th century and a continent over which to scatter its inner tension is yet another of those Brazilian anomalies from which de Gaulle, for instance, should not draw too firm a conclusion...

...A man of culture, a progressive in most social and economic matters as well as by personal formation, an anti-totalitarian of deep commitment, his ignorance of political realities and the international situation can only be ascribed to schizophrenia...

...They are nothing more than a collection of aggrieved factions of national life, making a majority while united and a set of quarrelsome minorities when disunited (which of the two is more likely to obtain, students of previous "rebellion" can judge...

...One had a profound sense, even as one left Brazil with gladness and nostalgia, that the country is truly destined to evolve its own political form, as it has evolved its own society and its own culture, and that such sudden reversals of fortune are part of some grandiose instinctive future whose outlines we on the outside cannot yet-any more than we can in the rest of the Tiers Monde-distinguish or describe...

...There is every likelihood that he was a thief only on a slightly lesser scale than ex-President Juscelino Kubitschek...

...Actually, it is a vague subterranean current which would be better understood as a "radical" nationalism...

...3.) a total absence of coordination between state and federal government...

...One can draw no comfort from the presence in the leadership of the most backward hierarchy in Latin America, or from the substitution of one crook, Goulart, by another, Adhemar de Barros...

...Long suffering and no longer comic, the menace was implied: a mass living in the realm of chaos...

...with money, patience, resolution and time, one had solved a problem...

...Certainly it was not "reformist," as the Associated Press has lately taken to calling it...

...They have now been polarized anew by the posturing (accompanied, to be sure, by perfectly serious arrests, censorship and depression) of those who would divide the only nation in America, besides our own, with a long and deep commitment, in its most ideal form, to democracy...

...One was shedding confusion, dropping off the miasma...

...But utterly bereft of the discipline, the personal honesty and authority of Vargas, not to speak of the former dictator's intelligence, courage and consistency, Goulart was a sort of Octavian following on a Caesar: He never even began to fit into the shoes of the collossus...

...I refer not only to the "bloodlessness" of the method, but also to the extraordinary parity of forces involved, the supple blend of direction and pressures that made, finally, a consensus of opinion...

...Briefly, 200,000 cruzieros were paid to a despachante, a professional who earns his money by doing your bribing for you, and a police officer was found who duly burgled his own office to find the necessary seal...

...A modern nation cannot be created out of warring regents, each seeking its development at the expense of the other...

...To expropriate land within five miles of highways and rivers, when such land is obviously already contributing most to the economy, is a move to gain political power from the mass and not a more efficient agriculture...

...Still, paper in hand at sailing time, one heaved a sigh of relief...

...One is surprised more by its forebearance than by its final intervention...

...Without any plan of administration, development or tactics-in short, without any plan-it is hard to see what significant force they represent...

...The context of this problem is radically different in a populous and prosperous state like Sao Paulo and in an arid, historically neglected area like the Northeast...

...And this is a most curious figure...

...It is not bands of Catholic ladies, sweet with the delicate scent of mimosa (the odor of sanctity the hierarchy grants to its faithful competents against the "Red menace"), marching with blue silk around their pretty and vulnerable necks, that will solve the future of Brazil...

...to most, it is merely a step, a small one, toward a more serious and responsible government...

...And he would not show up because his employer had told him not to, since both the chauffeur and the car had been boondoggled onto the payroll...

...Before this not a few piquant adventures were enacted, such as the chauffeur who had to have his share of the booty because otherwise he would not show up at his boss' office to carry a paper from one ministry to another...

...The late unpleasantness proved once again that there is a particular Brazilian way of handling even the most acute sores on the body politic...

...and finally 6.) pressures from outside-specifically from the United States-to adopt postures in the cold war (such as withdrawing recognition from Cuba) that can only worsen the already instable structure of the continent...

...a window-breaking mood in the crowd...

...Like a man who has been among trick mirrors and rolling rubber floors, never sure of being up or down, thick or thin, one plunged for the exit as though for salvation...

...4.) political parties that have no raison d'être other than the creation of votes at five-year intervals, and hence impede in every way possible the political education of the population...

...During three years of non-administration, Goulart did not even take the first step toward these reforms, which would have hurt the base of his political power...

...One has little sympathy for Goulart...

...5.) an unreconstructed rural autarchy, over which no one, least of all the federal government, has the slightest control, opposed to a mass that has suffered too patiently a 30year history of mismanagement under which most nations would have ceased to exist, and which only those, such as Brazil, with the greatest fortitude and potentiality could have withstood...

...Images are a writer's shorthand, and in this case these two images represent the two faces of Joao Goulart's reign...

...As for the "constitutionalists," they are neither a party, nor a movement, nor an ideology, nor a class, nor anything nearly so organized or institutionalized...

...The first thing to note is that Brazil is traditionally a country of middles...

...The one thing that Goulart did achieve by his policy of "muddling through to power" was a postponement of the day of reckoning...

...To the degree that elements of the Goulart "movement" are purged, as all signs indicate they will be, at least during the interregum and in those states like Sao Paulo and Guanabara which have frothing anti-Communists at their head, one may expect the Communists to be able to organize a far more effective opposition, especially if no alternative is offered...

...The ex-President's game was ever to play the see-saw, to speak out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and wherever possible to consolidate his own power and position with a view, one suspected, to succeed to the mantle of his mentor, Getulio Vargas...

...The case of the Army in Brazil is somewhat distinct...

...First, the Brazilian Army has a certain sérieux, acquired from actually participating in professional activity (from World War II to the present, with the U.N...

...The first, with its aura of improbability, is the regime just toppled...

...After half a decade in Latin America one notes a strange particularity about Brazil: that it is the only nation as a whole where one feels that the people really care about democracy...

...In the first stage, Lacerda must have the dominant voice both by right of intelligence and by right of intransigence...

...Where he has proven himself a model of energy, honesty and devotion in his administration, he is, in matters of wider reach, on the level of sophistication of the McCarran Act...

...For what was the regime that has just been overthrown...

...The Goulart reforms were neither systematic nor clearly conceived, but of that species of verbal reform that is the handmaiden of demagoguery...

...Its main emphasis was agrarian and made no sense in a country where more than twothirds of the land is both fertile and uninhabited, and where a true agrarian reform can only result from increased efficiency and careful government planning...

...One remembers sundry great sullennesses, an atmosphere in Capete or Botafogo (though never in Copacabana, where everything is softened by money) as heavy as the thick pulpy blossoms that exhaled into Rio's hot and difficult days -those days of lines outside markets...

...There is also every sort of evidence that he was a fool of the worst and most dangerous kind-the kind that mindlessly pursues all alternatives in any given situation and can never decide, beyond the immediate, where he is going...

...All the gleeful hand-rubbing in Thomas C. Mann's office in the State Department and all of President Johnson's proclamations of triumphant joy are premature, to say the least...

...That blend of the comical and illogical with the tragic and even desperate will probably outlive the best efforts of all those who approach Brazil with preconceived notions, whether of "Left" or "Right," of "order" or "Christianity...

...Hovering behind the third stage -that of elections-is the ambiguous figure of Kubitschek, dentist, tango champion and five-percenter extraordinary, the symbol of the good old days when Brazil had money in the bank and an illusory international prestige...

...No, the Goulart regime was not reformist...

...It is with undisguised pessimism that one returns to one's opening images...

...Its mark will be a bitter wheeling and dealing with 1965 in mind, and with an increasing disintegration of what is in any case a putative unity, leading into open warfare, on traditional lines, as the elections approach...

...Where no doubt some professional liberals will rail against the spectacle of generals interfering with the governing of nations, the Brazilian version of this cliché is still totally different from the Argentinian or, to pass to the ridiculous, the Guatemalan...

...in fact, given the peculiar conditions of Latin America, one might even say they have gained...

...A second obvious fact is that the rebellion has changed no part of the complex of problems that besets Brazil...

...waits for beans, rice or sugar...