Clarence Hall’s Reader’s Digest special feature, The Country that Saved Itself, bills itself as the story of Brazil’s defense of the people’s freedom from the threat of communism. It tells the narrative of the Brazilian “counterrevolution” as a mass-based, middle-class-driven popular uprising against a disconnected group of powerful, communist-leaning elite leaders.

To the United States government of the 1960s, Brazil was seen as a key to the whole South American continent, due to its enormously large size and wealth of untapped natural and human resources. As Brazil goes, so will the rest of Latin America, thought the State Department. With the strength and popularity of left-wing, communist ideologies growing throughout Latin America, Brazil’s role grew and its relationship to the United States grew ever more crucial. As U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon explained:

Given the size and location of Brazil, such a course of events [Brazil becoming a communist country]—evidently hypothetical, but not implausible—might have made all of South America an area of left-wing totalitarian regimes (Gordon, 379).

The United States thus had a keen interest in the political climate of Brazil, whose political leadership acted as a barometer for the rest of the continent.

Perceptions of Power

The article positions João Goulart’s government as spiraling rapidly into leftist dictatorship and paints the generals who orchestrated the coup as defenders of freedom.

Goulart, a legally elected politician, is characterized as a sinister leftist enacting a Castro-esque scheme heading toward communist dictatorship. Hall describes a labor rally organized by Goulart:

Goulart and Brizola irrevocably committed the government to radical change. Many Brazilians, watching on TV, were shocked to hear Goulart denounce the government structure and social order as ‘outmoded’ and demand basic changes in the constitution. Among the changes, full legalization of the Communist Party. Goulart then announced two decrees, signing them on the spot with a flourish. One decree confiscated and handed over to Petrobrás, the government oil monopoly, the six oil refineries still in private hands. The other, more alarming, empowered the government to confiscate any large land tracts it adjudged inadequately used, and hand these over to landless peasants—a clear replay of Castro’s early ‘land reform’ program. The decrees were a bold and ominous move to bypass congress. Combined with the attacks on the constitution, they amounted to an audacious bid for establishment of government by decree, the essence of dictatorship (13).

In contrast, Hall depicts the military leaders plotting against Goulart as everyday heroes, protecting their country from an imminent communist takeover in the name of freedom and legality. In a subsection titled “Guardians of Legality,” Hall calls attention to the urgency of stopping the move toward authoritarianism:

But if the Red coup was to be thwarted, action stronger than public demonstrations was necessary. Middle-class leaders began conferring secretly with anti-communist generals of Brazil’s army, long distrustful of Goulart and quietly carrying on their own resistance to his policies (14).

Local Elites and Fear of Corporatism

It was not only foreign interests—not just United States intervention—that encouraged anti-communist action. Local economic elites also had an interest in maintaining a right-wing conservative political climate. Due to President Kubitschek’s policy of printing money to cope with foreign debt, rapid inflation meant that Brazilian export volume was decreasing, and local industries were suffering. The corporatist relationship between the government and the labor unions meant that Goulart’s left-leaning government held strategic control over the labor force. The nationalization of key industries, including the oil refining and mineral ore industries, as well as the proposal for radical land reform and redistribution, meant that the power base of the landed, economic elite was under attack. As one conservative journalist’s article chronicling the lead-up to the military coup shows, the conservative elite felt that the favors ordinarily afforded to them by the government were being transferred to the lower classes:

The president then started a new move: the country needed structural reforms. Some basic reforms—especially land and tax reforms—were announced. But the measures—many of them unconstitutional—through which such reforms would be put into effect were clearly designed to appeal to the ignorant masses rather than accomplish anything (Tavora, 234).

The combination of the United States’ fear of communist takeover and the local economic elites’ fear of being pushed out of power motivated the events leading up to the counterrevolution of 1964. Hall’s portrayal of the political climate in The Country that Saved Itself attempts to construct the veneer of popular resistance against communism, but cannot fully conceal the signs that betray these underlying fears. For the United States, the counterrevolution marked a victory in its ongoing war against the perceived communist threat:

A huge victory for Brazil itself, it was an even bigger one for the entire free world. For, as a high U.S. official in Brasília commented, “It marks a change of the tide wherein all the major victories have seemed to be Red, thoroughly debunking the communist claim that ‘history is on our side.’ ”

Of its significance, Lincoln Gordon, U.S. ambassador to Brazil, says, “Future historians may well record the Brazilian revolution as the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-20^th century” (3).

Communist Subversion and “Homegrown” Revolution

The article reflects the pervasive mood in the United States that the dominance of their democratic ideals was rapidly losing ground and signals their desperation for a victory against the relentless forces of communism, especially in Latin America. It consistently points out the many instances in which communist forces had worked to create conflict in Brazil: subverting an anti-illiteracy campaign to “distribute reading-aid materials that included ‘Che’ Guevara’s guerilla-warfare manual,” and forming a Sailors and Marines Association to move Marxist class war into the armed forces and weaken military discipline.

In addition, Hall insinuates that the communist forces in Brazil were led by foreign elements, including Chinese and Soviet agents. In doing so, Hall attempts to portray the actions of the revolution as a defense of the country against a hostile, foreign, communist invasion, and not a coup, thus winning for them the moral high ground. He particularly emphasizes the grassroots nature of the revolution:

This was a homegrown, do-it-yourself revolution, both in its conception and accomplishment. Not one U.S. dollar or brain cell was involved!

How, precisely, did Brazilians bring it off? The inside story of this genuine people’s revolution—planned and executed by embattled amateurs working against hardened communist revolutionaries—is a blueprint for every nation similarly threatened. It is invigorating proof that communism can be stopped cold, when people are sufficiently aroused and determined (3).

The Americanization of the Coup

Hall is keen to portray the Brazilians who supported the counterrevolution as independent of U.S. influences, but surprisingly similar in ideology and approach, in order to demonstrate the legitimacy and universality of U.S. democratic ideals. Business-initiated research groups that conducted surveys, formulated action plans, and circulated political newsletters closely resembled the technocratic progressive reforms that were occurring throughout the United States in the 1960s. The critical role of the Campaign of Women for Democracy that “established the power of women to influence public opinion” exemplifies the ideals of the Feminism movement that was gaining momentum in the United States.

The claim that the revolution was defending the Constitution and upholding the Brazilian “tradition of legalidade” echoes a critical American ideal articulated by John Adams since 1786. With a mass base of citizen support, from shopkeepers to elevator operators and taxi drivers to barbers, the counterrevolution was legitimate because its supporters believed in the same democratic ideals as the United States.

Elitism Within the “Revolution”

Hall cannot fully conceal the influences of business and industry leaders in the counterrevolution. He acknowledges that “heads of business organizations and industrial plants called regular meetings of their employees” to spread information about the counter-movement, while wealthy advertisers paid for year-long contracts in advance to anti-communist newspapers, radio, and television stations to fund and support the “Network of Democracy” and spread their message to the public. The economic interests of Brazil, increasingly paranoid about the public’s sympathy for the communists, worked actively to win the war over public opinion, exerting their influence through authority within their organizations and through money in the streets.

Beyond the economic elite, the political elite were also involved in engineering the counterrevolution. Hall attempts to characterize the Brazilian military as a defender of the Constitution and the “guardians of legality” whose members were not drawn from a single wealthy aristocratic class, but rather from an amalgamation of the middle and lower-middle classes.

Most rise from the ranks. Thus they form no military caste, but come perhaps closer to representing a cross-section of Brazilian opinion and democratic ideals than any other segment of the population (14).

Hall thus presents the military as an accurate representation of Brazilian public opinion, not a disconnected external force, but a true extension of the people’s ideals.

However, the process of military involvement in the counterrevolution is an indicator of the true elite-driven nature of this movement. Far from being a grassroots-driven uprising, the movement was organized by the traditional political powerhouses of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Pernambuco, which sent a secret memorandum to trusted top military officers and garnered support from anti-communist Brazilian businessmen, thus building a coalition among “the country’s most responsible circles.” The appearance of an organized middle-class citizen counterrevolution was really only the façade for a secret coalition of elite political, economic, and military powers trying to preserve the status quo.

The clearest indicator of the elite-driven nature of the counterrevolution was the make-up of the government immediately after its coup. Both economic and social control over Brazil was increasingly turned over to wealthy industrialists, large landowners, and business leaders who “think not only about profits, but about the social problems of our country.” Rather than return power to the people, the revolution consolidated power in the hands of the conservative Brazilian military elite.

Hall asks, “How could a divided nation of some 77 million swing politically so far so quickly, and with virtually no loss of life, in contrast to Castro’s bull-ring butcheries in Cuba, or to the Spanish Civil War, where both sides fought so bloodily for years?” (18). His question is off-base, considering that the coup of 1964 had nothing to do with the large masses and everything to do with a small handful of power players.

Further Reading

• James N. Green’s We Cannot Remain Silent analyzes the U.S. government’s dissemination of information about Brazil’s coup, as well as grassroots activities within the U.S. that brought to light the reality of the situation under the military dictatorship.

Sources

• Gordon, L. “Torture in Brazil [Letter to the editor].” Commonweal, August 1970.
• Hall, Clarence W. “The Country That Saved Itself.” The Reader’s Digest. 1964.
• Levine, R. M., & Crocitti, J.J. (eds.). The Brazil Reader. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.
• Tavora, Araken. “Rehearsal for the Coup.” In R. M. Levine & J. J. Crocitti (eds.), The Brazil Reader. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004.