On October 4, Flávio Bolsonaro narrowly defeated incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by two points, 47% to 45%, in the first round of Brazil’s election, forcing a runoff to be held on October 25. It was a shockingly strong performance by Bolsonaro in an election that Mark Weisbrot, a Latin America expert and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me “should never have been so close.”
Abin, Brazil’s intelligence agency, and a small group of Democratic senators in the United States have accused the Trump administration of election interference. Abin has “confirmed the existence of interference from the United States…from lawfare to interference that is openly acknowledged.” The American senators, in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have accused the Trump administration of “an effort to interfere with, and potentially undermine, Brazil’s general election.” They point to a pattern of “using diplomatic, economic, and political pressure in ways that risk weakening the country’s democratic institutions, undermining confidence in Brazil’s electoral process,” including Donald Trump’s appointment of a senior State Department advisor on Brazil with a well-known “commitment to undermining Brazil’s democratic institutions,” politically motivated tariffs, and a White House meeting with Flávio Bolsonaro.
Though it often gets lost between the more famous 1954 Guatemalan coup against Jacobo Árbenz and the 1973 Chilean coup against Salvador Allende, the United States has a dirty history of political interference in Brazil.
There is well-documented evidence of American cooperation in the 1964 coup that removed João Goulart from power and ushered in two decades of what linguist Noam Chomsky has described as a “murderous and brutal” military dictatorship.
In The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins cites a recorded meeting between President John F. Kennedy and Ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon. They agree to commit millions to oppose Goulart in that year’s elections. But the commitment was not just financial. It was also to “push him out, if it comes to that,” as Gordon told the president. The two were preparing for regime change. Gordon said that it was important “to make it clear, discreetly, that we are not necessarily hostile to any kind of military action whatsoever.”
According to the declassified documents, the U.S. knew in advance of the coup. In Killing Hope, William Blum reports that the CIA informed Washington, but did not inform Goulart, of the plot. Washington’s liaison with the coup conspirators, Vernon Walters, was “apprised that President Kennedy would not be averse to the overthrow of João Goulart,” Blum says, citing an interview with Walters.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, was also not averse. He told his aides, “I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do,” and he instructed them to assign “everybody that had any imagination or ingenuity” to the project.
And the United States was prepared to do a lot. Lincoln Gordon told CIA Director John McCone, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk that the U.S. should prepare for “a clandestine delivery of arms…pre-positioned prior any outbreak of violence” to the coup forces, as well as shipments of gas and oil. Gordon told them to “prepare without delay against the contingency of needed overt intervention at a second stage.”
Rusk then sent Gordon a list of the steps that would be taken “in order [to] be in a position to render assistance at appropriate time to anti-Goulart forces if it is decided this should be done.” The list, sent in a telegram on March 31, 1964, included dispatching U.S. Navy tankers with petroleum and oil, an aircraft carrier, two guided missile destroyers, four destroyers and task force tankers for “overt exercises off Brazil.” The telegram also lists as a step to “assemble shipment of about 11 tons of ammunition.”
Half a century later, there would be another coup in Brazil. Dilma Rouseff, who succeeded Lula as president after his first two terms, became the target of manufactured corruption charges. A recent study has suggested that “the evidence for U.S. involvement” in this process “is overwhelming.”
Proof that the impeachment was a disguised coup is provided by a leaked confession of a seventy-five minute phone call that reveals “a national pact” to remove Dilma and install Michel Temer as president. The conversation reveals that opposition politicians, the military and the Supreme Court are all in on the coup:
“…[t]he generals, military commanders…say they’ll guarantee it.”
The transcript does not name Washington as a participant in the coup. But the United States would come to know that the impeachment was a coup and would tacitly approve. They knew because the coup plotters kept telling them.
Three weeks after Dilma’s impeachment, the new unelected president, Michel Temer, told his New York audience of multinational corporations and the U.S. policy establishment that Dilma was not removed for corruption but for her refusal to implement a right-wing economic plan that was inconsistent with the economic platform on which Brazilians elected her. Temer brazenly told his American audience:
“…many months ago, while I was still vice president, we released a document named ‘A Bridge to the Future’ because we knew it would be impossible for the government to continue on that course. We suggested that the government should adopt the theses presented in that document called ‘A Bridge to the Future.’ But, as that did not work out, the plan wasn’t adopted and a process was established which culminated with me being installed as president of the republic.”
It is still not known when Washington became aware the impeachment was a coup in disguise; although Weisbrot says “there is no doubt that the biggest players in this coup attempt—people like former presidential candidates José Serra and Aécio Neves—are U.S. government allies.”
But the U.S. was very fast to recognize the new government. The very day after Dilma’s impeachment, Senator Aloysio Nunes of the new coup government began a three-day visit to Washington. Nunes is no small player in the coup government; he was the vice-presidential candidate on the 2014 ticket that lost to President Rousseff and a key player in the effort to impeach Rousseff in the Senate. Nunes had meetings with, amongst others, then-chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker (R-TN) and Ben Cardin (D-MD), as well as with Undersecretary of State and former Ambassador to Brazil Thomas Shannon. Though Nunes denies it, there are reports that his trip to Washington was ordered by acting President Michel Temer.
Several unknowns will determine whether Bolsonaro will defeat Lula in the runoff round. The first is which way the 8% who voted for other candidates will go. The second is what the 21%, or 33.4 million people, who did not vote in the first round will do in the runoff round. And the third, given history both past and recent, is what the United States will do.
