to the East/West détente. Instead, Allende aligned with Cuba, while the United States aligned with Brazil and the Southern Cone regimes. As Harmer has suggested, these right-wing leaders were hardly pawns of the United States, but rather increasingly took “ownership” of the Cold War in their region.139
The Nixon administration offered mild, private encouragement for a parliamentary transition in Brazil, and they acknowledged that the torture allegations were at least partially true. But if there was any indignation about torture in the administration, it took a backseat to the desire for stability. “An aroused [Brazilian] public could well give rise to a deep division within the government on how to deal with the [torture] problem,” suggested the State Department, “in the process possibly weakening the government’s hold on the country.”140 Nixon summarized his approach in a December 1970 meeting with the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, William Rountree. In a world filled with undemocratic states, argued Nixon, the United States would have to be “realistic and deal with governments as they are.” He wanted Rountree to ensure that the Brazilian government and military “do not get the impression that we are looking down our noses at them because of their form of government.”141 The administration would consult with Brazil on political developments, but Nixon drew a clear line at addressing the status of individual Brazilians. When the U.S. embassy received requests to inquire about imprisoned Brazilians, they turned these down as interventions in Brazil’s internal affairs.142 The Nixon administration considered economic development to be America’s chief long-term interest in Latin America. Meanwhile, Brazil’s economic growth and its diminishing reliance on U.S. aid meant a concurrent decrease in U.S. leverage.
While the administration strengthened relations with Brasilia, congressional liberals grew increasingly vocal. As chair of the Senate subcommittee on Latin America, Senator Frank Church built a reputation as one of the chief political gadflies of the era on the subject of military aid. In 1969, he suggested the unprecedented step of cutting such assistance to Brazil, arguing that military aid fueled anti-Americanism, alienated the American public, and “raise[d] the question of what the United States really stands for.” Church also assailed the Alliance for Progress, to which the United States had contributed $8 billion while nine nations in the region had suffered military takeovers.143 President Emílio Médici’s enduring grip on power encouraged more legislators to shed the spotlight on Brazil in 1970, including Senator Edward Kennedy, who embarked on a public campaign against U.S. support to human rights abusers. “Reports of official terrorism and torture [in Brazil] are mixed with incidents of violence committed by opponents of the regime who are denied access to legitimate political channels,” said Kennedy on the Senate floor. America’s support for the regime, he argued, was laying bare the gap between America’s ideals and Washington’s policies. In so arguing, Kennedy was making a clear leap from America’s Vietnam experience to its support of other anticommunist regimes. “We now face a deep crisis in the spirit of the American people because of our support of an unpopular government in an unjust cause in Vietnam,” he asserted. “Our unquestioning endorsement of a government that accepts torture of political prisoners can only exacerbate this crisis.”144 In retrospect, Kennedy was on the cutting edge in his attempts to loosen America from its Cold War assumptions, though he oversimplified events in Brazil. In reality, many of the victims he championed were also willing to use violence against civilians.
The Brazilian junta lashed out at Senator Kennedy, “international agents of subversion,” and the “morbid and sensationalist” foreign press. Regime representatives admitted that there had been instances of mistreatment, but they pledged that this was not official policy and that alleged “political prisoners” were actually incarcerated terrorists. Besides, they argued, other regimes did much worse. The general message was that outsiders did not understand the threats that Brazil faced. “Do people think this is a picnic?” said the finance minister to an American official. “These terrorists are a bunch of murderers…. We all live in fear.”145 The Brazilian regime also continued to make the case that things were different in Latin America. “I do not believe that the public is interested in any change in the present regime,” a Médici deputy told a reporter. “The truth is that political liberty, in the sense of liberty to elect the government, is not one of the values sought by our people.”146 The regime was at least correct in arguing that many foreign critics were working from secondhand information, often had no specialized knowledge of Brazil, and downplayed the violence posed by insurgents. But the regime’s other rejoinders were spurious. In stating that human rights violations were not unique to Brazil, they were essentially admitting guilt. And in focusing their propaganda on a chimerical “conspiracy” of foreign criticism, they were ignoring the substantial wellspring of legitimate domestic opposition. The combination of Kennedy’s statements and the negative international press reports fueled the Brazilian opposition’s call for investigations and reforms.
Concern then shifted to possible U.S. complicity in torture through USAID’s Office of Public Safety (OPS), which had provided funds and training to police forces in several nations since 1957. Because the OPS had trained thousands of Brazilian police officers in law enforcement and interrogation techniques, activists shed light on the small U.S. Naval Mission that was housed in Brazil’s Navy Ministry. Some prisoners claimed that Brazilian security officers had tortured them in this building, and a few added that they had heard American voices in the corridors. Others said that the Brazilian interrogators claimed to have been trained by the CIA. The State Department, meanwhile, vehemently denied that torture was on the agenda of the training programs.147
It was one thing for American activists to point out that their government was supporting a repressive regime; it was another thing entirely to claim that Americans were training foreign nationals how to torture, or even participating in torture themselves. At the very least, it was significant that so many now believed that their government was directing such morally questionable actions. However, CIA activities were closely guarded, and even congressional committees did not find evidence that implicated the agency or OPS. Langguth published some of the victims’ claims in his 1978 book Hidden Terrors, though he did not uncover much hard evidence that Americans were directly involved in torture. It is now clear that torture was happening in Brazil and that the CIA and State Department were aware of it, but much of the rest is speculation or hearsay.148 Recently declassified CIA interrogation manuals are intriguing, though confirmation of direct CIA abuse has been harder to come by.149
But this focus on American culpability deflects attention from the story’s central truth: that Brazilians were abusing Brazilians. Even if some Americans were involved in police training, to claim that they were the architects of extensive detainee abuse is to betray a marked ignorance of Brazil’s troubled, violent history. More important than the claim that Americans were torturing or training others to do so was the perception—both in the United States and in South America—that American support was empowering dictatorial regimes to abuse civilians. The OPS became infamous because of its training in South Vietnam, and activists and journalists naturally began to scrutinize OPS ties to a host of Latin American nations. (A decade later, activists would raise similar questions about counterinsurgency training at the U.S.-funded School of the Americas.)
In 1971, Senator Church chaired SFRC hearings on U.S.-Brazil relations. Together with the debate over aid to Greece, these hearings were among the earliest congressional efforts to investigate and limit U.S. involvement in other governments’ human rights violations. The hearings would last only three days and would include only government witnesses, but the modest agenda could not obscure the provocative precedent. As soon as Senator Church announced his plans, representatives of the Brazilian government and American businesses unsuccessfully petitioned the State Department to stop it. As it turned out, the hearings were somewhat traditional in the sense that the committee did not seek to change Brazilian society or protect the rights of Brazilian citizens. “How Brazilians organize their own affairs and how they treat each other are not proper concerns of the U.S. Senate,” said Church, but the actions of U.S. agencies in Brazil were “proper concerns of all Americans.”150
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