Fw: U.S. Policies in Hemisphere Precede Kissinger and Pinochet

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg at tin.it>]

 LOS ANGELES TIMES
 LATIN AMERICA
 U.S. Policies in Hemisphere
 Precede Kissinger and Pinochet
 A. J. LANGGUTH
 A.J. Langguth, a professor at the USC School
 of Journalism, is the author of "Hidden Terrors,"
 an account of U.S. involvement in Latin America.
 His most recent book, "Our Vietnam," won
 
 July 15 2001
 
 Human rights activists have been calling for Chile's Gen.
 Augusto Pinochet to be tried for his role in the murders and
 disappearances that followed his 1973 coup d'etat. Others, led
 by British journalist Christopher Hitchens, have pressed for
 former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to be prosecuted for
 his role in that same overthrow of Chile's elected president,
 Salvador Allende.
 
 It is unlikely that either Pinochet or Kissinger will be
 brought to trial. But the outcry has raised a question: Why
 should the demand for justice stop with those two men?
 
 If world attention is finally focused on 30-year-old crimes in
 Latin America, simple fairness demands that the inquiry not be
 limited to the actions of the Nixon administration. We must
 also revisit the Kennedy and Johnson years and assess what
 misery they inflicted on the hemisphere. Just as President
 John F. Kennedy's advisors worried about a China-North Vietnam
 alliance, they were also alarmed that Cuba might succeed in
 turning Latin America against us. Their greatest concern was
 with Brazil, the continent's largest country.
 
 In the fall of 1961, Kennedy's new ambassador arrived in Rio
 de Janeiro. Lincoln Gordon was typical of Kennedy's recruits
 for his New Frontier: Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar,
 professor of international economics at Harvard's business
 school. He was not, however, politically adroit. When Brazil's
 president, Joao Goulart, tried to maintain his country's
 uneasy balance by naming two cabinet officers from the far
 left, Gordon warned against their appointments. "Oh," Goulart
 said cheerfully, "I can keep an eye on them."
 
 During his term, Goulart tried to reassure Washington more
 directly. He paid a call on Kennedy in the White House and
 later, during the Cuban missile crisis, he pledged Brazilian
 solidarity with the United States. It was not enough. In
 December of 1962, then Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy traveled
 to Brazil to warn Goulart against any attraction he might be
 feeling to left-wing causes.
 
 Meantime, the CIA was expanding its presence in Brazil,
 bribing public officials and circulating lies about such
 reformers as Paulo Freire, who was considered dangerous not
 only for teaching farm hands to read but for challenging them
 to question their condition as chattel on Brazil's great
 estates.
 
 Ambassador Gordon became friendly with officials of the
 Institute for Social Research Studies, an organization much
 like America's John Birch Society. He also heard from
 segments of the Brazilian military intent on removing the
 civilian president, although Goulart had just won, by a
 margin of 4 to 1, a plebiscite expanding his powers.
 
 One stumbling block to a coup, however, was a highly respected
 Brazilian general, Humberto Castelo Branco. To overcome
 Castelo Branco's respect for civilian authority, Washington
 sent as its new military attache Lt. Col. Vernon A. (Dick)
 Walters, a gifted linguist who knew Castelo Branco well from
 serving as a liaison with the Brazilian army in Italy during
 World War II.
 
 As the pieces fell into place, Gordon mastered the idiom of
 the Cold War, sprinkling his conversation with phrases about
 Goulart like "parlor pink" and "playing footsie with the
 communists." The ambassador met regularly with Goulart's
 enemies. Walters, while he worked on Castelo Branco, advised
 other Brazilian officers about which colleagues to recruit for
 their conspiracy.
 
 The CIA was flush with money channeled through the Bank of
 Boston and the Royal Bank of Canada. Its agents, aiming for a
 coup, helped to sponsor tens of thousands of demonstrators in
 Sao Paulo for a "March of the Family with God for Freedom." It
 ended with the reading of a manifesto by Sao Paulo women on
 behalf of Christianity and democracy. The archbishop of Sao
 Paulo had forbidden his bishops to participate, however,
 saying the march had been organized by a U.S. advertising
 agency, McCann-Erickson.
 
 As the coup's target day approached, Walters wired the State
 Department that Castelo Branco had "finally accepted
 leadership" of the anti-Goulart forces. On April 1, 1964, the
 Brazilian military seized the government. Goulart defied his
 more fiery allies and refused to fight back. He did not want
 to be responsible for bloodshed among Brazilians, he said.
 
 That night, Gordon slept well. When he flew to Washington, he
 found a jubilant mood in Lyndon Johnson's White House.
 
 Although Washington downplayed its involvement in the coup,
 the director of the American Institute for Free Labor
 Development (AIFLD)--funded by the CIA, the AFL-CIO and some
 60 U.S. corporations, including ITT and Pan American World
 Airways--was indiscreet enough to boast over the radio, "What
 happened in Brazil did not just happen--it was planned--and
 planned months in advance. Many of the trade-union leaders,
 some of whom were actually trained in our institute, were
 involved in the revolution, and in the overthrow of the
 Goulart regime."
 
 Even Robert Kennedy, still grieving for his brother murdered
 the previous November, took heart from the coup: Goulart got
 what was coming to him, he told Ambassador Gordon.
 
 The Brazilian people got a good deal more. Increasingly severe
 crackdowns on political dissent led to bloody years of torture
 and murder. By the time Richard M. Nixon took office in 1969,
 Gordon was back in the United States, as president of Johns
 Hopkins University. When students badgered him about having
 saddled Brazil with a vicious dictatorship, Gordon
 acknowledged the torture but said that at least Brazil had
 been spared a communist regime, and he pointed to the
 country's economic boom. Students countered that the boom had
 benefited only corporations, that real wages had declined 10%.
 
 The repression spread. Uruguay, once a model democracy, became
 a military dictatorship, and Argentina established close ties
 with Brazil's army and police. From the time Allende was
 elected president of Chile until his overthrow, CIA agents
 strengthened the anti-democratic network in the countries of
 Latin America's Southern Cone, supplying explosives and
 untraceable handguns.
 
 They introduced members of Brazil's death squads to the police
 of nearby countries and set up meetings to discuss how the new
 dictatorships could monitor their country's political exiles.
 The women's protest marches, so useful in destabilizing the
 political climate in Sao Paulo, were exported to Chile.
 
 That quick recap of events from 1961 until Pinochet's coup
 12 years later raises questions: Should Kissinger be tried as a
 war criminal or congratulated for carrying forward a bipartisan
 policy in Latin America? Is Pinochet a monster or merely one
 more ambitious but dutiful Latin American ally?
 
 Copyright 2001, Los Angeles Times
 
 
 
 
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