As President Barack Obama grapples with accusations of torture by US agents, I suggest he consult former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. He will find accounts of US complicity in torture in the senator’s files. The stories come from Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and the rest of the continent’s Southern Cone.
Despite my past reporting from South Vietnam, I had been appalled by the degree to which our country had helped to overthrow elected governments in Latin America. Our interference, which went on for decades, was not limited to one political party. The meddling in Brazil began in earnest during the early 1960s under a Democratic administration. At that time, Washington’s alarm over Cuba was much like the panic after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. President John F. Kennedy’s administration was determined to prevent another communist regime in the hemisphere, and Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, was taking a strong interest in several anti-communist approaches, including the Office of Public Safety.
When OPS was launched under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, its mission sounded benign enough — to increase the professionalism of the police in Asia, Africa and, particularly, Latin America. But its genial director, Byron Engle, was a CIA agent, and his program was part of a wider effort to identify receptive recruits among local populations. Although Engle wanted to avoid having his unit exposed as a CIA front, in the public mind the separation quickly blurred. Dan Mitrione, for example, a police adviser murdered by Uruguay’s left-wing Tupamaros for his role in torture in that country, was widely assumed to be a CIA agent.
When Brazil seemed to tilt leftward after President Joao Goulart assumed power there in 1961, the Kennedy administration grew increasingly troubled. Robert Kennedy traveled to Brazil to tell Goulart he should dismiss two of his Cabinet members, and the office of Lincoln Gordon, President Kennedy’s ambassador to Brazil, became the hub for CIA efforts to destabilize Goulart’s government.
On March 31, 1964, encouraged by US military attache Vernon Walters, Brazilian Gen. Humberto Castelo Branco rose up against Goulart. Rather than set off a civil war, Goulart chose exile in Montevideo. Ambassador Gordon returned to a jubilant Washington, where he ran into Robert Kennedy, who was still grieving for his brother, assassinated the previous November. “Well, he got what was coming to him,” Robert Kennedy said of Goulart. “Too bad he didn’t follow the advice we gave him when we were down there.” The Brazilian people did not deserve what they got. The military cracked down harshly on labor unions, newspapers and student associations. The newly efficient police, drawing on training provided by the United States, began routinely torturing political prisoners and even opened a torture school on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to teach police sergeants how to inflict maximum pain without killing their victims. Looking back, what has changed since 1975? A Brazilian truth-and-reconciliation commission documented 339 cases of government-sanctioned political assassination. In 2002, a former labor leader and political prisoner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was elected president of Brazil. He’s serving his second term.
Fernando Gabeira, a young reporter for Jornal do Brasil and one of the torture victims wrote a book about kidnapping the American ambassador, his arrest and ordeal in prison. The book became a bestseller throughout Brazil, and Gabeira was elected to the national legislature. In an election last October, he came within 1.4 percentage points of becoming mayor of Rio de Janeiro.
But in the United States, there’s been a disheartening development: In 1975, US officials still felt they had to deny condoning torture. Now many of them seem to be defending torture, even boasting about it.
