The decision of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to cancel any official commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the 1964 coup d’état has generated perplexity among human rights defense groups, historians, relatives of the victims of the 21 years of dictatorship and in the left-wing parties that support the president. The coup that overthrew the progressive government of Joao Goulart and began two decades of military dictatorship in Brazil occurred on March 31, 1964.
It is speculated that Lula has reached an agreement with the high command military so that they do not react against the legal investigation into another attempt – much more recent – against Brazilian democracy: the alleged conspiracy of former president Jair Bolsonaro and a large group of military personnel. to prevent Lula’s inauguration in January of last year.
“There may be something behind closed doors between the military, the Ministry of Defense and Lula” to avoid “a serious reaction from the military if public and academic events (of critical commemoration) are held,” James Green, said in statements to La Vanguardia, historian specialized in Brazil from Brown University in the USA.
“It’s a bad sign because this would have been an ideal time to emphasize the fact that the military should be neutral and stay out of politics,” Green added.
It is speculated that Lula may have obtained the collaboration of various senior members of the armed forces who opposed Bolsonaro’s coup plan in exchange for government discretion regarding the commemoration of the 1964 military coup.
“There are signs of an agreement between the president and the military leadership: the exchange of silence about 1964 for punishments against the military involved in the Bolsonaro conspiracy,” states the Lulista magazine Carta Capital.
The Brazilian Armed Forces have always defended the need for the dictatorship between 1964 and 1985 as a measure against anti-democratic communist forces. This despite the fact that Goulart was a left-wing nationalist opposed to the Soviet Union and fully committed to democracy. Bolsonaro, and those close to him in the current Armed Forces, often insinuate that Lula himself is a communist.
Lula acknowledged in a television interview last week that he is “more worried about the coup of January 8, 2023 than about 1964.” Two senior commanders of the army and air forces have declared before prosecutors that Bolsonaro proposed that they participate in a coup in 2022 to prevent a Lula presidency and that they had refused to collaborate. The admiral at the head of the Navy, on the other hand, supported Bolsonaro’s coup proposal, according to what is understood from his recorded statements.
Bolsonaro protests that he is the victim of persecution at the hands of judges, the government and the military that he considers traitors.
According to new evidence of a coup plot, Bolsonaro’s vice presidential candidate, retired General Walter Braga Netto, allegedly tried to organize the sending of a squad of soldiers to Brasilia in early January 2023 during the Bolsonaro assault on the headquarters of the Three powers.
This would have been done with the aim of sowing terror and thus justifying the declaration of a state of siege and the annulment of the electoral result, according to police sources cited by Reuters on Monday.
Lula insists that he intends to clarify what happened in 2023-23 with collaboration with democratic militaries and that the events of 1964 are now of little interest. “I’m not going to continue to dwell on the past; I’m going to look forward,” the president added.
But various commentators accused the left-wing president of being excessively cautious. “History shows that whenever you try to heal a wound to cover up a crime, the monsters return,” says journalist and writer Jamil Chade. “Would the current coup plotters have had the audacity to plan a democratic rupture if the generation of soldiers from 1964 had been duly tried for their crimes?” he asked.
Like Spain and unlike Chile, Argentina and now Colombia, Brazil never demanded responsibility for the crimes of the dictatorship and the corresponding state terrorism. An amnesty law was signed in 1979 that absolved both the thousands of political prisoners imprisoned during the dictatorship and the military coup leaders themselves, including torturers like Carlos Brilhante Ustra, one of Bolsonaro’s idols.
By minimizing the importance of the 1964 coup in his statements, Lula may have unintentionally reinforced the wave of denialism regarding crimes against humanity committed by Latin American military dictatorships during the Cold War. The revision of the dirty history of the coups is normalized in the discourse of a new extreme right with ties to the most reactionary sectors of the armed forces.
The new Argentine president Javier Milei and his vice president Victoria Villarruel, for example, do not recognize the state terrorism of the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-1983 and describe the state violence of those years as part of a war against communism, a discourse used by Bolsonaro in Brazil.
But the government’s reluctance to provoke the military generates more immediate concern in Brazil. Although it is true that Lula, a master of dialogue and consensus, has agreed to a quid pro quo with the military who defended democracy by refusing to follow Bolsonaro’s coup plan, the simple fact that he has done so raises fears that the president be afraid of new coup plots.
Lula “has to understand that this decision (not to critically commemorate the 1964 coup) suggests a kind of guardianship of the military,” said historian Heloisa Starling in an interview published Monday in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo. Starling, author of the new book “The Machinery of the Coup: 1964”, criticizes Lula for negotiating face to face with the military. “The military should not be in a position of equality with the president of the Republic.”
Starling, Green and other historians believe there is a missed opportunity to use the failure of the Bolsonaro coup attempt and the anniversary of the 1964 coup to reopen a national dialogue about the role of the armed forces in democracy. This would have allowed the initiative of the Truth Commission created during the presidency of Dilma Rousseff (2010-16) to be recovered, which was boycotted by the Armed Forces.
Lula has canceled the event planned by the minister of human rights, Silvio Almeida, to critically remember what happened 60 years ago. A project to build a museum that would commemorate the atrocities committed by the military regime, an idea piloted last year by Justice Minister Flavio Dino, has also been suspended.
The number of deaths (356) at the hands of the Brazilian military regime was lower than in Chile (3,065) or Argentina (30,000, a figure publicly disputed by Milei). But 25,000 Brazilians were imprisoned for their political ideas and some 10,000 were forced into exile.
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