The Military Dictatorship
“Subversion is not Brazil's greatest problem. Corruption is, and it is much more difficult
to identify, punish and eradicate.”
By Heloisa Maria Murgel Starling
In Avritzer, Bignotto, Guimarães & Starling (eds.), Corruption: Essays & Criticism
UFMG (Minas Gerais, Brazil), 2008.
Translated (draft-quality) by Boi Zebu Editorial Services
To combat corruption and defeat Communism: These two purposes served as the touchstones of a
rhetoric common to the various conspiracies that were buzzing among Brazilian military circles on the
eve of the coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart in March 1964.
The coup actually occurred on April Fools' Day, 1964 (in Brazil, it is known as Dia da Mentira, or
the Day of the Lie.). Revisionist historians obligingly moved it back a day to avoid the motive for
satire.
The ferocious anti-Communism that gripped the military barracks throughout much of our modern
republican history has two explosive elements at its center:On one hand, the mythology generated by the
impact of the 1935 uprising – the frustrated attempt by the Communists to take power through armed
insurrection – and on the other, the ideological motives consolidated by the Cold War and articulated
politically in the elaboration of the Policy for National Security, with its concept of “revolutionary
warfare.”
The concept of corruption adopted by the military regime, however, was always associated with a
specific form of dishonesty: misuse of public funds. Corruption was reduced to theft.In the delirious
imaginings of the barracks, corruption was the result of vices produced by a political culture of deficient
morality and came to be associated, on the eve of the coup, with the reprehensible conduct of politicians
directly tied to the policy of nationalist development. Among the military men, the judgment was nearly
unanimous:Corruption was a problem of a moral nature, easy to detect and measure, and relatively
simple to control: In the face of corruption by big money, the spirit of honesty would stand up and be
counted, and if the old standards of demagogy and dishonesty continued to flourish in the corrupt portion
of the nation – the State, the political sphere – then it was always possible to regenerate society. A
society which the generals, let it be noted in passing, saw as incapable of resolving on its own a problem
that the regime of nationalist development could not or did not want to resolve: Dishonest politicians
might change jobs, but they remained the same, and democracy was powerless to remove them.
The conviction that society was being renewed, but that politics remained perverse, molded the logic of
the military regime in its campaign against corruption. According to this logic, the 1964 coup was
justified in large part by a sort of intervention ex machina capable of putting an end to corrupt politicians
and guaranteeing that which the military men believed constituted good order and exemplary
punishment: The trial of civilians considered unworthy of managing public affairs. Moved by this logic,
as soon as he took office, General Castello Blanco promised to widely publicize evidence of the
corruption of the prior regime by publishing a “white book” of corruption – a promise he never
kept, among other reasons, because it would probably have been necessary to admit at the same
time that military men were involved in the incidents of corruption the book was to narrate.
But the main reason Castello's promise could not be kept was other: The military regime's crusade
against corruption was a failure from the start. A major portion of the blame for this failure must be
attributed to the enormous difficulties the military had in transcending a strictly moralistic definition of
corruption. The result of this tunnel vision was utterly predictable. From a moralistic perspective, the
public sphere cannot be recovered, but remains just as it was under the prior period of corruption. To put
it another way: From the moral point of view, vice is always public, while virtue is always private, and
neither can be political. This reduction of the political to what it is not – individual morality, a
salvationist alternative – predetermined the disaster that was the Brazilian military regime's strategy for
combating corruption, just as it determined the public conduct of many of the regime's principal leaders,
whose concern was to promote to maximum what they called “personal decency.” Castello Branco, for
example, owned a simple Aero Willis and a single home in Ipanema. General Medici delayed
announcing an increase in the price of beef so that he could sell his own herds on the downside, and rerouted a road so that it would not add to the value of his own lands. General Geisel refused to buy
himself an apartment, even though he had the savings set aside to do so, because “I am going to head
Petrobras, and if I buy this apartment, they will soon say I am stealing.”
But these displays of personal decency by the generals had scant effect on the public life of Brazil. The
military regime tolerated and collaborated with corrupt persons and their desire to be a part of the
government, no matter what their political persuasion, as well as with the most visible face of corruption,
which thanks to efforts to evade the censor found their way into the pages of the newspapers and the list
of major scandals that marred the period – as in the famous cases of the Brazilian Coffee Institute, the
Hanna Mining Company incident, the Delfin case, the Jari project, the construction of the RioNiterói bridge and Transamazonica highway, and the Capemi transaction. Castello Branco himself
soon discovered that summoning up the specter of corruption was easy to do, but that arresting the
corrupt was another matter: “Subversion is not Brazil's greatest problem. Corruption is, and it is
much more difficult to identify, punish and eradicate.”
That statement by Castello came some months after the start of work by the newly created General
Investigations Commission (CGI). The CGI was planned during the turbulent early days of the
revolution, by the self-styled Supreme Command of the Revolution, and assigned the task of conducting
Military-Police Inquests (IPMs) to identify the degree of involvement by suspects in subversion or
corruption. The CGI had national jurisdiction, its proceedings followed the principle of summary
judgment, and its members were recruited from among the most radical Navy and Air Force officers,
who sought to use the CGI to build a power base that would enable them to impose their own candidate
for president. With its anticommunist rhetoric and their defense of public morality, the CGI produced an
impressive quantity of information, which, though not subject to the rules of evidence, supported the
impeachment of politicians and the suspension of political rights of citizens, as well as arrests and purges
of civil servants and military personnel.
Former president Juscelino Kubitschek, for example, was one of these citizens. In 1965, on the eve of
Institutional Act No. 2 (AI-2), JK was subjected to an endless series of interrogations and daily affidavits
that sought to drag out of him confessions of supposed ties with the Superior Institute of Brazilian
Studies (ISEB) and the leadership of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) with respect to the
embezzlement of public funds. Accusations of corruption against JK included his purchases of lots of
land in Pampulha, near Belo Horizonte, based on inside information; shady favors done to public works
contractors during the construction of Brasilia; and corruption in the negotiations over the construction
of the bridge linking Brazil to Paraguay. Companies were investigated, American and Swiss banks were
contracted in an attempt to discover evidence against the former president. At the end of two weeks and
nearly 60 hours of questioning, broken and sick, JK left Brazil. None of the accusations against him were
proven.
Sebastian Nery's Os Pecados de Imprensa Brasileira has a pretty good basic account of the use of
a compliant press to thoroughly ratfink the Bossa Nova president on what by all accounts were
utterly bogus charges.
Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5), published December 13, 1968, marked the beginning of the most violent
and repressive phase of the Brazilian dictatorship – and also, as it happens, substantially broadened the
reach of agencies established by the military to defend public morality. A new CGI was set up within the
Ministry of Justice and tasked with investigating and instituting proceedings under Article 8 of AI-5.
Thanks to this article, the president of the republic now had the power to confiscate assets from “all those
who have illicitly enriched themselves in the exercise of public office.”
In order to react against the elevated level of corruption and ensure public morality, the military men
used both their dictatorial powers and prevailing legislation, but to no effect. Between 1968 and 1978,
when it was disbanded by General Geisel, the CGI limped on both legs. On one hand, its members
harbored the arrogant certainty that it was possible to prevent misappropriation of public funds merely
through the intimidation represented by a summons issued to citizens taken as potential ne'er-do-wells.
CGI agents called their truculent strategy of issuing idle threats “catalytic action” -- according to them,
this method was delicate technique of political accommodation and prevention and highly effective
against corruption.
On the other hand, the CGI arrogated to itself the messianic mission of transforming the anticorruption
effort into a complex national network capable of functioning at one and the same time as a special court
of exception and as an intelligence and investigative agency. Thus, either because it was convinced of its
ability to rationally deploy the instruments of intimidation at its disposal or because it believed itself
capable of exercising control over every single member of a large and complex society, the CGI tried to
maximize its areas of operation. As a result, it sank into mediocrity, mired in the trivial tasks it had
established for itself in defining its own jurisdiction, which included, for example, investigating the late
payment of teachers' salaries in São José do Mipipu, in Rio Grande do Norte; overbilling in the purchase
of fertilizer by the state agriculture secretary of Minas Gerais; salary increases for auditors and
prosecutors in Paraná; the collection of school taxes in Espirito Santo; alleged irregularities in the Bahian
Football Federation; the rising price of beef in Manaus. Between 1968 and 1973 members of the CGI
produced some 1,153 cases. Of these, 1,000 were closed without further action, while 58 actually
resulted in requests for the confiscation of property based on illegal self-enrichment. Of these, 41
resulted in presidential decrees.
But the failure of measures to combat corruption cannot be attributed exclusively to the CGI or to the
refusal of some members of the new political order to pay the price for the public morality preached for
generals. In reality, the military regime was not itself immune to corruption. In fact, corruption
was inscribed in the very nature of the regime itself – that is to say, inscribed in its power structure
and the way it functioned. There are two ways of looking at this issue. First, if the political meaning of
corruption is directly correlated with an institutional inability to enable individuals to take part in public
life, then in a dictatorship, where to govern is to repress, there is no avoiding corruption, the
disaggregation of the public space and the resulting degradation of the idea of the public interest.
In the Brazilian case, part of the military regime's survival strategy was to mount a State that seemed
very powerful, especially because of its ability to continually enlarge the scope of its instruments of
arbitrary rule and violence. In this world ruled by arbitrary authority, the political sphere is emptied of its
public meaning and evil spreads. In fact, the other way of understanding how corruption is inscribed in
the very nature of the military regime is visible in its association with torture – the highest possible
degree to which human nature can be corrupted.
The existence of torture did not emerge during the history of the military regime as a mere accident, as
something that got out of control, nor as a residual effect, as collateral damage in a war that simply
developed, in an incipient form, at certain very specific and limited times and places. On the contrary:
The argument presented by Elio Gaspari in his notable A ditadura escancarada is that the practice of
torture was installed at the outset of the Castello Branco government, and weighed heavily in the
composition of the military-political alliances that sustained the power of Geisel and Golbery,
propagating like a fungus and known to everyone, most especially thanks to the silent collusion of the
military power elite. In the end, torture produced a great deal of corruption. In this context, corruption
signifies the degradation of ethical values and the values of civility, creating an internal moral void that
put torture at the heart of the arbitrary exercise of power unleashed by the military regime. In Brazil, the
practice of political torture was not the product of individual behavior by unbalanced personalities. That
is what so scandalous and painful about it.
Instituted as a policy of State during the dictatorship, and especially during the period from 1969 to
1977, torture became inseparable from the mechanisms of corruption. One sustained the other. When
torture and corruption joined forces, the military regime elevated the torturer to the conditions of an
Untouchable; rewards such as promotions and salary increases were guaranteed to members of the
repressive apparatus of the state. And the torturer was rewarded publicly for his actions. An exemplary
case: The awarding of the Medalha do Pacificador, destined for the acknowledgment of acts of courage
to Sérgio Fleury.
The Pacificadores is the name of the “militia” in Rio das Pedras, in Rio de Janeiro – a classic
mafia protection racket run by cops and led, until his assassination by a rival mafioso (and police
colleague) by a senior Rio police official, Félix dos Santos Tostes.
By the same token, when torture needed to flow over into other areas of public activity in order to obtain
complicity and legitimacy, corruption greased the ways. For torture to function properly, a judicial
apparatus is needed that will recognize as plausible and legal the most absurd of proceedings, recanted
confessions, fraudulent medical reports; it must also find, in the hospitals, those willing to defraud
autopsy reports and corpus delicto examinations and to doctor the records of persons admittedwith marks
of physical violence; it is necessary as well to find business owners willing to furnish extralegal funding
so the machinery of political repression can function with greater precision and efficiency.
In the Greek origin of the term, corruption has two basic meanings: The breaking of a link, and
something that degrades because of the breaking of such links. The consequences are serious. In the first
sense, the principle of mutual trust is violated, the tie that enables the individual citizen to associate
freely with others in order to participate in the public life of the nation. In the second sene, the meaning
of the public domain is degraded as a result. It is for this reason that in dictatorships, corruption has a
practical purpose: It serves to ensure the death of public participation and public life. In democracies –
and in our Republic – the effect of corruption is otherwise: It dissolves the political principles that create
conditions for the exercise of virtue by the citizen. The Brazilian military regime failed in combating
corruption for a simple reason: There is only one remedy for corruption, and that is more democracy.