a, special feature the Sunday daily by the committee on brazil Number 54 Night Editor: Pat Bauer Sunday, December 5, 1971 Persecution and repression in Medici's rB AEMNINk azil The University Committee on Brazil is a group of individuals who have researched conditions in Brazil. They are planning a forum this week to coincide with a visit by the head of Brazil's military govdrnnment to Washington on Tuesday. Brazil is huge Brazil's three million square miles cover sixty per cent of South America and include most of the vast, undeveloped Amazon River basin. The nation's area is so huke that Brazil exceeds the size of the continental United States and bor- ders on every South American country except Chile and Ecuador. The topography of the nation, contrary to most North American stereotypes, is in the south very mountainous and in the northeast very arid. Brazil is large in other ways. Its population approximates 100 million, almost half the total population of South America. And, again con- trary to most stereotypes of Latin American na- tions, this large population has a high degree of geographical mobility. By 1970, 55 per cent of the population had become urban - and urban- ization is continuing at the rate of five per cent to six per cent annually. Brazil is rich .. The agricultural sector of Brazil is one of the most important in the world. Brazil is the world's largest producer of coffee And one of the five leading sugar producers. In addition, large volumes of cotton are raised yearly and the world's second largest spread of cattle grazes within Brazilian borders. Besides its agricultural wealth, Brazil is rich in natural resources. It is estimated that 15 per cent of the world's petroleum reserves and al- most 75 per cent of its iron ore reserves lie In Brazil virtually untapped. Also there are de- posits of bauxite, manganese, and rare gems. Industry is also booming in Brazil. The na- tion's GNP is increasing at a phenomenal rate of nine per cent annually and has been increas- ing at about that rate for over two decades. The industrial triangle between the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Belo Horizonte is the richest area per square mile in all of; Latin America. .. *but the people are The vast majority in Brazil live in excruciat- ing poverty. The per capita income of 60 per cent of the population'is below $100 annually. Of the Brazilian people 40 per, cent are illiterate and only two per cent have college educations. In the Brazilian Northeast, an arid region per- iodically devastated by drought, the illiteracy rate is 71 per cent and life expectancy is an appalling 35. And the situation is getting worse. For ex- ample, in wealthy Rio de Janeiro between 1958 and 1964 the number of slum dwellers increased from 8.5 per cent to 16 per cent of the city's total population. Now more than two million live in Rio's "favelas," urban squatter-settle- ments for the poor. These two million-plus, like many of their fellow Brazilians, consume much less than 1000 calories per day - they are starving in the most literal sense. Yet food crop production in Brazil deci'eased during the past decade. Foreign companies dominate the economy Abstract statistics alone show the foreign dom- ination of the Brazilian economy. Foreign com- panies control: Twenty per cent of mining interests Thirty-five per cent of food industries Forty-eight per cent of aluminum production Forty-eight per cent of chemicals industries Fifty-nine per cent of the critical machinery production sector Sixty-two per cent of the equally critical ex- portation sector Eighty-six per cent of the drugs laboratories One hundred per cent of automotive produc- tion, Latin America's largest. (Source: B. V. Schmidt in unpublished M.A. thesis; Belo Horizonte 1969). Eighty-five per cent of business in Brazil is controlled by foreigners, and U.S. investors are number' one. Private business interests from the United States have invested $1.8 billion in Brazil which amounts to 38 per cent of total foreign investment. A Stifling a IN 1964 tanks and troops rolled into Rio de Janeiro and ended the liberal-pop- ulist administration of President Joao Goulart. From the very beginning of the coup, the Brazilian military took power to keep power. Since 1964 the military leaders of the Brazilian government have increasingly exhibited the "linha dura," the hard line. They have dismantled the Brazilian party system, closed and reopened Con- gress twice, taken away the office and political rights of duly elected public of- ficials, closed labor unions, persecuted stu- dents with riots and arrests, eliminated "troublesome" arrest procedures, exiled thousands of Brazilians, censored the press, transferred political trials to mili- tary courts, killed who-knows-how-many, and imprisoned - often tortured - over 12,000 individuals without trial. Dictatorship is too kind a label for the brutality of Brazil's military regime; neo- people wil fascism is more appropriate. (The expan- sion of capitalism is accompanied by the inevitable problems of imperialism where, as Veblen's famous theory portrays it, the capitalists in their expansion use the same methods as strong fascist regimes, but dis- guise it under the flag of nationalism and economic development.) On Tuesday, the president of Brazil, General Emilio Garrastazu Medici, will visit President Nixon in Washington. Me- dici's visit is only the latest example of the myriad links between the Brazilian military dictatorship and the United States government. It is a fact that the United States en- couraged, if it did not cause, the military coup. For example, the military attache of the U.S. embassy in 1964, Lincoln Gor- don, was a close friend of the leader of the military revolt, General Castello Branco. The North American Gordon on a num- ber of occasions before -the coup, both U.S. aid privately and publicly, pledged U.S. sup- port of a military takeover in Brazil. North American recognition of the mili- tary government came within hours after the insurrection. Since 1964 Brazil under the military has become a major target of North American foreign aid. In fact, Brazil re- ceived close to $2 billion between 1964 and 1970-the largest aid program ex- tended to any country outside of Vietnam and India. Predictably, a large part of this U.S. aid has gone to the military establish- ment. The Brazilian dictatorship has re- ceived $130 million for military training and equipment. Through December 1969, the Agency for International Develop- ment's "Public Safety" project had as- sisted in training locally over 100,000 federal and state police. An additional 641 higher officials have been trained at the International Police Academy in the United States. WHY HAS the North American govern- ment placed such importance upon a military, neo-fascist dictatorship in Bra- zil? On July 23, 1971, the newspaper Marcha of Montevideo, Uruguay, pub- lished the "National Security Plan" of the SuperiorWar College of Brazil. Among other things, this top-secret document identified as "dangerous" to the Brazilian dictatorship, the "Communist pressures" from Chile and Uruguay and the "strategic importance" of the bor- ders with Guyana, Venezuela, and Bo- livia. The plan included a 30-hour occu- pation and "pacification" of Uruguay. On- ly one month after the publication of the lM1archa article, on August 19, 1971, the left-wing government of Bolivia was over- thrown by conservative - reactionary ele- ments of the Bolivian army. The Marcha article and the recent right- wing coup in Bolivia make it clear that the Brazilian military establishment wants to play the imperialist role of the "appren- tice world power of the West" in South America. And the links between the U.S. and Brazilian governments also make it clear that the United States government wants very badly to encourage that Bra- zilian role.- ]NOW THAT South Vietnam has shown Nixon the impossibility of direct North A CROWD gathers in Republic Square in Rio de Janeiro (left) after President Joao Goulart announced his extensive land reform pro- gram in March, 1964. Two weeks later Goulart's loyal tank forces (ri ght) are mobilized before his ouster by a spreadling military coup. PreservinLg power with torture THE NEO-FASCIST, military govern- ment of Brazil "has refused to let the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an' organ of the Organization of American States, enter the country to in- vestigate charges that political prisoners are being tortured there." The following instances among many of torture and re- pression in Brazil today perhaps explain why. In April, 1964, Gregorio Bezerra, then over 60 years of age, a leader of the Bra- zilian Communist Party in 1946, was beat- en, then pulled half-naked through the streets of Recife, while Col. Villoco Viana of the IV Army tried to obtain his con- fession of "treason." In 1968, David Lerer, a member of the Brazilian Congress, a young socialist from Sao Paulo, was punched, kicked, and whipped in the Army Minister's office in government officials that Paiva was re- leased within 24 hours after his arrest. INSTANCES of torture in Brazil have in- creased drastically with the advent of President Medici. The repression has not been restricted to members of revolution- ary movements. Peasants and labor union leaders and members have been attacked by the military as well, as documented by the American Committee for Information, on Brazil in Terror in Brazil, published in April, 1970. Zilea Resnik, 22, was arrested on charges of belonging to the revolutionary group MR8, was held incommunicado for 45 days - 35 days more than the military code allows, and was beaten frequently. Rosane Resnik, 20, was arrested on the same charges as her sister, stripped naked by her torturers, beaten, and subjected to electrical shocks on various parts of her Marcia Savaget Fiani was arrested with Maryjane Lisboa and was subjected to the ame treatment except that dowsing in water intensified the electric shocks, re- sulting in the partial paralyzation of . her right' fingers. Maria Elodia Alencar, 38, was arrested in Rio. Strangling forced her to sign her last will and testament. Her torturers kept threatening to arrest and torture her 15- year-old son. Priscila Bredarial. Vania Esmanhoto, and Victoria Pamplona were arrested, beaten, and forced to listen to the cries of Pris- eila's husband. Celso Bredariol, and of Vic- toria's fiance, Geraldo Azevedo; Both were being tortured next door at the offices of the Naval Tnformation Center, Dorma Tereza de Oliveira, 25, arrested in Rio, got the usual beatings and electric shocks, plus dowsing and strangling. Pin- ,q " sr:: .:' :