Never Again?

This week marks the sixty-first anniversary of the military coup in Brazil, coinciding with a time of great instability in the country’s liberal democracy. A few days ago, the Federal Supreme Court ordered Jair Bolsonaro to stand trial for attempting a coup during the 2022 elections, an event that for Brazilian progressive forces evoked memories of the terror under the dictatorship and renewed debates about the threat of authoritarianism today. To explore the meaning of these experiences in light of current events, Phenomenal World editor Hugo Fanton spoke to Frei Betto, an organizer whose social and political work helped facilitate the resistance to the Brazilian military dictatorship, and caused him to be twice imprisoned by that regime.

A Dominican friar and writer, Frei Betto took part in the creation of the ecclesial base communities (Communidades Ecclesial do Base, or base communities), a form of organization encouraged by the parts of the Catholic Church practicing liberation theology in Brazil during the Cold War. These groups met regularly in a specific area—slums, schools, factories, etc.—to combine biblical reading with a debate on the political and social reality they were experiencing. They became one of the main mechanisms of resistance to the dictatorship and the fight for democracy in Brazil.

Frei Betto is the author of a number of books based on the experience of community organizing during the dictatorship, including Letters from Prison and Baptism of Blood, a work exposing the military regime for its crimes against humanity.

At a time when authoritarian forces are advancing in Brazil and around the world, and with the number of arrests and deportations rapidly increasing in the US under Donald Trump, the processes of regime transition toward increasingly authoritarian methods are more relevant than they’ve been in decades—as are the struggles to ensure that the horrors experienced in Brazil are never repeated.

An interview with Frei Betto

Hugo fanton: April 1 marks the sixty-first anniversary of the military coup in Brazil. Could you put it into context?

FREI BETTO: After the Second World War, as the Allies succeeded in defeating Nazi-fascism, a wave of democratization led popular movements worldwide to organize and demand rights. In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas returned to power in 1950. He had ruled the country under a dictatorial regime for 15 years, but had granted great benefits to the working class and was therefore considered the “father of the poor.” Vargas was also the mother of the rich, but in this new government, at the beginning of the 1950s, the conservative sectors of Brazilian society plotted to overthrow him because they did not accept policies that promoted better living conditions for the working classes. This right-wing conspiracy led to Vargas’ suicide in 1954, and Brazil entered a period of great political instability.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Jânio Quadros was elected, which only deepened this instability, as he resigned seven months after being elected, thinking that there would be a large national mobilization to bring him back to the presidency with authoritarian powers. That didn’t happen. The vice-president, João Goulart, better known as Jango, took over.

In this period, the word that most defined Brazil was the adjective “new.” Bossa was nova, cinema was new, literature was new. Celso Furtado’s economy was new, everything was new. Brazil was experiencing its emancipation and a progressive turn,   which granted more freedom to social movements such as the peasant leagues and the student movement. In short, it was an effervescent country with a lot of creativity, many achievements, and economic policies that were quite unexpected. All of this was dismantled by the military coup of April 1, 1964.

The Brazilian elite didn’t anticipate that the popular sectors would threaten the privileges and interests of the ruling classes by, for example, demanding land reform. Brazil is a country of continental dimensions and has never known land reform, unlike its neighbors Bolivia and Peru, to name just two examples. This threat to privileges led to several coups with support from the White House, which established civil-military dictatorships throughout Latin America. This happened in many countries on our continent, as part of the US campaign to contain communism. In Brazil, while João Goulart’s government had many progressive aspects, there was nothing communist about him. He was a democrat and even a landowner, but he was sensitive to popular demands. As a reaction to this agenda, the military, subsidized by and in coordination with the United States government, carried out a coup on April 1, 1964. They tore up the Brazilian Constitution and implemented a regime of terror that lasted twenty-one years, of which I was personally a victim.

HF: How did this affect your life at the time?

fb: I was arrested as a student leader for fifteen days in June 1964, a few months after the coup. Then, in 1969, while working as a Dominican friar, I was arrested again for my work in support of the resistance and the struggle to re-democratize the country. I remained in prison for four years, until 1973. That period was marked by a lot of cruelty, torture, and the disappearances of those who were fighting for another social system, in this case socialism, or for the mere re-democratization of their countries. And we saw the spread of military coups to Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. This tragic period in Latin American history was all financed, bankrolled, and sponsored by the White House.

At the beginning of the dictatorship, some liberal and democratic leaders, such as Rubens Paiva, who is portrayed in the film Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here), thought that the coup would just be a period of rearrangement for the ruling classes, under the tutelage of the military. They didn’t think there would be torture, disappearances, shootings, or cruelty at such a scale, as is condensed in the work Brazil: Never Again.

But the dictatorship did take hold, and although different generals took turns as president, its character became increasingly violent, murderous, and genocidal.  The situation became more dire after December 1968, when the regime passed Institutional Act No. 5, which many analysts call the coup within the coup, as it institutionalized extrajudicial killings and the suspension of civil rights. Things really escalated at that point, and democratic forces began to resist the military dictatorship, both by peaceful means and by armed means. Groups and parties began to arm themselves in order to confront the military power of the dictatorship. This led to a great deal of wear and tear on the military regime.

HF: What was the work of resistance like throughout the 1970s? What would you highlight in terms of this organizing—whether it was comprised of permanent, daily, or less habitual patterns of opposition—in the extremely unfavorable context of political arrests, torture, murders, and disappearances?

fb: There was a period when this resistance was clandestine, either peacefully or through armed struggle. But during the mid-1970s it took on the dimensions of a mass struggle through union strikes. The union movement, led by Lula, denounced the dictatorship’s economic policy—the so-called “miracle”—as false, a big lie to cover up the real dynamics of the economy. Large unions began to mobilize, bringing thousands of people onto the streets to demand labor rights. This progressively undermined the foundations of the dictatorship.

The positive consensus in Brazilian society that the military had saved the country from communism started to fade as people became increasingly aware of the regime’s atrocities. It was also very important that official trade unionism was opposed and replaced by grassroots mobilization.

Brazil has always had grassroots organizations. From the sixties onward, through the progressive sectors of the Catholic Church, we formed the base communities that gave birth to what is known today as liberation theology. These communities did not attract the attention of the dictatorship, which considered them just a religious phenomenon. Meetings would begin with a reading of the Bible from the perspective of the oppressed, through an embrace of Paulo Freire’s pedagogical method. Ignoring the base communities was a big mistake on the part of the military, as these meetings turned toward training militants for popular activist movements, for trade union mobilizations, and, later, for organizing new political parties.

Between the 1960s and 1970s, there was a great spread of progressive Catholicism in Brazil. Grassroots organizing extended through favelas and factories, generating a more combative opposition within trade unions then tied to the dictatorship. This organizing struggle opened the way for new political parties. Among them was the Workers’ Party led by Lula.

So this is the process that brought together popular forces and undermined the dictatorial regime. Its victories included the return of exiles and the establishment of new national associations for organizing the working classes, such as the Central Única dos Trabalhadores and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra.

Unfortunately this process, this progressive organizational accumulation, has been lost in recent years. The election of Bolsonaro points to a global phenomena of weakened progressive forces and a strengthening of rightward mobilizations.

Hf: To what do you attribute the new rise of authoritarianism?

fB: After democracy was won due to the social, economic, and political failure of the dictatorial regime, we thought Brazil would never have an autocratic government again. But the world situation is not always linear, and is rather cyclical. Today, in my opinion, we are experiencing a wave of authoritarianism with a strong Nazi accent. This is happening on every continent, and is further exacerbated by the election of Donald Trump in the United States, as he is openly and avowedly an autocrat. An old joke in Latin America is that there has never been a coup in the United States because there is no American embassy in Washington. This is no longer true. The threat is now real there too. Trump tried to stage a coup d’état, and fortunately he was defeated, but now he’s back in office with massive support from the US population.

This authoritarian bias is in vogue around the world, and is due to several factors. During the Cold War, there was bipolarity, with the capitalist countries hegemonized by the United States and the East by socialism in the Soviet Union and China. This created a certain balance of forces. I believe that the greatest achievement of socialism did not take place in any socialist country, but in Western Europe: the working classes won many of their rights, guaranteed by law, because the European bourgeoisie feared that the workers would embrace the path of socialism and communism. The welfare of the working class in Europe was never as solid as it was in this post-war period lasting until 1989.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world elite tore off its mask. And with the change in the pattern of capitalist accumulation from production to speculation, these elites now have much more income and power. Today, we have a world dominated, on the one hand, by speculators and, on the other, by these Big Tech companies that produce nothing, but just process our knowledge and information, turning it into merchandise and also into a force for dominating consciousness.

So I think we are in a world in which consciences are experiencing a spiritual domestication. We’ve always talked about globalization and I’ve always criticized this expression: what really exists is globo-colonization, the colonization of the planet by a system of society that is capitalist; a hedonistic, consumerist system that turns human beings into merchandise because we’re not worth our intrinsic dignity, but rather the goods we own or don’t own. The more we possess material goods, the more we are welcomed into society. There is an accelerated process of domination, causing social ties to become increasingly frayed. Union, or party relations are increasingly atrophied. There’s a strong tendency for networks to lead to individualism, because associative ties are being eroded and, at the same time, narcissism is being accentuated. The logic of social media produces both narcissistic feedback and a great dependence on these Big Tech companies that don’t exist to facilitate our communication but to sell products.

Hf: Is there a parallel between Bolsonaro and the military coup in 1964, between today and what we experienced under the dictatorship?

fB: Yes, because Brazil, unlike Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, has never punished its torturers and murderers. On the contrary, it has created an odd mechanism from a legal point of view, which is the reciprocal amnesty. Instead of being denounced, tried, and sentenced, the torturers and murderers were granted amnesty at the same time as those who fought against the dictatorship. This meant that the culture of the dictatorship remained warm in the barracks of the Army, Air Force, and Navy. And they consider the 1964 coup to be a breakthrough, a revolution, and not the establishment of a dictatorship. Bolsonaro is the son of this strongly Nazi-like military background, just like all those who, with him, attempted the failed coup of January 8, 2023.

But today, they can’t find support in the military institutions. I don’t see any possibility of a new coup as we had before. But while Bolsonaro is ineligible to run for office, I do see the possibility of his people winning the next election in 2026, including the office of the President of the Republic.  The authoritarian threat is in place. I think we progressives have to step up our work, because the risk is there. There is a tendency in Brazilian society to support this Nazi-fascism that characterizes Bolsonarism. I think this is a very big risk. So we need to get back to grassroots work and master the digital networks. We’re very reactive, we’re not proactive on digital networks.

Hf: What impact does the Trump administration have on this situation?

Fb: Trump is going to rule autocratically, ignoring the laws, the judges, as seen in the deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador. The question is how the US judicial system reacts, to what extent it has the strength to stop him. If the mechanisms of checks and balances aren’t activated, I think that, looking at today’s scenario, he won’t be in office in four years’ time. He can’t be a candidate, but he can invent a casuistry, a new amendment to the US Constitution that allows him to be a candidate again. It’s too early to make an assessment, but I predict an extremely autocratic government, on the edge of what would be a declared dictatorship.

But all this will depend a lot on the performance of his government. Already, in his two months in office, he is creating a great deal of disappointment. Sixty days in office, and his prestige is already going down the drain. The wear and tear is already too great. The most sensitive part of the human body—the pocket—is a source of tension in Brazil, the US, or anywhere else. What will be the government’s role in people’s well-being? Food, health, education, etc., or war, arrests, and deportations?