It Never Seems to End

Just when you thought the last chapter had been written on how thoroughly vile and reprehensible Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's foreign policy was, something new crops up:

President Richard M. Nixon discussed with Brazil’s president a cooperative effort to overthrow the government of Salvador Allende of Chile, according to recently declassified documents that reveal deep collaboration between the United States and Brazil in trying to root out leftists in Latin America during the cold war.

The formerly secret memos, published Sunday by the National Security Archive in Washington, show that Brazil and the United States discussed plans to overthrow or destabilize not only Mr. Allende but Fidel Castro of Cuba and others.

Mr. Nixon, at a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 9, 1971, said he was willing to offer Brazil the assistance, monetary or otherwise, it might need to rid South America of leftist governments, the White House memorandum of the meeting shows.

Mr. Nixon saw Brazil’s military government as a critical partner in the region. “There were many things that Brazil as a South American country could do that the U.S. could not,” Mr. Nixon told the Brazilian president, Gen. Emilio Médici, according to the memo.

If Nixon and Kissinger were looking for someone thoroughly brutal to do their bidding, they couldn't have found a better person than Emílio Garrastazu Médici, the third of six military presidents during the twenty-one year military dictatorship.

During Médici's rule, the cruelest aspects of AI-5, passed under his predecessor, went into effect: torture was institutionalized and used with an intensity bordering on alacrity.

During the AI-5 the dictatorship developed some of its most creative and cruel forms of torture and the number of disappeared—those secretly killed by the state—multiplied. Among the favorite methods of torture there were the coroa-de-Cristo (Christ's crown) and the pau-de-arara (macaw's stick). Coroa-de-Cristo was a metal hoop attached to the victim's head that kept being pressed by a wicket until it smashed the skull. A Brazilian invention, the pau-de-arara is a monument to the national sadistic impulses. The technique still used nowadays around the country to torture common prisoners consists of a metal bar placed over two wooden horses. The victim is tied to the bar by the wrists or the kneecap. After being immobilized the prisoner used to get hit over the kidney with a broom or receive electrical shocks. Other simpler methods used consisted in introducing a broom stick in the prisoner's anus or throwing cold water on the victim keeping him or her awake for days or simply taking someone in a car to a deserted area and threatening to kill him there.

Habeas corpus was suspended for "political" offenses.Political meetings were banned. Even the largely powerless congress was abolished. One could make a compelling argument that Pinochet took some of his inspiration from Médici.

If there's any hope to be taken from any of this it's this bit of cold comfort:

But after word of the conversation between Mr. Nixon and General Médici found its way to the Brazilian military, a C.I.A. memo suggests that not all military officers were happy with the arrangement.

Gen. Vicente Coutinho, commander of Brazil’s Fourth Army, said the United States wanted Brazil “to do the dirty work.”

I think Peter Kornbluh absolutely nails it when he calls for Lula to open Brazil's military archives. I don't have much hope, however, as Brazil has been very reluctant to address much of the human rights abuses that took place during the dictatorship. Here's a link to the national Security Archive's section on this.