July
2019
Rafael
Freire
Financed
by the U.S., the Dictatorships in South America Killed Thousands
“In
1964, Che Guevara showed me, in his office in Havana, that Batista's
Cuba was not merely sugar: the Imperium's blind fury against the
revolution was better explained, he thought, by Cuba's big deposits
of nickel and manganese.”
In
this short passage from the classic Open
Veins of Latin America,
the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, starting from Che's Marxist
view, reinforced the point that the economic basis of the capitalist
system ultimately determines politics. That is, behind the
political-ideological action of the ruling classes are their
nefarious financial interests, the unrestrained pursuit of profit,
and the exploitation of the natural resources of the oppressed
nations and the labor power of the working class.
It
was with these objectives that the United States, after World War II,
financed coups d'état to overthrow democratically elected
governments and to establish military dictatorships in South and
Central America.
Please
excuse us for a longer quote from Galeano, so that there will be no
doubt about what we want to say about the coups in Brazil and our
neighboring countries:
“The
wealth of iron beneath Brazil's Paraopeba valley overthrew two
presidents – Jânio Quadros and João Goulart – before Marshal
Castelo Branco, who made himself dictator in 1964, graciously handed
it over to the Hanna Mining Company. An earlier friend of the U.S.
ambassador, President Eurico Dutra (1946-1951), had handed Bethlehem
Steel the 40 million tons of manganese in the state of Amapά – one
of the world's biggest deposits – for 4 percent of the income from
exporting it. Since then Bethlehem has been moving the mountains to
the United States so enthusiastically that in fifteen years' time
Brazil may have no manganese for its own steel industry. Furthermore,
thanks to the generosity of the Brazilian government, $88 of each
$100 Bethlehem invests in mineral extraction are tax exempt, in the
name of ‘regional development.’
“In
Bolivia, the Matilde mine contains lead, silver, and abundant zinc
twelve times more pure than that in U.S. mines; between massacres of
miners, dictator René Barrientos, who seized power in 1964, handed
it over to Phillips Industries. The firm was authorized to remove the
crude zinc for processing in its refineries abroad, paying the state
no less than 1.5 percent of the sale value. In Peru in 1968, page 11
of the agreement which President Fernando Belaúnde Terry had signed
with a Standard Oil affiliate was mysteriously lost; General Juan
Velasco Alvarado overthrew Belaúnde, took the reins, and
nationalized the firm's wells and refinery. In Venezuela, the largest
U.S. military mission in Latin America sits on Standard and Gulf’s
great petroleum take. Argentina's frequent coups d'état erupt before
or after each offer of oil concessions. Copper was a far from minor
factor in the Pentagon's disproportionate military aid to Chile
before the electoral victory of Salvador Allende's left coalition;
U.S. copper reserves had fallen by more than 60 percent between 1965
and 1969.” (Op. Cit., p. 135-136)
A
History of Dictatorships
The
first dictatorship [after the Second World War – translator’s
note]
in South America with U.S. fingers on it was that of Paraguay in
1954, with Alfredo Stroessner toppling President Federico Chavez, an
anti-IMF populist politician. Stroessner was elected through fraud,
which prevented an opposing slate in the election. Once in power, all
parties were closed down and only the Colorado Party ran the sole
candidate for president, Stroessner. He remained in power until 1989,
the longest dictatorship on the continent, lasting 35 years. His base
of support was the agricultural oligarchy. The United States made
Paraguay a laboratory for its National Security Doctrine.
In
1959 came the victory of the Cuban Revolution the United States
tightened its grip on the Americas. It would not allow a new Cuba to
arise by any means, the profits of the industrial monopolies had to
be increased and the natural wealth appropriated.
In
1946, U.S. imperialism had already created the School of the
Americas, with the objective of training instigators of military
coups and dictators. In 1961, under the pretext of building
cooperation in order to develop Latin America and combat communism,
the Alliance for Progress was created, whose real objective was to
closely control possible revolutionary movements or any workers'
actions that contradicted the interests of the capitalists.
In
1964, two dictatorships came to power in South America, both with
direct intervention by the armed forces and the U.S. government: in
Brazil and Bolivia. These military governments then adopted policies
of privatization, eliminated labor rights, banned strikes, massacred
students, criminalized communists and invited in foreign companies
interested in cheap labor.
Attempts
at resistance by Bolivian miners and workers were harshly repressed.
In October 1967, in the region near the village of Vallegrande, the
revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, who commanded a guerrilla struggle
to liberate Bolivia from the dictatorship, was arrested and executed.
In
one of the short-term successes of military presidents in Bolivia,
General Juan Jose Torres, a democratically oriented military officer,
took over. In August 1971, Brazil's then-dictator president Emilio
Garrastazu Medici offered General Torres' opponents all logistical
support for a coup (weapons, planes, mercenaries, places to set up
military training areas on Brazilian soil near the border, etc.). The
coup, led by General Hugo Banzer, overthrew Torres and increased
repression against the people, banning the trade union movement,
suspending all civil rights and sending troops to the mining centers
to stifle strikes.
In
1968, it was Peru's turn. General Velasco Alvarado led the coup that
overthrew President Fernando Belaunde and took power. This was the
response of the elites to the growth of the popular movements, such
as "Tierra o Muerte" (”Land or Death”), with more than
300,000 peasants who since 1963 had occupied the land that had been
taken over by the landowners. Only in the late 1970s would the
country return to presidential elections, from which successive
victorious corrupt governments emerged.
In
1973, Uruguay and Chile suffered coups d'état. In Uruguay, the coup
was already planned due to the possible electoral victory of General
Liber Seregni, candidate of the Broad Front (formed by left and
center left parties). But Juan Maria Bordaberry was elected, who as
president on June 27 closed the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies
with the support of the Armed Forces, announcing the creation of a
State Council to replace the parliament.
This
was followed by years of intense repression of the people and their
organizations, such as the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement
(MLN-T), which recently had its story told in the film A
Night of 12 Years.
Only in 1985 would the country return to a democratic transition.
In
Chile, the democratically elected president Salvador Allende,
supported by the Popular Unity (an alliance of several leftist
parties), was trying to implement some reforms in order to reduce the
extreme inequality of the country. Allende, however, was not a
revolutionary; he defended "socialism by the democratic road".
However,
on the "accusation" that the president was a communist, on
September 11, 1973, the Palacio La Moneda [the president’s
residence] was bombed by the military, resulting in the death of
President Allende himself, who resisted with a rifle in his hand.
General Augusto Pinochet seized power and implemented a genocidal
policy, which included, for example, mass shootings in football
stadiums.
Only
in 1990 would the military retire from power, leaving behind a trail
of blood and almost two decades of faithful application of the
neoliberal economic project ordered by the U.S., which keeps Chile
subordinated to the United States to this day.
In
Argentina, the coup took place on March 24, 1976. Until 1983,
thousands of militants were thrown alive into the sea from airplanes
(the “death flights”); 340 concentration camps were created in
which “subversive” workers were punished and condemned to
slavery; nearly 2,000 people have been proven killed and 30,000
others are missing, leaving behind orphaned children, desperate
fathers and mothers. As if that were not enough, more than 500 babies
were taken from their families to be handed over to the military and
then given a "good" education. To this day, the “Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo” and “Grandparents of the Plaza de Mayo”
movements have struggled to identify the kidnapped babies, having
succeeded in 126 cases.
The
first president of the Argentine military dictatorship was General
Jorge Rafael Videla. On November 22, 2010 he was tried and sentenced
to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity and died in jail at
age 87 on May 17, 2013.
Brazil:
fascism never again!
On
December 10, 2014 (World Human Rights Day), the National Truth
Commission (CNV) presented its final report to Brazilian society. The
CNV officially declared that there were 434 people killed (of these,
210 are still missing) by the military dictatorship in Brazil, but
the list is much larger.
According
to the Commission's own survey, it is estimated that more than 8,350
indigenous people were killed in massacres, land grabs, forced
evictions, contagion from infectious diseases, arrests, torture and
ill-treatment, all in a study that only looked at ten ethnicities.
There was also a massacre of peasants: the CNV counted almost 1,200
dead, surely less than the real number. Even within the Armed Forces
there was a great deal of repression: about 6,600 military personnel
were arrested or expelled from their units; some were killed. More
than 1,200 unions were taken over by the state and dozens of student
organizations, including the UNE [National Union of Educators], were
closed and outlawed.
All
these events proven today could have been investigated and judged
after the end of the dictatorship, as the historian José Levino
pointed out in the article “A Long Night of Terror” (A
Verdade,
No. 169):
“Ignoring
the struggle of the streets, the bourgeois opposition, represented by
the MDB, negotiated the Amnesty Law (Law No. 6.683 / 79) with General
Joao Baptista Figueiredo, which also benefitted the agents of
repression, engaged in the apparatus of 'political and related crimes
', leaving out those condemned ‘for the practice of crimes of
terrorism, assault, kidnapping and personal attack'….
In
Argentina, for example, in 1983, the same year that the dictatorship
fell, the government of Raul Alfonsin set up a commission to
investigate the violations that had occurred. This allowed for the
condemnation of military commanders and generals who became president
(dictators) Jorge Rafael Videla and Reynaldo Bignone to 50 years in
prison and life imprisonment, respectively.”
The
struggle for an effective Transitional Justice (right to memory,
truth, justice and institutional reparations) in Brazil is therefore
a current and necessary campaign. If today the President of the
Republic is an apologist for the 1964 coup, by contrast, all those
who defend freedom, all democrats, progressives, socialists,
communists, must keep alive the slogan of punishment for the agents
of dictatorship.
Sources:
Eduardo
Galeano, Open
Veins of Latin America,
Monthly Review Press, 25th anniversary edition, 1997.
José
Levino, A
Verdade,
No. 169, February 2015.
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