message was that outsiders did not understand the threats that Brazil faced. “Do people think this is a picnic?” said the finance minister to an American official. “These terrorists are a bunch of murderers…. We all live in fear.”145 The Brazilian regime also continued to make the case that things were different in Latin America. “I do not believe that the public is interested in any change in the present regime,” a Médici deputy told a reporter. “The truth is that political liberty, in the sense of liberty to elect the government, is not one of the values sought by our people.”146 The regime was at least correct in arguing that many foreign critics were working from secondhand information, often had no specialized knowledge of Brazil, and downplayed the violence posed by insurgents. But the regime’s other rejoinders were spurious. In stating that human rights violations were not unique to Brazil, they were essentially admitting guilt. And in focusing their propaganda on a chimerical “conspiracy” of foreign criticism, they were ignoring the substantial wellspring of legitimate domestic opposition. The combination of Kennedy’s statements and the negative international press reports fueled the Brazilian opposition’s call for investigations and reforms.
Concern then shifted to possible U.S. complicity in torture through USAID’s Office of Public Safety (OPS), which had provided funds and training to police forces in several nations since 1957. Because the OPS had trained thousands of Brazilian police officers in law enforcement and interrogation techniques, activists shed light on the small U.S. Naval Mission that was housed in Brazil’s Navy Ministry. Some prisoners claimed that Brazilian security officers had tortured them in this building, and a few added that they had heard American voices in the corridors. Others said that the Brazilian interrogators claimed to have been trained by the CIA. The State Department, meanwhile, vehemently denied that torture was on the agenda of the training programs.147
It was one thing for American activists to point out that their government was supporting a repressive regime; it was another thing entirely to claim that Americans were training foreign nationals how to torture, or even participating in torture themselves. At the very least, it was significant that so many now believed that their government was directing such morally questionable actions. However, CIA activities were closely guarded, and even congressional committees did not find evidence that implicated the agency or OPS. Langguth published some of the victims’ claims in his 1978 book Hidden Terrors, though he did not uncover much hard evidence that Americans were directly involved in torture. It is now clear that torture was happening in Brazil and that the CIA and State Department were aware of it, but much of the rest is speculation or hearsay.148 Recently declassified CIA interrogation manuals are intriguing, though confirmation of direct CIA abuse has been harder to come by.149
But this focus on American culpability deflects attention from the story’s central truth: that Brazilians were abusing Brazilians. Even if some Americans were involved in police training, to claim that they were the architects of extensive detainee abuse is to betray a marked ignorance of Brazil’s troubled, violent history. More important than the claim that Americans were torturing or training others to do so was the perception—both in the United States and in South America—that American support was empowering dictatorial regimes to abuse civilians. The OPS became infamous because of its training in South Vietnam, and activists and journalists naturally began to scrutinize OPS ties to a host of Latin American nations. (A decade later, activists would raise similar questions about counterinsurgency training at the U.S.-funded School of the Americas.)
In 1971, Senator Church chaired SFRC hearings on U.S.-Brazil relations. Together with the debate over aid to Greece, these hearings were among the earliest congressional efforts to investigate and limit U.S. involvement in other governments’ human rights violations. The hearings would last only three days and would include only government witnesses, but the modest agenda could not obscure the provocative precedent. As soon as Senator Church announced his plans, representatives of the Brazilian government and American businesses unsuccessfully petitioned the State Department to stop it. As it turned out, the hearings were somewhat traditional in the sense that the committee did not seek to change Brazilian society or protect the rights of Brazilian citizens. “How Brazilians organize their own affairs and how they treat each other are not proper concerns of the U.S. Senate,” said Church, but the actions of U.S. agencies in Brazil were “proper concerns of all Americans.”150
The liberal Senator Claiborne Pell—another early advocate of limiting aid to undemocratic governments—had a testy exchange on these points with USAID’s chief public safety adviser in Brazil, Theodore D. Brown. “The thing that arouses me and arouses American public opinion a good deal,” said Pell, “is this use of physical torture. Why is it the Brazilians … use torture as a police method when it will alienate their friends and allies around the world?” Brown first replied that he was “not personally aware” of torture, and then tacitly acknowledged the problem: “Why certain people do things, that is a difficult question for me to answer, sir…. Why do some people beat their wives?” Senator Church then got into a row with Ambassador Rountree over President Nixon’s policy of dealing with all governments. “We not only deal with them,” said Church, “we extend lavish amounts of money…. Can we simply say it matters not what the state of freedom is in any country?” Church went on to succinctly lay out the moral dilemmas Americans faced in the human rights era. “When I go to American colleges and talk to young people,” he told the ambassador, “they ask why have we spent two billion dollars in Brazil when the government there is dictatorial in character, run by military men, any number of Brazilians are said to be mistreated in the jails, where there are recurrent reports of human torture.”151
The congressional hearings process had long served as an opportunity for legislators to question the executive branch on policy matters, but the Church hearings went much further in highlighting the level of skepticism about the moral value of foreign aid. Church and Pell not only doubted that the large aid allotment to Brazil did anything for the United States, but they were unimpressed with the administration’s claims of private diplomacy, and argued instead for strong public condemnation. The hearings were also a different kind of conversation because the senators had been receiving information from nongovernmental sources. Because activists and NGOs had done so much research and writing on Brazil, the senators did not have to rely on the State Department.152
Congress did not cut direct aid in 1971, but these hearings set an important precedent for the threat of cutoffs based on human rights concerns. Congress soon terminated USAID funds for Brazilian police training, and the OPS pulled out of Brazil. (Congress would phase out the entire program in 1974.) These hearings also increased the congressional momentum against such regimes in Latin America. In 1971–1972, Senator John Tunney (D-CA), Congressman Donald Fraser, and Congressman Ronald Dellums (D-CA) proposed Brazilian aid cuts until the IACHR could prove that torture had been eradicated. These proposals received no more than about one-third support in each house, but they demonstrated a growing liberal challenge to Nixonian realpolitik.153 Meanwhile, the State Department was hardly unified. Ambassador Rountree, who was clearly troubled by the overwhelming evidence of torture, supported diplomatic intercession. Unfortunately for him, when he commented to Washington on the “essentiality of making [U.S. disapproval] clear on appropriate occasion and in appropriate manner,” his superior wrote in the memo’s margin, “i.e. never, and by saying nothing.”154
The mounting congressional opposition did not prevent the administration from rolling out the red carpet when President Médici visited Washington in December 1971. With both governments seeking to halt the leftward drift in the hemisphere, Secretary Rogers advised Nixon that the visit would provide an opportunity to influence Brazil’s leadership, as “the Brazilians’ objectives parallel our own.” Rogers even put a positive spin on the junta’s domestic achievements. Although many “thinking Brazilians” were “impatient with the slow pace of return to democratic procedures,” the wider public was “enthusiastic about Brazil’s progress.” Terrorism had been reduced, Brazil’s economy had grown, and the regime had permitted some direct congressional and municipal elections.155 State Department FSOs in Brazil concurred. In the words of a U.S. embassy report, “large segments of Brazilian opinion [are] willing to accommodate themselves to authoritarian government, tainted