Brazil: Answer for a Critic

A raging call to revolt echoed through Rio de Janeiro last week. It came from Carlos Lacerda, 51, Brazil’s perpetually angry man. Lacerda was one of the leaders of Brazil’s anti-Communist revolution 19 months ago, but now he turned on the regime he had helped to power. Reason: in gubernatorial elections two weeks ago, Lacerda’s ambitions to win the country’s presidency in 1966 were dealt a severe blow when he could not even get his own man elected to succeed him in his home state of Guanabara. Lacerda then demanded that the elections be annulled. Castello Branco refused. Suddenly Lacerda started arguing for a new military coup.

“The army should declare that the revolution has ended,” he roared at a press conference in Rio. “The revolution no longer exists. It doesn’t exist because it was betrayed. President Castello Branco assumed power in the name of the army. I ask if the army agrees with what he has done and what he is doing.” It went on like that for four days, until Lacerda descended to personal insult. “I have already vomited the President,” he snarled during an interview with reporters. “If the President is ugly outside, inside he provokes horror.”

Brazil’s chief of state is a patient man, but this was too much. In a series of meetings with his top military advisers, Castello Branco reconfirmed that most of Brazil’s military is solidly be hind his government. At one point there was talk of indicting Lacerda, under the National Security Law, for under mining the stability of the government. Castello Branco used a defter maneuver: his telecommunications agency ordered Rio’s broadcasting stations to deny Lacerda air time, thus stripping him of his biggest audience. That could be just the beginning. “We will never ignore the complaints and suggestions of those who aided the revolution,” Castello Branco vowed in a speech at Pôrto Alegre. “Yet we will not be diverted by those who, with the pretext of defending the revolution, want to smash liberty and benefit from its disappearance.”