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prison.” Ambassador Gordon cabled Washington that the US should increase military aid for Brazil because the military was essential in the “strategy for restraining left wing excesses of Goulart government.” Meanwhile the CIA was “financing the mass urban demonstrations against the Goulart government, proving the old themes of God, country, family, and liberty to be as effective as ever,” Philip Agee noted in his Diary.
    Recall that aid to the military is standard operating procedure for overthrowing a civilian government. The device was also used effectively in Indonesia and Chile, and tried in Iran in the early 1980s, the first stage in what later became (suitably recrafted) the Iran-contra affair. 9
    On March 31, the generals took over, with US support and plans for further action if necessary “to assure success of takeover.” The Generals had carried out a “democratic rebellion,” Gordon cabled Washington. The revolution was “a great victory for the free world,” which prevented a “total loss to the West of all South American Republics” and should “create a greatly improved climate for private investments.” “The principal purpose for the Brazilian revolution,” he testified before Congress two years later, “was to preserve and not destroy Brazil’s democracy.” This democratic revolution was “the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century,” Gordon held, “one of the major turning points in world history” in this period. Adolf Berle agreed that Goulart was a Castro clone who had to be removed. Secretary of State Dean Rusk justified US recognition for the coup regime on the grounds that “the succession there occurred as foreseen by the Constitution,” a statement that was not “entirely accurate,” Thomas Skidmore judiciously observes.
    US labor leaders demanded their proper share of the credit for the violent overthrow of the parliamentary regime, while the new government proceeded to crush the labor movement and to subordinate poor and working people to the overriding needs of business interests, primarily foreign, reducing real wages by 25 percent within 3 years and redistributing income “toward upper-income groups who were destined to be the great consumers of the Brazilian miracle” (Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who sees the brutal repression and attack on living standards as “an essential prerequisite for a new cycle of capitalist growth within the Brazilian domestic economy”). Washington and the investment community were naturally delighted. As the relics of constitutional rule faded away and the investment climate improved, the World Bank offered its first loans in 15 years and US aid rapidly increased along with torture, murder, starvation, disease, infant mortality—and profits. 10

    4. Securing the Victory
    The United States was the “regime’s most reliable ally,” Thomas Skidmore observes in the most comprehensive scholarly study of what came next. US aid “saved the day” for the ruling Generals; the process also “turned the US into a kind of unilateral IMF, overseeing every aspect of Brazilian economic policy.” “In almost every Brazilian office involved in administering unpopular tax, wage, or price decisions, there was the ubiquitous American adviser,” the new US Ambassador discovered in 1966. Once again, the US was well-positioned to use Brazil as a “testing area for modern scientific methods of industrial development”(Haines), and therefore has every right to take credit for what ensued. Under US guidance, Brazil pursued orthodox neoliberal policies, “doing everything right” by monetarist criteria, and “strengthening the market economy” (Skidmore). The “economic miracle” proceeded in parallel with the entrenchment of the fascist National Security State, not