Reflections on Life Under a Dictatorship

By Edgar Miller

IT WAS SUNDAY EVENING a week after Easter. I was hurrying to finish my last story of the day so I could get to a party at the home of one of my colleagues in the foreign press corps to unwind after the conclusion of the military coup that ousted Brazil’s democratically elected president, João Goulart.
I had been on the job with hardly a break since the previous weekend when Brazil’s growing political and economic crisis boiled over, culminating in the military takeover of the government in a movement that started on Tuesday, March 31, 1964, and ended with hardly a shot fired on the next day when the president fled the country. 
In the two plus years of Goulart’s left-leaning government, the country had lurched from crisis to crisis, political and economic. Inflation was rampant. Brazil’s economy was nearly bankrupt. Even worse in the eyes of the military and the U.S. government, Goulart had put several avowed communists in high government jobs. The fear was Brazil was on the path to become a South American Cuba.
Faced with these circumstances, millions of Brazilians cheered on the military takeover which had the full backing of the U.S. government. 
The last straw for the coup plotters was a speech by Goulart to the non-commissioned military officers on Easter Monday night in which he urged them to ignore their leaders and support his government’s programs. 
The leaders of the coup promised that military control would be temporary and that the presidential election scheduled for the next year would be held as usual.
The new military leaders moved swiftly to round up any individuals who had opposed the coup, including any known leftists, or suspected terrorists.
As I finished the story I was writing that Sunday night the elevators opened on the 11th floor and Brazilian Air Force troops armed with automatic weapons rushed out, storming into our office. 
They were followed by an Army captain who came into the Associated Press office. He demanded to know where we kept the files of the Russian, Polish and other Iron Curtain country correspondents. I tried to tell him we didn’t keep such files, but he screamed at me that he knew we had them and that I was “resisting the revolution.”
A soldier came in and told him what I had been trying to do: The telegraph company that handled press dispatches was down the hall.
When he left the office, I called a friend who was high up in the cabal that engineered the coup. Before I could finish telling him what was happening, the captain returned.
“Aha!” he screamed. “I knew it. You are resisting the revolution.” He yanked the telephone receiver from my hand and hurled it across the room into the wall.
Then two soldiers with automatic weapons to take to a paddy wagon on the street below to be transported to the Department of Political and Social Order, DOPS.  
Somewhere along the way, the truck stopped. For more than an hour I sat in that pitch dark, extremely hot vehicle that reeked of urine and vomit.
Meanwhile, the friend I had called responded immediately by alerting a general who was in the top echelon of the coup conspirators and they rushed down to the AP office. The general ordered the captain to call DOPS and have me brought back to the office, but when he did he was told that the paddy wagon had never arrived.
The military men decided that “counterrevolutionaries” had intercepted the vehicle and kidnapped me. They put an all-points bulletin on the police and military radios.
As I learned later, the driver of the van had stopped at a bar for a couple of drinks. When we got to DOPS, the vehicle was surrounded by police with automatic weapons. I was let out, and the driver was taken into custody. 
Instead of being jailed, I was put in a police car and returned siren blasting lights flashing to the office. 
 The general, my friend and the captain, along with the manager of the cable company on the same floor, were waiting when I got there.
The general told me that this had all been a misunderstanding.
“So apologize to the captain and we can all go home,” he said.
I refused to apologize and suggested the captain was the one who owed me an apology.
That started a heated discussion that quickly ended when my friend grabbed me by the arm and said, “Ed, shut up or we’re both going to wind up in jail.”
He turned to the general and said, “The best way to end this is to end it.” And he pulled me by the arm out of the room.” 
On the way out, the captain stuck his head in my office and warned me to be careful about what I wrote or he would be back for me.

THAT SUNDAY NIGHT RAID on our office in the heart of Rio de Janeiro was my introduction to what was going to be an increasingly brutal military dictatorship that lasted 21 years.
The interim civilian president was quickly replaced with a general. The new regime adopted a series of increasingly sweeping “institutional acts” that bypassed the Congress and the Constitution, giving the new rulers a free hand to do what they pleased. That included chasing down not only those they thought were communists, communist sympathizers or leftists in general, but also civilian politicians who had supported the regime. Then they turned on the leading candidates for president in the election scheduled for November, taking away all their political rights to vote or hold office. The election the public had been assured would be held as usual was postponed indefinitely.
Many cabinet ministers and other top officials of the former government fled the country or took asylum in foreign embassies. Others were arrested. 
It also didn’t take the new regime long to introduce total press censorship. Censors, mostly army officers, were placed in all the newspapers, magazines, TV stations and radio stations to make sure nothing was printed or broadcast that would be against or derogatory to the new government.
Army censors also were placed in the cable companies including Teleradio Brasileiro the Brazilian office of Press Wireless, the company used by all foreign correspondents in Brazil for their dispatches. That office was on the same floor as the AP bureau.
AP’s New York headquarters began putting a flag on all stories that news from Brazil was censored by the government. That gave the country such a black eye internationally that ambassadors from around the world convinced the government to lift direct censorship.
After that, we would get a call from a military censor, usually a colonel, who would tell us certain stories were censored. Sometimes the call would tip us off to something we didn’t know was happening. After a few phone calls, we would flesh out the information and file a story. 
As opposition to the dictatorship grew, many people were arrested as terrorists and tortured, many were killed and thousands simply “disappeared.”
Even though direct censorship was lifted on the foreign press, we still were under constant pressure from the regime to report only what they wanted. Reporters, especially those from the Iron Curtain countries, were harassed and even arrested, roughed up and interrogated before being released. Many left the country.
My own run-ins with the military government were minor compared to some of my colleagues.
When I was running the AP’s São Paulo bureau where we translated incoming news in Spanish to Portuguese and distributed to newspaper clients throughout Brazil, one of my best translators failed to show up for work several days in a row. Nobody answered the telephone at his residence or that of his parents.
Eventually, I got a call from his parents telling me that he had been arrested as a suspected terrorist. They and their son’s wife also had been arrested and released after a couple of weeks. 
The translator was a dedicated worker, who never missed work. I seriously doubted that he had been involved in any terrorist activity.
After failing to get any information about him through the normal procedures, I decided to go to the political police headquarters where he was being held to see if I could find out anything.
People were lined up at the door to the building where a police officer sat at a desk listening to their pleas for information or asking permission to take food to a loved one being held there. Those allowed to go into the building had to leave their identity documents at the desk to be retrieved when they came out.
I patiently waited until it was my turn. I told the officer that I wanted to see my employee. He said it wasn’t possible. I argued with him, pointing out that The Associated Press was the largest news agency in the world and that by holding our employee he was creating an international incident.
The officer listened with a poker face. When I finished, he said I could go with two plainclothes officers who had appeared while I was talking. I offered my ID documents as I had seen others do. 
“No need. You can keep that,” he said. 
I felt a chill. Did that mean I wouldn’t be coming back?
The two men said nothing as we went into the building. They took me up to the second floor and left me in a large room furnished only by a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet in one corner. They left and I sat there for several minutes wondering what was happening. Finally, a tall, blond-haired man wearing khaki pants and a white dress shirt, a pistol on his hip, came into the room and sat down on the other side of the desk. He pulled out his pearl-handled revolver and placed it on the desk, pointing at me. 
I told him that I was there to find out about my translator. I assured him that the young man was a hard worker with a wife and a young child and an unlikely terrorist. He told me that he couldn’t confirm that my employee was being held there. But I told him that the man’s parents and wife had been arrested along with him and later released said he was there.
All in all, we had a pleasant conversation. As I suspected he was from Rio Grande do Sul of German descent. I didn’t get anything from him but a vague, “I’ll look into it.”
A few weeks later, the translator was released after being exonerated by a military tribunal.
I also learned that the same day that I visited the political police headquarters, he was taken out of the bullpen where he was held with others and put in a private cell. He also was not tortured again. 
The evidence that led to his arrest was his telephone number in the address book of a suspected terrorist. The man was a high school classmate whom he hadn’t seen since graduation more than 10 years earlier.
Another of my employees, an older woman, disappeared. I never found out what happened to her. I imagine she was tortured and killed like some many thousands of others.
I was detained by the military once again during my time in São Paulo, this time because of a story I wrote about Brazil’s 2nd Army and the Brazilian Air Force being on the alert to enter Bolivia to support a coup attempt against the communist-leaning president. 
Army Intelligence had intercepted my article when it was sent by cable to New York. While they were not censoring us, they were still reading all our outgoing stories.
The colonel in charge of military intelligence called the office and demanded a copy of the story. I had already left but I told the night editor to give it to him.
The next morning when I arrived for work, I found two army captains with sidearms waiting for me. They “invited” me to come with them. At least we were in a military sedan, not a stinking paddy wagon.
To my surprise, I was not locked up but ushered into the office of General Humberto de Souza Melo, commander of the 2nd Army in São Paulo. In Brazilian style, we were served cafezinhos, very strong coffee in tiny cups. It was all very pleasant. 
He asked me how I got my story. I replied that I had no sources other than those quoted by name in my story, a general and a former Bolivian cabinet minister who was involved in the coup attempt.
General Souza Mello said the general had no authority to give me that story. I said, so you’re telling me the story is accurate. He said yes, but that no Brazilian forces had gone into Bolivia. 
We left on very good terms. He gave me a card with his direct telephone line and asked me to call him anytime I wanted to.
As it turned out, there was no need for Brazilian intervention. The coup by Bolivian Colonel Hugo Banzer was over within hours. 
In the mid-1970s, I became the AP bureau chief for Brazil. I also was elected president of the Foreign Correspondents Club and as such I had to deal not only with the problems of my employees but those of all the club members who faced varying degrees of intimidation that ranged from being called in for “questioning” to being followed by police agents. No correspondents were arrested, as far as I know.
Everything we wrote had to be thoroughly checked out. And we had to protect our sources so that they didn’t wind up in the torture chambers. It was a tense time.
After my brief encounter with General Souza Melo I was never personally bothered by the military over something I wrote.
One of the correspondents who was targeted was Bruce Handler. Bruce had worked for me in São Paulo and later was transferred to the Rio bureau where he worked until he landed a job with The Washington Post.
Shortly before his death in 2022, I asked Bruce for his recollections of his troubles with the military. He said they stemmed strictly from stories he had written for The AP and later The Washington Post.
“A lot of it was routine stuff that certainly cast the military regime in a negative light but never appeared in the Brazilian press because of domestic censorship,” he wrote to me in an email. “Local journalists kept me in the loop, as I'm sure they did with you, because they knew that what they couldn't write about at home at least would be seen by people overseas. As those were pre-internet times, Brazilian embassies abroad would clip unfavorable stories from papers in their regions and send them to Brasília.
“Here's one you certainly will recall. President [Ernesto] Geisel was going to inaugurate a new Embratel commercial communications ground station in Rio de Janeiro state — a positive story about Brazil — and the government decided to invite the foreign press. I signed up to cover it for the Post. The night before, the press spokesman for the Communications Ministry, also a friend, called me at home and said, ‘Bruce, sinto muito, mas você foi cortado da viagem’ [Bruce, I’m sorry, but you were taken off the trip]. Why? He said he didn't know. The decision, he said, apparently came from G-2, the intelligence branch of the 1st Army. Hmm, very strange. 
“You were president of the Foreign Correspondents Association, and somehow you managed to get a meeting with G-2 in the old War Ministry building near the Central do Brasil railroad station. Some colonel received us and said I was forbidden from being anywhere near Geisel in 1st Army territory (Rio, Espirito Santo and some other places.) You said, ‘You are limiting Senhor Bruce's freedom of expression.’ The colonel said, ‘No we're not. He can write anything he wants. He just can't be near the Presidente da República.’
“I said, ‘But I covered him at his inauguration, and I was as close to him as I am to you in this room.’ 
“The colonel said, ‘That was Brasília. That's the 2nd Army. I'm talking about when he's under the protection of the 1st Army.’
“You asked if we could appeal. He said yes. You said ‘Com quem?’ [With whom]. He said, ‘Comigo.’ [With me]. You said, ‘Okay, we appeal.’”
He added that about a week later he got a call from G-2 saying the appeal was rejected. About two years later, he said, the Geisel ban was removed.
Bruce was one of several foreign correspondents I intervened for during my two years as president of the Foreign Correspondents Club.

JIMMY CARTER WAS THE FIRST American president to take a firm stand against Brazil’s abuses of human rights. In his visit to Brazil in 1978, he made it clear that Brazil would not receive any military aid unless the abuses stopped.
Even his wife, Rosalynn, got involved when she went to Recife to intervene on behalf of two Americans, a Catholic priest and a Protestant missionary, who had been arrested as terrorists because they were feeding the hungry. They were released after her visit. 
Carter’s frank discussions reportedly angered then President Geisel, but the reports of  arrests and torturing almost vanished in the weeks after his visit. 
Here’s how it was summed up in the official statement following the visit:
     
     President Carter emphasized the fundamental commitment of his country to the promotion of human rights and democratic freedoms as basic to the process of building a more just world and stated that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the OAS Charter provide a framework for international concern in this area. In this regard President Geisel recalled that international cooperation for the affirmation of human rights, in all their aspects, is one of the noblest tasks of the United Nations. He stressed the preoccupation of the Brazilian Government with the observance of human rights and noted the essential role of economic, social and political development in attaining progress in this area.

It still took another seven years for the military regime to return political control of Brazil to civilians. 

THE COMPARISON WITH ELEMENTS of the Brazilian military dictatorship and the current situation in the United States is inevitable: getting rid of all those who oppose the regime or might in the future oppose it, even those who may have supported it in the past; censoring the media to stop any published criticism; ignoring the constitution by creating documents that would avoid constitutional limits, such as the “institutional acts” in Brazil and the executive orders in the U.S., among other things.
I just hope that it doesn’t take 20 plus years for democracy to return to this country.