Document of the week! Alliance for Progress: how the United States understood Brazil's role in the Cold War

Check out the full document in our collection: Memorandum from Roberto de Jesus Toro to Teodoro Moscoso contextualizing Brazilian politics and economy and US concerns in Brazil

Alliance for Progress: how the United States understood Brazil's role in the Cold War

In May 1962, a mission sent by the coordinator of the Alliance for Progress (US economic aid program for Latin America), Teodoro Moscoso, in order to evaluate the prospects for economic aid to Goulart's Brazil and, above all, to Brazilian states. 

This mission would be made up of several members, including economist Roberto Jesus Toro, who would produce a report on the mission, which is NACE CNV-Brasil's document of the week.

There are several notable things in Jesus Toro's report: the first is that few Yankee documents express so limpidly and clearly the perception of North American representatives about the strategic importance that Brazil represented for the United States in the global Cold War. 

One of the excerpts from Jesus Toro's report says: “if the communists ever take control of this country, the position of the United States in Latin America could be doomed.”

The other notable feature of the report is that Jesus Toro explains, like few others before him, the logic behind the US economic aid policy to Brazilian states – something that, later, the US ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, I would call “islands of administrative sanity”. 

Jesus Toro argues, without squeamishness, that there should be an “unwritten policy” to “separate friends from enemies”. In other words, for friends, as was the case with the governor of Guanabara, Carlos Lacerda, there should be a minimum of analysis for loan approval – approval should be almost automatic.

For enemies, however, as was the case with the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Leonel Brizola, the treatment given should be “cold”. 

Basically, Jesus Toro preached the need for explicit political use of the resources of the Alliance for Progress in Brazil for states of the federation, which would be exactly what Washington would do during much of the Goulart government, placing yet another brick in the destabilization policy that, in March 1964, he would overthrow the Brazilian president and begin 21 years of dictatorship in the country.

Prof. Dr. Felipe Loureiro,

Deputy coordinator of NACE CNV-Brazil,

Institute of International Relations at the University of São Paulo