Document of the week! Vernon Walters and Brazilian politics: the presence of the North American military attaché in the dictatorship

Check out the full document in our collection: Telegram from John Wills Tuthill to the Secretary of State in Washington DC regarding a conversation between Vernon A. Walters and Arthur da Costa e Silva

Vernon Walters and Brazilian politics: the presence of the North American military attaché in the dictatorship

One of the most important characters in Brazilian history before and after the 1964 coup it was the military attache North American, Vernon Walters, who became attaché in the country at the end of 1962 at the request of the then ambassador Lincoln Gordon. The ambassador wanted someone who could liaise efficiently with the Brazilian military; and Walters, who spoke fluent Portuguese and had been the liaison between Brazilian and American troops in the fields of Italy during the 2nd World War, he could do it like no one else – and he did. 

What few know is that Walters continued to play a role in Brazilian politics even after leaving his post as US military attaché in Brazil at the end of 1966. He would continue to come to the country frequently and speak intimately with the most important Brazilian military leaders of the period.

In this week's document we have a notable example in this sense. Walters visited Brazil in April 1967 and had the opportunity to speak with the president Costa e Silva; the Embassy, of course, reported the conversation in detail to its superiors in Washington.

The Costa e Silva-Vernon Walters meeting took place at the beginning of the second military administration of the dictatorship. Costa e Silva had just taken power and, at the time, progressive sectors had hopes that his government could be the beginning of a process of normalization of Brazilian politics, moving towards a return to the Democratic Rule of Law.

As we know, the story would be very different – in reality, the Costa e Silva government would end up marked by the resurgence of the dictatorship, having undercut what is considered the most draconian and harsh of the Institutional Acts imposed by the military on society: the AI-5, in December 1968.

Back in April 1967, however, the perspective was different, but in the conversation with Walters we were able to foresee some very important prejudices of Costa e Silva that would mark the deepening of authoritarianism during his presidency. One of these prejudices, which would play an important role in the radicalization of military personnel in the period immediately prior to the decree of AI-5, referred to the supposed “communist infiltration” – or, at least, leftist infiltration – of the Brazilian press. 

Costa e Silva complains about the way the Brazilian press portrayed the North American president at the 1967 Punta de Este Conference – Johnson had dozed off between some speeches by Latin American statesmen and this was picked up by Brazilian journalists – saying that the supposed communist infiltration of our press would make her deeply anti-United States. 

In the end, it would be exactly this type of conspiratorial and extremist thinking that would provide the basis for the imposition of a harsh censorship to the press after the decree of AI-5.  

Prof. Dr. Felipe Loureiro,

Deputy coordinator of NACE CNV-Brazil,

Institute of International Relations at the University of São Paulo