These books provide three views of the Brazilian reality—those of a longtime Communist, a politician, and scholar. Not surprisingly, their separate perspectives produce different portraits of that reality, though when read together they tend to blend into a coherent image of the Brazilian political situation.
Leôncio Basbaum and Daniel Krieger, descendants of non-Portuguese immigrant families, represent divergent responses to Brazilian politics. Basbaum was the son of a Jewish shopkeeper in Recife who, while studying medicine in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s, joined the nascent Communist party and thereby opted to spend his life on the margins of national politics. Krieger, a mixture of German with some Spanish and Guaraní, who grew up in the former Jesuit reduction of São Luis Gonzaga in Rio Grande do Sul in an atmosphere out of the pages of Érico Verissimo’s Time and the Wind, opted for law and a career within the system. Both memorialists tend to be more detailed regarding their less complex earlier years, both focus on their political, as against personal, lives, and both leave us guessing as to their basic motivations.
Basbaum, who will be familiar to HAHR readers as the author of A História Sincera da República (1957-1962), portrays himself as an idealist who joined the party in its formative days, rose to some prominence (it was he whom the party sent to Buenos Aires to interview Luís Carlos Prestes) before 1930, suffered imprisonment, and then was marginalized for his middle-class origins. By the short 1946-1947 legalization, he had become more of an addict than an activist. He was disenchanted with an organization that was all head and no body, out of touch with Brazilians, and that continually sought financial support from him so that its leaders could live in hiding. Some of the scenes he describes would be humorous if they had not caused him such anguish and financial loss. At great personal cost he hosted Prestes and a large retinue of guards and hangers-on for several months after the Communist chiefs release from prison in 1945. He continually wrote letters to the central committee protesting its ideological positions while demanding a meaningful voice in party affairs. Insensitive party officials repeatedly dashed his hopes after first raising them with tantalizing messages to meet this one or that on street corners or in out-of-the-way bars. In one ridiculous incident, he was asked in furtive tones to obtain a common address; in disgust he pointed his questioner to the telephone directory.
Basbaum sacrificed his medical career, a budding second career as a manager in the family-owned Lojas Brasileiras, his first marriage, and a great deal of money, time and energy to a set of political beliefs which, by his own account, seem to have had little to do with Brazil. His is the story of political failure, but then so is the story of the Brazilian Communist party.
Krieger’s memoir is more of a personal success story. A friend and political aide of José Antônio Flores da Cunha in Rio Grande before the Estado Nôvo, he became one of the founders of the UDN in that state after the war and eventually represented it in the senate. He provides some interesting information on various incidents. For example, he attributes the split between Getúlio Vargas and Flores da Cunha to the latter’s refusal in 1935 to support Vargas in setting aside the constitution and forming a strong central government. He may be right in his dating, but until supportive documentation from the Flores da Cunha papers is available the motivation for the split remains vague. His account of the 1964 revolution is particularly valuable because it shows the intense involvement of politicians in the conspiracy. It was not a purely military coup d’état.
The detailed descriptions of the congressional role in the Castello Branco and Costa e Silva administrations will interest political specialists. Krieger gives a blow-by-blow account of the famous Marcio Moreira Alves case that provided the excuse to close the congress and to issue the infamous Ato Institucional #5. He ends with the accession of Emílio Garrastazu Médici and with the hope that Brazil will return to democratic rule. But from his own testimony the use of the verb “return” seems odd indeed.
Edmundo Campos Coelho’s book title is apt. Brazil and its political institutions have been engaged in a search for identity since colonial days. Basbaum described the Communists groping to find themselves, Krieger depicted a party system trying to form itself, and Campos Coelho analyzes the army seeking its purpose in the Brazilian political system. The army’s identity crisis had its origin in the identity crisis of the state which lacked a focal institution that everyone could accept as the “incorporation of national authority” (p. 170). The nineteenth-century army overthrew the emperor when dissolution threatened. It allied itself to the republican central government for mutual protection against factionist state forces. After the disastrous splintering in the 1920’s rebellions, the 1930’s army under Pedro de Góes Monteiro’s influence strove to create such a high degree of cohesion that future tenente movements would be impossible. Henceforth, internal institutional disagreements would end in compromise rather than risk splitting the army.
Rightly he stresses the importance of the Estado Nôvo (1937-1945) in the formation of the army’s institutional personality. He asserts that it was a military dictatorship—the army put Vargas in and turned him out. It was the period in which Góes and his colleagues developed the army’s doctrine of national security for a national state which doctrine he sees as identical with the doctrine that the army has sought to impose since the Revolution of 1964.
Campos Coelho accepts military tutelage as a necessary step toward the formation of an institutionalized political system. His view of pre-1964 Brazil, unhappily, is borne out in the other two books. Having had “personalities,” he said, “we never had institutions . . . the politician without the party, the union leader without the union, the president without the presidency, the vote without representation, politics without participation. Our “isms” never had relation to currents of ideas, doctrinal content, or partisan programs” (p. 159).
Finally he makes clear that when military and political leaders talk of institutionalizing the revolution they mean implanting the “exceptional legislation” as norms in the political process. Though dissidence will be permitted it will be to teach the limits of the possible. AI-5 will remain in some form or other. There will be no return to the days in which Basbaum became a Communist and Krieger a politician. And there will be no fulfillment of Krieger’s concluding wish for Lincolnian democracy in Brazil.
