This massive deposition is neither memoir nor autobiography, but combines the best features of both. It is a vast improvement over the memoirs of Goes Monteiro, dictated to that vacuous Boswell, Lourival Coutinho, because Cordeiro’s interviewer, historian Aspásia Camargo, asked pointed, well-informed questions and kept her opinions to herself. It is similarly an improvement over Juarez Távora’s autobiography because Cordeiro’s reflections were prodded by a skillful questioner.
What has emerged from more than ninety hours of interviews is an impressively critical, valuable description of Brazil’s metamorphosis over the past sixty years by a man who saw it all. He was a tenente, a conspirator in the 1930 revolution; fought against São Paulo in 1932, as well as the rebels of 1935 and 1938; commanded the artillery of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force in Italy; helped remove Vargas from office in 1945; was active as a soldier and politician during the subsequent twenty years; conspired to remove Goulart in 1964; was Brazil’s first minister of the interior under Castello Branco; and continued to be involved in government affairs until his death early in 1981.
Not surprisingly, Cordeiro dwelt on the events that affected him most directly. The first was the Prestes Column, in which he participated from beginning to end, and the second was the Italian campaign. In both cases he was fighting, and, being a soldier, he loved it. Those events also, he freely admitted, profoundly affected him politically, drawing him into the interventions of 1930, 1945, and 1964 as a vigorous conspirator and participant.
The person who emerges from this deposition is curiously equivocal. A man who was often at the center of important events, he repeatedly portrayed himself (as have others) as an intermediary or moderator; a valuable role, to be sure, but almost suspiciously self-effacing. (He rose very rapidly in rank after 1930; was he a brilliant soldier, useful, or both?) When it was fashionable to be a rebel, he was; when it was not, he was not. Every important action he took was in step with the times; this allowed him in the interrogation to duck questions of motive, which he frequently did.
What we are given is, in Cordeiro’s own words, “minha versão dos factos.” That version is, nonetheless, extremely important because it is at times very revealing, particularly of people. He was always frank, even scathingly critical, in his assessments of people he knew; he was not unkind about those with whom he was not well acquainted.
The book is copiously illustrated, and contains more than a hundred pages of supporting documents. It is a very important work, but one for the knowledgeable student of twentieth-century Brazil.
