Brazil and the Soviet Challenge, 1917–1947

By Stanley E. Hilton

This study sheds new light on the Brazilian communist movement and how the specter of the USSR influenced mid-twentieth century Brazilian foreign policy.
 
Between 1918 and 1961, Brazil and the USSR maintained formal diplomatic ties for only thirty-one months, at the end of World War II. Yet, despite the official distance, the USSR is the only external actor whose behavior, real or imagined, influenced the structure of the Brazilian state in the twentieth century. In Brazil and the Soviet Challenge, 1917–1947, Stanley Hilton examines Brazilian policy toward the Soviet Union during this period.
 
Drawing on American, British, and German diplomatic archives and unprecedented access to official and private Brazilian records, Hilton elucidates the connection between the Brazilian elite’s perception of a communist threat and the creation of the authoritarian Estado Novo (1937–1945), the forerunner of the post-1964 national security state.
 
Hilton shows how the 1935 communist revolt generated irresistible pressure for an authoritarian government to contain the Soviet threat; details the Brazilian government’s secret cooperation with the Gestapo during the 1930s and its concomitant efforts to forge an anti-Soviet front in the Southern Cone; and uncovers Brazil’s attempt to build counterintelligence capabilities in neighboring countries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781477303566

Book preview

BRAZIL AND THE SOVIET CHALLENGE, 1917–1947

STANLEY E. HILTON

   UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, AUSTIN

Copyright © 1991 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819.

utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

This publication was partially supported by the Center for Soviet and East European Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library ebook ISBN: 978-1-4773-0356-6

Individual ebook ISBN: 9781477303566

DOI: 10.7560/707818

Hilton, Stanley E., 1940–

Brazil and the Soviet challenge, 1917–1947 / by

Stanley E. Hilton.

   p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.   ) and index.

ISBN 0-292-70781-9 (cloth)

1. Brazil—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 2. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—Brazil. 3. Brazil—Politics and government—1889–1930. 4. Brazil—Politics and government—1930–1954. 5. Politicians—Brazil—Attitudes. 6. Brazil—National security. I. Title.

F2523.5.S65H55   1991

To Gabriela and Louise,

frutos de minha paixão por coisas brasileiras

Contents

PREFACE

1.   Challenge and Response (1917–1930)

2.   The Debate over Trade and Recognition (1930–1934)

3.   Red Rebellion (1935)

4.   Toward the National Security State (1935–1937)

5.   The Battle on the External Front (1935–1937)

6.   Coming of the Estado Novo (1937)

7.   Dictatorship, War, and Internal Security (1937–1941)

8.   Global Conflict and Rapprochement (1941–1945)

9.   Cold War Antagonisms (1945–1947)

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Preface

THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY background of Brazil’s contemporary foreign policy is a relatively unexplored one, and the scarce literature available deals primarily with the United States and secondarily with Germany and Great Britain.¹ This emphasis on major Western countries seems appropriate because they traditionally have been Brazil’s leading trade partners and sources of investment capital, technology, and military aid—in Germany’s case, even immigrants—for not only Brazil, but Latin America as a whole.² The United States, especially, has played a preponderant role in Brazilian foreign policy considerations. Indeed, at the turn of the century Brazilian strategists assigned a critical place in their foreign policy to the United States, seeing in a special relationship with Washington the key to protecting Brazil’s national security vis-à-vis historic rival Argentina, and perhaps expansionist European powers, and to ensuring Brazil’s long-range paramountcy in South America.³

The subject of this book, Brazilian policy toward the Soviet Union during the first thirty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, has been addressed only implicitly or tangentially by scholars interested in the Communist movement in Brazil or very briefly in the few existing broad commentaries on Soviet or Soviet-directed activities in Latin America. The fact that Rio de Janeiro and Moscow between 1918 and 1961 maintained formal diplomatic ties for only thirty-one months at the end of World War II would seem to be strong prima facie evidence for ignoring what apparently did not exist anyway. But to ask why the two countries remained officially apart for so long and why it proved impossible to establish permanent relations in the mid-1940s is to open up a fruitful avenue of inquiry. How did the Brazilian foreign policy elite perceive the USSR and particularly Soviet intentions? What role did the Kremlin seem to reserve for Brazil in its external program? What did the Brazilian government do to protect the country from the apparent threat emanating from Moscow? These are basic questions guiding this evaluation of Brazil’s response to the Soviet challenge. The analytical focus of this book is thus a dual one: the images of the USSR, particularly of its policies and goals, held by the Brazilian foreign policy elite, and the transformation of those images into a program of anti-Communist action. The result is a study of the linkage between threat perception and political conduct.

As used here, foreign policy elite refers basically to political leaders, senior diplomats, and high-ranking military officers. Historically speaking, the formulation of national strategy and foreign policy in Brazil was not an open process. The political system itself was highly elitist. The overwhelming majority of the people were excluded from the electorate because of illiteracy, and women were not allowed to vote in national elections until 1933. For fifteen of the thirty years covered in this study, moreover, the country lived under either outright dictatorship or a modified form of martial law (state of siege or state of war), which obviously meant restrictions on constitutional liberties and a further centralization of policy formulation. In other polities, characterized by pluralistic decision making, representatives of organized labor, for example, might well be included in the foreign policy elite. During the post-World War I era, however, organized labor in Brazil was in its infancy, and scholars who have examined the trade union movement generally agree that it was largely a creation of the central government after 1930. There was no independent labor movement in Brazil, particularly during the period 1930-1945; there was no Brazilian equivalent of a Samuel Gompers or John L. Lewis; and there is no evidence that union leaders contributed to the debate on foreign policy or had a voice in policy decisions. Especially after 1930 the government increasingly controlled both the establishment and functioning of unions, virtually handpicking their leaders. The sindicatos, therefore, insofar as the anti-Communist struggle was concerned, were in part both a result and an instrument of national policy. In the case of Brazil during the period in question, analysis of elite perceptions thus properly places emphasis on men of state. Still, I have sought to avoid an exclusively bureaucratic focus by occasional reference to the opinions of business and church leaders and by frequent reference to the editorial positions of several major newspapers published in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

This book suggests that the Soviet Union occupied a unique place in the history of Brazilian foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century because it was the only external actor whose behavior, real or attributed, actually influenced the structure of the state in Brazil by encouraging the imposition of a system of social control in the 1930s without precedent in the country’s history. The profound fear of Moscow-directed subversion had gained strength steadily since the beginning of that decade and was demonstrated to have foundation when the Third (Communist) International sponsored armed insurrection in Brazil in 1935. Had it not been for the Soviet threat, in all probability there would have been no Estado Novo, the eight-year dictatorship launched in November 1937, which constituted a forerunner for the authoritarian, military government installed twenty-seven years later.

Therein lies another reason for systematic examination of Brazil’s policy toward communism and the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s. The establishment in 1964 of a military regime that lasted two decades was an epochal event in Brazilian history, one that has attracted a great deal of attention from social scientists. The armed forces had intervened in the political process on other occasions in this century to change or overthrow a government, but 1964, when they toppled the left-wing regime of João Goulart (1961-1964), marked the first time that the high command decided to take the reins of power directly in hand. The element common to the military and civilian figures prominently involved in the conspiracy against Goulart, which began as soon as he took office, was fear of communism. Suspect because of his cooperation with Communists while minister of labor in the early 1950s, Goulart fueled the anxieties of his adversaries a decade later by mobilizing wider sectors of the working classes, involving the Communists in his dialogue with the Left, displaying a tolerant attitude toward Castro’s Cuba, adopting what seemed to be a confrontational posture vis-à-vis the United States, and showing a keen interest in closer cooperation with the USSR and Communist bloc countries from the outset of his administration, when he restored relations with Moscow.

Once in power in 1964, the military proceeded to implement a program based on a doctrine of national security that had been gradually formalized by the Escola Superior de Guerra in the 1950s. The doctrine was an all-embracing construct that emphasized the need for broad governmental action, on multiple fronts, to enable the country to meet not only the challenge of direct aggression by external enemies, but more importantly the threat of revolutionary (Communist) warfare. The state, accordingly, must press forward with a program of intensive industrialization, since there was a vital connection between development and security, and at the same time create mechanisms of control and repression, including a formidable network of political intelligence and a program of counter propaganda—all of which required greater centralization of power. The new order pursued policies along those lines, utilizing greatly enhanced executive authority to arrest subversives; purge the bureaucracy, universities, and labor unions; censor the press; establish a Servico Nacional de Informações (SNI), or National Intelligence Service, as a sort of combined FBI and CIA to monitor dissidents; and reassert an anti-Communist foreign policy that included a severance of diplomatic ties with Havana and a marked cooling of relations with the USSR. Widespread disenchantment on the part of many military leaders with representative democracy and judicial restraint as weapons against subversion facilitated the centralization of power.⁴

The bridges between the anti-Communist movement in the 1930s and 1940s and that of the post-1964 period need emphasis. There was, first of all, a human connection, as various individuals prominent in the plotting against Goulart had been involved in the campaign against communism during the Vargas era (1930-1945). Many of the essentials of post-1964 policies, moreover, were present in military thought and the government’s program in the 1930s—which would seem to heighten the historical significance of the earlier period. The nexus between national security and economic development in elite thought is beyond the purview of this book, but it was an operational principle of government leaders in the 1930s.⁵ More germane to the specific focus here, military planners even before 1935 were beginning to think of Communist insurgency as a new form of potential threat to national security and, disgruntled with the civilian political class and political liberalism, began urging an expansion of the preventive and repressive apparatus of the state to meet the danger, calling specifically for a purge of the civil service, press censorship, counterpropaganda, and more extensive monitoring of antiregime behavior.

The uprising of 1935, planned by Comintern agents and led by Communists and fellow travelers, was a pivotal event because it offered proof that previous warnings about Soviet policy had been correct. The so-called intentona comunista thus made prophets of many who otherwise would have passed for mere conservative alarmists, and it opened wounds that affected foreign and domestic policy for years to come. Understandably, the revolt gave greater salience to insurrectionary warfare in military thought, and it led to ultimately irresistible pressure for an authoritarian state in order to deal with the perceived subversive threat. In view of the creation of the SNI three decades later, it is interesting that political intelligence was an area to which army leaders gave major emphasis in the 1930s. Heretofore untapped personal papers of Filinto Muller, the army officer who served as chief of police in the Federal District during 1933-1942, Ministry of Justice files, official military records, and the private papers of influential generals made possible this book’s exploratory probe into that uncharted field. Muller, who exercised enormous political influence, was particularly active in endeavoring to build up counterintelligence capabilities in other countries of the Southern Cone and develop greater monitoring and repressive services inside Brazil, as his extensive correspondence with police agents, diplomats, and other informants indicates. Interestingly, as a senator, Muller was in the vanguard of the battle to secure congressional approval of the bill that created the SNI in 1964. The army high command in the late 1930s and early 1940s undertook a parallel effort to expand domestic espionage and ultimately to organize a national intelligence agency. All of this was primarily a function of the perceived need to defend the state and society against subversion and constituted the pioneering phase of a process that culminated in the SNI.

A basic problem in evaluating elite opinion is determining the extent to which statements represent real or sincere beliefs. The dimensions of that potential pitfall are reduced here by reliance primarily on unpublished materials—that is, private communications, both official and unofficial, between representative members of the foreign policy elite. Perusal of Itamaraty (Brazilian Foreign Office) files and the personal papers of several high-ranking diplomats, including three former foreign ministers, permitted what hopefully is a fairly complete appraisal of the Brazilian diplomatic viewpoint and of the external dimension of Brazil’s anti-Soviet policy. The discussion here of Rio de Janeiro’s cooperation with German authorities, particularly the Gestapo, and efforts by Itamaraty to forge an anti-Soviet front in the La Plata Basin was one significant dividend of examination of this material. The mammoth collection of presidential papers at Brazil’s Arquivo Nacional and the extensive personal papers of dictator-president Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945) helped further to elucidate Brazilian policy and clarify elite attitudes.

This book does not offer a history of Brazilian communism, a subject covered well and in detail by other scholars,⁶ but relies on these accounts to establish the indispensable background to its primary concern. Fresh detail has been added when relevant, but basically the findings of previous students of the Communist movement in Brazil have been synthesized, rearranged perhaps, and placed within the analytical context of Brazilian policy toward the USSR. No effort has been made here to distinguish between or among elements of the extreme Left in Brazil; if, in addition to Communist, such terms as radical extremist, or militant leftist appear, their use should not be taken as a sign of bias or lack of conceptual discipline on the author’s part. They are employed mainly because the subject is being approached from the viewpoint of Brazilian leaders, and these are terms typically used by them when referring to Communists. The emphasis here, it bears repeating, is on perception of reality, and the record leaves no doubt that for Brazilian policymakers the source of social threat was the Communist movement. Objectively speaking, and leaving aside the exaggerated dimension they gave to the perceived challenge, they were correct. Anarchism peaked in the early post-World War I period and waned rapidly after the mid-1920S, while Trotskyism never really got off the ground. Communism was the dominant radical force, and its importance was enhanced by the fact that it was the only one that enjoyed the support of a foreign power. In any case, Brazilian authorities tended to make no distinction, at least after the 1920s, between or among the varieties of left-wing politics, regarding all the hues of red as products of the same Soviet pigment.

A portion of this book—part of chapter 1 and chapters 2-6—appeared originally in Portuguese in 1987 as a slender volume entitled Rebelião Vermelha, which focused on the origins, course, and immediate impact of the Communist-led insurrection of 1935 and concluded with the November 1937 golpe. That study has been incorporated into this book after some parts were condensed and others reorganized; the original study, moreover, has been modified by the addition of more than 100 pages of manuscript on the pre-1930 and post-1937 periods. Chapter 1 of that book has been thoroughly rewritten and expanded to include discussion of elite images of the USSR during the 1920s and the anti-Soviet strategy devised then to meet the perceived threat. New, as well, are chapters 7-9 covering the critical decade 1937-1947, during which Brazil experienced an eight-year dictatorship, participated in a world conflict, and witnessed the onset of the Cold War, reassessing strategy toward the Soviet Union, restoring official ties with Moscow, and then once more severing them. The chronological broadening of the early, Portuguese-language version at both ends permits a fuller discussion of a complete cycle in Brazilian-Soviet relations—that is, a period beginning and terminating with a formal break—and thus provides greater perspective on the pivotal events of the mid-1930s.

The cooperation of various individuals and institutions was critical to completion of this book. In part this study is a by-product of research for a political biography of Oswaldo Aranha, the key architect of the Revolution of 1930, who then served as minister of justice, minister of finance, and ambassador to Washington (1934-1937) before becoming foreign minister (1938-1944). Field work for that project was partially financed by the Fulbright program, and I want to acknowledge here my sincere appreciation for that support; in particular, I would like to thank Dr. Marco Antonio da Rocha, president of the Fulbright Commission in Brasilia, who, along with his team in Rio de Janeiro, was exceedingly helpful. Dr. Rodolfo Aguilar, former director of the Center for Latin American Affairs at Louisiana State University, provided funds for travel to London and Rio de Janeiro, and I am grateful to him. To the detriment of international studies at LSU, his dynamic and creative stewardship was aborted. John L. Loos, who retired as chairman of the Department of History at LSU in 1988, after nearly a quarter of a century in that position, performed a number of services, not the least of which was arranging a teaching schedule that maximized time for research and writing. I spent the 1989-90 academic year as a visiting professor at the Air War College. My chairman there, Colonel Kent Harbaugh, did several favors in connection with the preparation of the final version of the manuscript, and I appreciate his assistance. I must also recognize the contribution of Dr. Armin Ludwig of the AWC, who used his geographer’s expertise to prepare the map for this book. The readers of the original manuscript for the University of Texas Press, professors Rollie Poppino and Neill Macaulay, deserve special thanks for their encouragement. It was a pleasure to work with Theresa May, executive editor of the Press, and Barbara Spielman, the managing editor. The keen eye of copy editor Robert Fullilove improved the readability of the manuscript.

The librarians and archivists who eased my research task are too numerous to mention individually, so I shall extend a blanket note of appreciation to the staffs of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Harry S. Truman Library, Library of Congress, National Archives, Federal Records Center (Suitland), and the Air University Library at Maxwell Air Force Base, as well as to the counselors and clerks at the Public Records Office in Great Britain who provided such superb assistance. My scholarly debts in Brazil are immense. The cheerful efficiency of former colleagues at the Arquivo Nacional and of the directors and staffs of the Arquivo do Exército, Biblioteca Nacional, Museu da República, and Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro greatly facilitated my research, and I must acknowledge my permanent indebtedness to Martha Maria Gonçalves, former head of the Arquivo Histórico do Itamaraty (i.e., Foreign Ministry Archives), whose enlightened professionalism is sorely missed by the scholarly community. I have stated elsewhere and repeat loudly here that Adelina Cruz and Celia Costa, with their assistants at the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de Historia Contemporânea in the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, deserve medals. I want also to thank Corina Pessoa Fragoso, daughter of the late General Pantaleão da Silva Pessoa, for allowing me continued use of his private papers. Jerry and Edie Cook provided occasional logistical support for this project, as they have done for previous ones, and I am grateful to them for their friendship. Finally, I want to single out for praise my wife Cristina, who bore with reasonably good cheer the strains and sacrifices that labor in the vineyard of area studies imposes.

1. Challenge and Response (1917–1930)

THE CHALLENGE posed to the international order by the Bolshevik triumph in 1917 became clearer when Lenin, shortly after the seizure of power, issued his Proclamation on Peace in which he appealed to workers in all countries to join in a worldwide struggle against the capitalist system. The establishment of the Third (Communist) International, or Comintern, early in 1919 made revolutionary agitation abroad a permanent plan in the Soviet foreign policy platform.¹ As one scholar has put it, The Comintern’s mere existence broke with all the current diplomatic rules of the game.² The Lenin regime was interested primarily in Europe and only marginally in Latin America, but the latter felt keenly the reverberations of the events in Russia, and for at least the Brazilian government, Moscow’s policies and activities were a source of increasing disquiet. Labor turmoil, the formation of Communist parties, a disruption of trade, and diplomatic questions involving recognition and immigration—these were the key issues and problems facing Brazil and other Latin American states as a result of the collapse of czarist Russia and the erection in its place of a political system that seemingly eschewed traditional limits on diplomacy. For the Brazilian foreign policy elite, the post-World War I period was one in which its suspicions and even dread of bolshevism crystallized, generating a perception of threat that in turn led to the incremental adoption of a defensive strategy that would remain basically intact until the end of World War II.

Early apostles of a new, stateless society saw opportunity in Brazil after the conflict of 1914–1918. The great mass of the country’s 30 million people tended to be dirt farmers or ill-paid field and ranch hands—illiterate, malnourished, and unhealthy. In the drought-stricken Northeast the rural poor were veritable social pariahs, battling to survive in the midst of starvation and disease. Even in Recife, the seaboard capital of Pernambuco and the major city in the region, the infant mortality rate stood at nearly 30 percent, and half the residents lived in suburban shanty towns.³ In relatively prosperous Minas Gerais, a leg of the nation’s dynamic triangle that included the neighboring states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 90 percent of the population was classified as rural, nearly 70 percent were illiterate, and disease and death stalked all classes.⁴ The same could be said of large areas of Rio de Janeiro, and in São Paulo, the country’s agro-industrial center and by far its wealthiest state, poverty was likewise widespread.⁵ Although predominantly an agrarian country, Brazil had experienced a remarkable growth in manufacturing since the turn of the century. Heavy industry remained a task for later generations, but by 1920 the country had achieved self-sufficiency in light manufactures, such as textiles, footwear, and foodstuffs. The industrial working class, concentrated in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, numbered some 275,000. Wages were abysmally low and plant conditions generally grim. Not surprisingly, there was considerable effervescence in labor ranks, and a strike begun by textile workers in São Paulo in mid-1917 rapidly spread to Rio de Janeiro and then to various other states. Unrest continued in ensuing months, and in 1919 another wave of strikes rocked major industrial areas.⁶

The political system offered little hope of meaningful redress. With the fall of the monarchy in 1889, a republic had been proclaimed, but only literate adult males could vote. By 1919 in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the federal capital, only 21,000 residents out of a total population of over one million enjoyed the franchise. Effective political power lay in the hands of the rural oligarchy, which used nepotism, administrative corruption, and electoral fraud to protect its interests. Dissatisfaction assumed a military dimension when junior army officers, collectively labeled tenentes (lieutenants), revolted in 1922 and again in 1924 under the banner of vague political and administrative reform. Emerging from the latter uprising, the famous Prestes Column, a small army of rebels led by Captain Luís Carlos Prestes, wandered the backlands during 1924–1926 evading federal troops and capturing popular imagination.⁷

As they surveyed national conditions, future Communist leaders found inspiration and guidance in the events in Russia. Octávio Brandão, then a young socialist in the Northeast, wrote an article in October 1917 comparing that region to czarist Russia and depicting it as ripe for social upheaval; later, as a temporary convert to anarchism in Rio de Janeiro, he ardently defended the Bolshevik Revolution, although he admittedly possessed only vague, uncertain, fragmentary information about it.⁸ Anarchists dominated the radical labor movement in Brazil during the first two decades of the century, and emboldened by the triumph of bolshevism in Russia, they intensified their agitation, helping to promote the wave of strikes during 1917–1919.⁹ By 1920, however, they had split over the question of support for the new order in Russia. For Astrojildo Pereira, a prominent radical intellectual, anarchism had run its course and demonstrated its inability to exploit the favorable perspectives that Brazil offered for fundamental restructuring along Bolshevik lines. Brandão put it simply in 1921: the movement’s sole program should be the intense propaganda of bolshevism, for the glorification of the Russia of the Soviets.¹⁰ It was anxiousness to be represented at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in Moscow that led the pro-Bolshevik faction within the anarchist movement to break away and establish, in March 1922, the Partido Comunista do Brasil (PCB), or Brazilian Section of the Communist International. Nine delegates (including Pereira), seven of whom had been anarchists, representing Communist groups in five states with a total membership of seventy-three, accepted the Comintern’s conditions for admission and launched the new party.¹¹

The Communists’ message found little resonance within Brazil. As Brandão recalled of his election to the executive committee in 1923 and appointment as head of agitation and propaganda, the PCB was then a small, closed sect fighting for recruits among illiterate workers in skeletal unions.¹² Fellow travelers greatly outnumbered party regulars, which partially explains the circulation figure of 1,800 for the PCB’s main propaganda sheet during 1922–1923.¹³Only 150 delegates, representing half of the party membership, attended its Second Congress in 1925, and the months-long series of lectures in Rio de Janeiro sponsored by the PCB late that year attracted a total audience of less than 1,500 persons.¹⁴ The new party weekly A Classe Operária, founded in 1925 and managed by Brandão, ran through twelve issues and 99,000 copies before being closed by the government; of those copies, however, an unspecified number were distributed free of charge at the doors of shops and factories.¹⁵ Public authorities greatly exaggerated the PCB’s overall influence in workers’ ranks: according to party member Heitor Ferreira Lima, it had controlled only eight unions during this period. The PCB was denied official registration, so Pereira and Brandão, on orders from the executive committee, formed a Workers’ bloc in 1927 as an electoral front; only one of its two candidates for election to the Chamber of Deputies received the necessary four thousand votes.¹⁶ Brandão and a comrade were elected to the Rio de Janeiro municipal assembly the following year, but in 1929 an expanded PCB front failed to place a single candidate in national, state, or local office.¹⁷

The PCB’s weakness explains its active interest by this time in an understanding with Prestes, whose exploits had made him a folk hero. The question was how progressive the Column commander was. Prestes himself acknowledged that when he revolted in 1924, he had only a vague notion of social problems and knew nothing about left-wing ideologies. I was merely a man disgusted with the way the country was governed, he said. One of his chief lieutenants, João Alberto Lins de Barros, confirmed the nonideological character of their rather amorphous program. We knew hardly anything about the Russian political phenomenon…and we never made a connection between our action and what was happening over there, he later wrote. The experience of roaming some twenty-five thousand kilometers through the backlands and witnessing the pervasive poverty and disease, however, shook us to the bottom of our souls, Prestes recalled.¹⁸ His sociopolitical views transformed, Prestes was cautiously receptive when Pereira, now secretary general of the PCB, traveled to Puerto Suarez to meet with him in December 1927. Pereira reached Bolivia with a valise full of works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, which he asked Prestes to read. The offer of an alliance with the party was intriguing to the rebel captain, but he agreed only to study Marxism. Two months later he moved to Argentina, where he spent his spare time perusing the volumes that Pereira had given him. It was in Buenos Aires, the seat of the Comintern’s new South American Bureau, that he became friends with Rodolfo Ghioldi, a prominent Argentine Communist, and found himself the target of active proselytizing.¹⁹

During the presidential campaign of 1929, the Communists renewed their attempt to exploit Prestes’ popularity and apparent influence. PCB strategists wanted to mobilize popular support by forging an electoral pact with the Column and putting Prestes up for the presidency. The scheme involved a tactical concession by the PCB in that it would acquiesce temporarily in a more or less liberal administration headed by Prestes, but the end justified the means. Consequently, during the First Conference of South American Communist Parties in Buenos Aires that year, Leôncio Basbaum met with Prestes to renew the offer of a political understanding. The platform envisaged by the PCB included state ownership of agriculture, nationalization of foreign companies, nonpayment of the foreign debt, social welfare legislation, and legalization of the party. Prestes expressed sympathy with that program but was unenthusiastic about entering the presidential race and insisted that, in any case, he could make no commitments without consulting his fellow tenentes. Two of the most famous of these, Siqueira Campos and Juarez Távora, participated in the discussions with Basbaum and did not disguise their antagonism toward the Communists. On his return to Rio de Janeiro, a pessimistic Basbaum admonished the Central Committee that it would be best for the party to proceed without Prestes, but a majority favored keeping the door open to negotiations.²⁰

If Prestes was not yet ready to enter into an alliance with the Communists, he nonetheless was rapidly putting ideological distance between himself and other prominent tenentes who wanted to support the reformist opposition candidate, Governor Getúlio Vargas of Rio Grande do Sul, who himself was interested in an accord with Column leaders. Urged by Siqueira Campos, Prestes reluctantly agreed to go secretly to Porto Alegre for talks with Vargas and his state secretary of justice, Oswaldo Aranha, in September 1929, but he had no real desire to work with the gaúcho authorities, who were anything but radical in their views. The upshot was that the two sides agreed to disagree. Prestes accepted a subsidy that Aranha offered him ostensibly for the purpose of purchasing arms in the event electoral processes proved unproductive, but which in all likelihood was intended as a bribe; they decided nothing concrete of a political nature, however. As Vargas indicated to his campaign manager afterward, Prestes was interested in revolution, not elections. The rebel officer, for his part, later recognized that he had been very sectarian with Vargas and Aranha and that his ideas had been already impregnated with Marxism. That he had more in common with the PCB than with the assorted groups of dissidents and moderate reformers who constituted Vargas’ Liberal Alliance was made clear by a letter he wrote to two tenentes who backed the gaúcho leader. Scorning the so-called liberals surrounding Vargas, he declared that the Column’s task was to mobilize the poverty-ridden population of the cities and backlands for armed struggle against the great lords of industry and agriculture and foreign imperialists.²¹

The definitive rupture between Prestes and his Column subordinates occurred after Vargas’ defeat at the polls in March 1930. Convinced that, because they were now engaged in an Aranha-inspired conspiracy to overthrow the government and install Vargas in the presidency, a break was necessary, Prestes summoned Siqueira Campos, João Alberto, and a third historic revolutionary, Miguel Costa, to a war council in Buenos Aires in April. He informed them bluntly that he had become a Marxist and was opposed to any bourgeois revolt to place Vargas in power. He seemed a fanatic, overflowing with violence toward adversaries and friends…, summarily marily lumping them all together as exploiters of the people, João Alberto recalled bitterly. After heated discussion, Prestes ended the meeting by saying that he planned to make his attitude public. In a manifesto distributed the following month, he inveighed against the landowning class and Anglo-American imperialism, calling for a general insurrection to implant a Soviet-style government in Brazil.²² The way now seemed clear for a union between Prestes and the Communists, but the PCB, in an episode illustrative of its subservience to Moscow, sharply rebuffed the new convert.

From the outset the PCB subordinated itself rigidly to the dictates of the Comintern. When the Brazilian delegate to the Fourth Congress in 1922 clashed sharply with the organization’s Soviet directors and accused the Executive Committee of knowing "absolutely nothing about the Brazilian movement, PCB leaders promptly expelled him from the party and redoubled their efforts to demonstrate fidelity to Moscow. The Comintern officially recognized the PCB only after Ghioldi, dispatched to Rio de Janeiro to investigate it, submitted a favorable report on the Brazilians strict’adherence to the tactical guidelines laid down by the Executive Committee.²³ Through its small South American Bureau, the Comintern sought to monitor the activities of the PCB; as Brandão put it, Moscow helped the PCB to overcome its errors and lack of understanding, and party leaders made every effort to base their program on what they thought would satisfy the Comintern. In typical fashion, when Brandão decided to write a book analyzing the revolts of 1922 and 1924, his inspiration was Lenin’s famous essay on imperialism. He therefore interpreted those uprisings as symptoms of a struggle between British and American imperialism, or between feudal agrarianism and bourgeois industrialism. Having forced Brazilian reality into a Marxist-Leninist mold, he hastened to seek Soviet approval, forwarding a copy to the Comintern with a request that it correct the errors. His thesis was approved by a party congress in 1925, but both he and Pereira later acknowledged that the mechanical application of Marxist-Leninist theory had greatly distorted those events.²⁴

All this is not to say that the Comintern involved itself in the day-to-day operations of the PCB; on the contrary, various factors, not the least of which was the remoteness of Latin America on Moscow’s list of foreign policy priorities, militated against any such supervisi on. At the level of formal ties with the region, the Soviet presence was severely restricted. Mexico agreed to establish diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1924, giving Moscow what the Soviet foreign minister thought would be a very convenient political base in the Western Hemisphere, and Uruguay took a similar step in 1926, but that represented the extent of Soviet diplomatic success in Latin America. Moscow was able to persuade Argentine authorities to allow it to open a branch of Amtorg (Soviet-American Trading Company) in Buenos Aires in 1925, and two years later the headquarters of the new special agency for commerce with South America, Yuzhamtorg, was set up in that city, but trade with the region was relatively insignificant.²⁵

The scale of Comintern activities in Latin America thus reflected Soviet foreign policy interests. Lenin was candid in telling a Mexican delegate to the Second Congress in 1920 that there were more urgent revolutionary tasks than the anti-imperialist campaign in Latin America.²⁶ The South American Bureau, with headquarters first in Buenos Aires and later in Montevideo, was not extensively staffed or financed. South American Communists who had contact with Comintern authorities in the Soviet Union were impressed by their ignorance of the region,²⁷ and Pereira broached the issue in the bureau’s official journal, complaining that South America deserved more serious attention and more assiduous political assistance from the Comintern.²⁸ During the inaugural session of the Sixth Congress in Moscow in 1928, Nikolay Bukharin, theorist of the Russian Communist party and head of the Comintern, had encouraging words about Latin America. Pointing to Nicaragua’s war of liberation against Washington’s imperialist invasion and to a powerful popular movement in South America against United States influence, he proclaimed that Latin America was now particularly important to us. The congress, however, then went on to deal almost exclusively with other areas of the world. About what really interested us, Latin America, there was nothing…concrete, recorded a disgruntled Basbaum, who attended the conclave as a member of the PCB’s Central Committee and who took back to Brazil the impression that they had never looked at a map of Latin America before in Moscow. Ferreira Lima, who was in Moscow for a three-year training program and formed part of the small Brazilian delegation, likewise was struck