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Power against the People
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
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The impossible is becoming a reality in Brazil, the unthinkable has become a fact. Methodical violence, unjustifiable repression, systematic use of denunciation and torture are emerging in a country where they were least likely to do so. Nothing is so opposed to Brazilian culture. Yesterday, speech was still circulating freely in the streets as the light and blood of communication. Today, blood is flowing in police cellars where so many men and women have fallen without knowing why: torture and corpses impose fear and silence everywhere, and dumb and terrifying rumours. Tongues fall silent, censorship and suspicion are rife.
Yesterday, the intelligence, subtlety and the manifold resources of human relationships were enough to solve or cope with all problems. Today, relationships are shattered by the suppression of all discussion; violence breaks age-old links, the brutality of a military order tends to multiply withdrawals, retirements and breaks, except between those who profit from the rCgime. The liberal tradition which inaugurated the first Brazilian Constitution in 1824 is thrown out as so much refuse.
This brutality takes the Brazilians by surprise, in the way in which horror suddenly strikes out of a morning sky which seemed to be dawning like any other. ‘Que cosa!’ Brutality strikes them before they have time to realize that it was possible. And the military may be maiming for a very long time a sort of national Brazilian genius in the way in which they are maiming so many victims of torture.
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- Copyright © 1970 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
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Translation of a summary of the discourse given by Père Michel de Certeau, S.J., on the occasion of a meeting held at the Mutualité, Paris, on 15th January, 1970. The meeting was under the chairmanship of Professor Georges Casalis, Professor of the Faculty of Protestant Theology in Paris, and included Père Blanquart, O.P., Jean‐Paul Sarte and Dr Miguel Arraes (ex governor of the state of Pernambuco, arrested by the Army in 1964, imprisoned 1964‐65, and now living in exile in Algiers) amongst its other speakers. It was a meeting of solidarity with the people of Brazil in revolt, and is here published by kind permission of the author and of the Front Brésilien d‘ Information, through the good offices of Brian Darling, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey and associate of Esprit, who is responsible for the British Section of the Enrope‐Latin‐America Committee.
References
page 340 note 1 Expenditure on the military budget for Brazil amounted to 18 per cent of the total budget in 1964, 24 per cent in 1965, and 25 per cent in 1968.
page 340 note 2 Such denunciations, stimulated as they are by the presence of the police (agents of D.O.P.S.—anonymous as they are, they are discovered. But what is one to do? Keep quiet?) and by the fear of being accused of not having made denunciations, are, of course, followed through. The minimum penalty is five years exclusion from the university for professors, three years for students.
page 340 note 3 The measures taken are often very discreet: paring down of the budget, cutting down the number of secretaries, etc. And as regards the professors excluded in this way, they are often amongst the best, like Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Sao Paulo), who belongs to the same group as Octavio Ianni, and whose researches into cultural dependence are decisive.
page 341 note 1 And this is why preference is given, for example, to privately‐financed studies and private universities, which favour ‘the heirs and elements of order’. ‘The most important thing’, the Atcon Plan was already saying (meaning by this to stop the university becoming a focus of agitation) ‘is to reduce the number of students, more competent and better selected.’
page 344 note 1 Has it not been said in high places that Brazil could increase its economic prosperity with 20 million inhabitants, and that there were 60 million too many—a remnant one did not know what to do with?… For their part, the bishops assembled at Medellin, in 1968, stated: ‘60 million Brazilians are not yet integrated into the economic circuit.’
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