By OSVALDO COGGIOLA*
The neo-fascist danger is there to demonstrate how precarious our democratic achievements have been
Sixty years ago, in 1964, two military coups, in Brazil and Bolivia, followed by the military coup in Argentina (in 1966), put South America on the front foot in a period that saw military regimes in almost all its countries, with violent repression against popular movements, and which would end approximately two decades later, in the mid-1980s.
During these years, the number of dead, disappeared, political prisoners, tortured and exiled numbered in the tens of thousands. In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, Latin American military dictatorships brought together small nations to enter the world market as peripheral countries specializing in the production of food and raw materials, in a circuit whose dynamic center was the industrialized nations of Europe and, to a lesser extent, the young industrial power that was beginning to emerge in North America, which secured its first area of external influence in Central America and Mexico (which, over the years, would be called “its backyard”).
The South American civil-military dictatorships of the 1960s-1980s were not only distinguished by a much greater degree of brutality than their predecessors, but also by the militarization of the economy and by the direct involvement of the US in repressive operations (with the so-called “Condor Plan”).
During these years, US military and political interventionism multiplied throughout the world, from Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), through the Middle East, especially in the Arab-Israeli conflict, to Latin America. Military dictatorships were a cheaper method of domination for the US to maintain continental dominance, because it avoided the costly (and risky) task of permanently maintaining troops in territories and countries considered allies in the Cold War (although direct occupation was always the last resort, as demonstrated by the list of military interventions and the US military bases spread throughout the world).
After the Second World War, political and military pressure on Latin America was completed with the signing (1947) of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), providing for the right of military intervention in any Latin American country in the event of external aggression. The Dominican Republic was a victim of this treaty in 1965, when it was invaded by the Marines, disguised as OAS soldiers, right in the middle of the wave of coups in South America. The coups aimed to put an end to a period of rising popular struggles in Latin America, notably the Popular Assembly in Bolivia in 1970-71, the revolutionary mobilizations in the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina) in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the wake of the Cuban revolution of 1959-1961.
The writer Christopher Hitchens (in The trial of Henry Kissinger) denounced the US Secretary of State’s guilt in crimes against humanity, from Cambodia to Chile, describing his character as “an opportunist, a white-glove criminal and a trafficker of hidden commissions who made pacts with the worst dictators”. The accusation was supported by documents from US cabinets, which proved direct collaboration between Washington and dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay, the countries that formed part of the Condor Plan.
For Christopher Hitchens, “US influence in Latin America during the 1970s was criminal”. Henry Kissinger’s “exploits” ranged from Vietnam to Cambodia, via Chile, Bangladesh, Greece and East Timor, but always with the support of the “American democracy” administration, for which he did the “dirty work”. The financial failure of the state in Latin America was the result of military dictatorships, and it was also the “legacy” accepted by the civilian governments that replaced them from the mid-1980s onwards.
Latin American democracies committed to paying off their enormously increased external debt (the largest in the entire Third World), which meant transforming Latin America into a pivot for the recovery of profits for international financial capital, especially North American capital, which had been compromised after the global economic crisis that broke out in the mid-1970s. Hyperinflationary processes were the consequence, marking Latin American economies in the second half of the 1980s.
SIPRI (Stockholm Peace Research Institute) reports that in 1980 military spending in the Third World exceeded 80 billion dollars: proportionally, the military spending of Third World countries was already greater than that of the superpowers. The percentage drop in military spending by the US and NATO during the 1970s did not correspond to a “pacifist” trend: it was a rationalization of spending, after the US defeat in Vietnam, parallel to a growing political interventionism by the US in areas of so-called “vital interest”.
It was in this decade, exactly, that the USA surpassed the USSR as the largest exporter of weapons to the Third World, while at the same time feeding the bloody military dictatorships of Latin America.
Increased exploitation was the aim and result of these policies: the gap separating the “underdeveloped countries” from the central countries grew. Between 1980 and 1990, the US share of world exports remained at around 12%; Europe’s share grew from 37% to 41%; Japan’s from 7% to almost 9%; while Africa’s share fell from 5% to 2,5%, and Latin America’s from 6,5% to less than 4%, leading one author to conclude that there was an “(involuntary) decoupling of the Southern Hemisphere from the world market.”
“Informal” work took center stage as a “sponge” for labor: between 1980 and 1987, it increased by 56% in Latin America. Social polarization became more pronounced: between 1970 and 1975, annual income per capita increased by $180 in the countries of the North, $80 in the countries of the East, and $1 in the “Third World” countries. As a result, 33% of the population of developing countries (1,3 billion) lived on less than $1 a day. Of these, 550 million were in South Asia, 215 million in sub-Saharan Africa, and 150 million in Latin America.
There was a brutal increase in the exploitation of the workforce, with highly repressive governments, the creation of technocratic-military states and “ideologies of national security”, allowing a recomposition of global profit rates, shifting economic and political tensions from the centers of the imperialist system to the peripheries.
In Brazil, the militarized state acted directly as an agent of capital against labor: in 1964, of the total income tax collected at source, 18% was related to labor income and 60% to capital income. In 1970, the same percentages were in the order of 50% and 17%, respectively.
The bargaining power of unions was drastically reduced, subject to the military government's (strict) wage and adjustment standards, in accordance with the dictates of its economic policy; labor legislation, of which the replacement of job stability by the Severance Pay Guarantee Fund (FGTS) was the prototype, to guarantee compulsory savings, benefited the accelerated accumulation of capital, accelerating employee turnover and the expulsion of those over 40 from the workforce.
During the period of the “economic miracle” (1968-1973), the civilian wing of the coup (especially the pro-coup press) made occasional complaints about the arbitrary nature of the institutional acts, the choice of Costa e Silva as Castelo Branco’s successor, and the lack of debates before the promulgation of the new Constitution of 1967. With caution, they reported arrests, impeachments, and the first actions of armed militants. Student demonstrations were given prominent coverage.
The Broad Front – an alliance between three former adversaries, Carlos Lacerda, JK, and Jango – was closely monitored. The hardliners in the Armed Forces realized that the same press responsible for mobilizing the middle class in favor of the coup had become the spokesperson for the first dissenters during the dictatorship. The Broad Front was dissolved by the Minister of Justice, Gama e Silva, in March 1968, and nine months later AI-5 was enacted, the coup within the coup, which made possible a short-lived “economic miracle.”
With the end of the agreements of Bretton Woods In August 1971 (declaration of non-convertibility of the dollar by the US government) a private international monetary system emerged, called the Eurocurrency Market. This system began to compete with the multi-state monetary system, composed of the IMF and the World Bank, for the provision of credit to public agents, especially to Latin American countries governed by military dictatorships. Dollar diplomacy imposed the consequences of its monetary policy on other countries.
In 1979, the United States imposed a unilateral increase in interest rates, imposing a brutal increase in financial expenses on other countries, since their debts had been contracted at floating interest rates. The consequence of this increase was the declaration of Mexican and Argentine moratorium in 1982, the Brazilian moratorium in 1987, and the credit crisis in Latin America in the 1980s.
Brazil's external debt expanded significantly in the 1970s, during the military regime, following the end of the Bretton Woods agreement, the capitalist crisis after 1974, the rise in oil prices between 1973 and 1979, and the rise in interest rates in the United States in 1979. In Argentina, between the beginning of the last dictatorship in March 1976 and 2001, the debt multiplied by 20, rising from less than US$8 billion to almost US$160 billion. During this same period, Argentina paid around US$200 billion, or 25 times what it owed in March 1976.
The renegotiation of the foreign debt included the renegotiation of part of the American debt, since in order to renegotiate the debt over 30 years, a guarantor from private creditors was needed. The US provided this guarantee, but in order to do so, it required the country to buy American Treasury bonds at rates of 6% per year. The surplus of parasitic capital from the central countries ended up finding in Latin American military governments, or in private agents with state guarantees, the major borrowers to finance the external deficit or leverage private investments.
In Brazil, borrowers included the federal government, state governments, state-owned companies and municipalities, and state-owned banks. From 1965 onwards, the dictatorship's economic proposal was based on encouraging the formation of conglomerates capable of expanding production levels aimed at the foreign market, as well as playing a role in the countryside during the “conservative modernization” through the expansion of large estates. Agricultural production became a privileged space for the interests that transformed it into agribusiness, a situation that has persisted to the present day.
During the dictatorship, the explanations given by Delfim Netto, the Minister of Finance, became famous: “We must first increase the 'pie' and then divide it up”. A wage-squeezing policy was adopted: the real minimum wage, despite falling less than in the period between 1964 and 1966 (when there was a 25% decrease), fell by more than 15% between 1967 and 1973.
To counter this attack on workers’ living conditions, political repression was unleashed on the organized left and the guerrillas, but it had a central social target: the working class, as exemplified by the murders of Manoel Fiel Filho, Olavo Hansen, Santo Dias and other workers’ activists. A report commissioned by the parent company of the largest Brazilian automaker, Volkswagen, concluded that the leaders of the multinational’s Brazilian subsidiary were complicit in the dictatorial repression, which even resulted in the death of many of the company’s workers, according to the “Volks Workers Group”, which presented a document on the matter to the Public Prosecutor’s Office in 2015: an example of the dictatorial violence against the working class within a general framework in which 308 people were “registered” by state security agencies, as revealed in the files of the SNI (National Intelligence Service).
The crisis of the Brazilian military dictatorship became clear in 1974, when the economic crisis of the “Brazilian miracle” became evident and, politically, the Arena was defeated by the MDB in the parliamentary elections in most capitals and large cities: the MDB won almost 73% of the votes and elected 16 out of 22 senators. Soon after, from 1975 to 1977, some unions and union oppositions began to mobilize, demanding a higher salary increase than that granted by the dictatorship.
The strikes of the metalworkers of the ABC region of São Paulo in 1978 and of the metalworkers of the capital of São Paulo in the same year spread throughout Brazil and to other sectors. They were the result of the preparatory work done years earlier by the most combative workers. The workers once again became protagonists of Brazilian political life, now directly engaged in the fight against the dictatorship. Adusp was born in the midst of this movement.
At the same time, student protests were increasing throughout the country, leading to the police raiding the University of Brasília and PUC-SP in 1977, where they arrested 1.700 students. Conflicts in the countryside were increasing, with the growing participation of Catholic organizations, which would culminate in the founding of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST). In the early 1980s, the Brazilian dictatorship began its countdown.
Between indirect and, finally, direct elections; between amnesties granted by the agents of repression themselves, as in the case of Brazil, or granted after the trial of the Military Juntas (as in the case of Argentina), right-wing, center, left-wing and even neo-fascist governments (Javier Milei, Jair Bolsonaro, Nayib Bukele), the 40 years following the redemocratization of our continent passed.
The worst consequence of the dictatorships was, of course, the murder of tens of thousands of activists and popular leaders. Had they been alive, our history would have been different in recent decades. Their deaths fulfilled part of the objectives of the dictatorships and their external supporters. The economic and financial structure of our countries, inherited from the dictatorial period, has not been fundamentally changed, despite new social policies and the removal of millions of people from living standards below absolute poverty, a result that is always temporary, as demonstrated by the rampant growth of poverty and hunger in the once proudly well-fed Argentina.
To eradicate poverty and hunger once and for all, and to protect our increasingly threatened environment, the experience of recent decades shows that it is necessary to put an end to that structure.
The latest ECLAC report defined the Latin American economic situation as a phase of “secular neocolonial stagnation that inhibits any independent development project to improve the living conditions of the population”, highlighting how the model inherited from colonialism, based on the extractive economy, has led the subcontinent into a quagmire of low growth that is difficult to reverse in the absence of profound changes in the productive structure.
The report indicates that in Latin America and the Caribbean, the average annual growth rate for the decade 2015-2024 was only 0,9% and that there is an absolute need to “stimulate growth to respond to the environmental, social and labor challenges currently faced”. How can growth and distribution be achieved with budgets increasingly consumed by debts to big financial capital? What type of growth? Through what means, economic, social and political?
This is the question that history poses to current generations. The neo-fascist danger is there to demonstrate how precarious our democratic achievements have been. In the young people who shout “no more dictatorship” without ever having experienced a military dictatorship, that is, in the young people who learn from the experience of history, lies our best hope for the future.
*Osvaldo Coggiola He is a professor at the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of Marxist economic theory: an introduction (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3tkGFRo]
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