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The Internal Security Mission, 1964-85
A central feature of military government during the 1964-85 period
was tension between external and internal defense roles. After World
War II, an internal orientation became respectable as a result of
the bipolar division of the world into Soviet and Western camps,
the peacekeeping procedures of the Organization of American States
(OAS; see Glossary), and the study programs of the ESG and the Army
General Staff School (Escola de Comando de Estado-Maior do Exército--ECEME).
In the 1950s, the ESG expanded on the doctrines of the French Military
Mission (1919-39) and the Joint Brazil-United
States Defense Commission (1942-77), which emphasized the need
for officers to study elements of the society and economy that contributed
to socioeconomic and political stability. The ESG's military-civilian
student body studied inflation, banking reform, agrarian reform,
voting systems, transportation,
and education,
as well as counterinsurgency. Because of the interlocking of the
ESG and ECEME, by the mid-1960s the ESG's doctrines were mirrored
in the ECEME's and thus had been extended to the officer corps as
a whole.
As Brazil's crisis deepened in the early 1960s, the military perceived
the country as entering an era of subversive warfare. Military officers
had studied this type of unconventional warfare in ECEME courses
on internal security and irregular warfare. The ECEME played a key
role in convincing officers to support the movement of 1964. In
the months prior to March 1964, the staff and student officers distributed
newsletters throughout the army, arguing the necessity of intervention.
They had come to believe that internal security and rational economic
development would occur only if various aspects of the economic
and political structure were altered. They also believed that the
civilian leaders were unwilling or unable to make the required changes.
For a military organization, mission and identity are tightly intertwined.
It can therefore be argued that in seeking to clarify its mission,
the Brazilian military was attempting to resolve its identity. Military
analyst Edmundo Campos Coelho saw the military in the post-World
War II era as suffering from a severe identity crisis. In his view,
this crisis had its origin in the identity crisis of the Brazilian
state, which lacked a focal institution that everyone could accept
as the "incorporation of national authority."
In 1963 and early 1964, there was widespread acceptance in the
officer corps of the need to act against the Goulart government.
However, there was less of a consensus for maintaining military
control once a stable government was established. Even though the
hard-liners were able to impose authoritarian rule, an underlying
sense of malaise followed. The military's organizational structure,
field training, and weapon systems were geared for use against conventional
forces or, to a lesser extent, guerrilla forces. Although the military
was not structured to govern the country, military institutions
adapted themselves to their assignments after 1964 (and especially
after 1968). Nevertheless, many officers were ill at ease in their
police-like internal security roles, and officers reacted angrily
when names such as milicia (militia) were applied to them.
A power struggle in late 1965 and early 1966 led to the defeat
of the Castelo Branco faction at the hands of the hard-line officers
clustered around Minister of Army
Arthur da Costa e Silva. It represented a victory for those who
favored defining the military's mission as primarily one of internal
security. In effect, this struggle may have produced two competing
ideas of military professionalism: Stepan's "new professionalism"
of internal security versus the other that sees the essence of the
military profession as one in which troops are trained and equipped
to fight foreign conventional forces as the essence of their profession.
Some officers questioned the legitimacy of the internal security
activities of their colleagues, even though they may have acknowledged
the need for such activities. These officers regarded troop commands
and normal staff assignments as being more "military"
than internal security assignments.
The officer corps has split in a variety of ways over the years.
After the rise of Geisel, if not before, some officers worried that
a high level of political involvement was bad and distracted the
corps from its main responsibility of protecting the country against
foreign enemies. They argued in favor of a narrow definition of
the military's mission, limiting it to external defense. They argued
further that to mount a secure external defense, internal support
and cohesion were necessary. Officers could not be seen imposing
an unpopular government one day and appealing to the population's
patriotism the next. Those who had long argued this way were nearly
jubilant in pointing to the disastrous results of the failed Argentine
invasion of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands in 1982.
Officers whose hands were tainted during the Military Republic
(1964-85) were fearful of reprisals once civilian government returned.
In August 1979, Congress approved Figueiredo's proposal for amnesty,
for both the agents of repression and those who took up arms against
the regime. The amnesty facilitated the military's return to the
barracks but did not resolve the moral or legal issues involved.
With the return of full democracy in 1985, the victims began seeking
redress in the courts, while some officers with tarnished reputations
were coming up for promotion to general. Many active and retired
officers who were not involved directly in repression or torture
tended to defend colleagues who were. The cleavages that the repression
caused within the military and between the military and society
have posed major problems for the army.
The hard-liners usually are very nationalistic and argue for stronger
stances in foreign policy, for stronger controls over multinationals,
and especially for stronger positions against the United States
and the International Monetary Fund (IMF--see Glossary). On October
7, 1987, a group of retired hard-line generals and their civilian
allies formed the Brazilian Association for the Defense of Democracy
(Associação Brasileira de Defesa da Democracia--ABDD).
The ABDD argued for a new military intervention "if the politicians
did not turn back the chaos." The ABDD and similar groups,
although populated by disgruntled retirees, have virtually no political
influence.
The military has an elaborate ideology of nationalism and development,
much of which has been incorporated into the thinking of civilian
opinion makers and politicians. Essentially, this ideology holds
that Brazil can be, and should be, a great power. The military sees
its primary function as contributing to that objective.
Data as of April 1997
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