Profile: Humberto Castelo Branco

During the 20-year period following the ousting of President Joao Goulart (see April 1, 1964), a succession of repressive right-wing governments rule Brazil. [Keen, 1992, pp. 359-368] The US House Committee on Foreign Affairs will report in 1974: “[General Castelo Branco] shuts down Congress, virtually extinguishes political opposition, suspends habeas corpus for ‘political crimes,’ forbids by law criticism of the dictator, takes over labor unions, institutes police and military firing into protesting crowds, burns down peasant homes, [and] brutalizes priests,….” [US Congress, 12/11/1974] Amnesty International also reports on the situation in Brazil: “Tortures range from simple but brutal blows from a truncheon to electric shocks. Often the torture is more refined: the end of a reed is placed in the anus of a naked man hanging suspended downwards on the pau de arara [parrot’s perch] and a piece of cotton soaked in petrol is lit at the other end of the reed. Pregnant women have been forced to watch their husbands being tortured. Other wives have been hung naked beside their husbands and given electric shocks on the sexual parts of their body, while subjected to the worst kind of obscenities. Children have been tortured before their parents and vice versa. At least one child, the three month old baby of Virgilio Gomes da Silva was reported to have died under police torture. The length of sessions depends upon the resistance capacity of the victims and have sometimes continued for days at a time.” [Amnesty International, 1974; Blum, 1995, pp. 171]