Leonel Brizola - Exile and Return (1964-1979)

Exile and Return (1964-1979)

In April 1964, when a coup d'état overthrew Goulart, Brizola one of the few political leaders to offer active support for the president, sheltering him in Porto Alegre, capital of Rio Grande do Sul with the hope that democracy would be restored. (Governor Miguel Arraes of Pernambuco also supported Goulart, but Arraes was detained as soon as the coup was declared.) Because of his connection with Goulart, the military regime exiled Brizola in 1964; he went to Uruguay, where Goulart had gone into exile earlier that year.

Excepted for a botched attempt by his sympathizers at the articulation of a theater for guerrila warfare in the mountains of Caparaó, which was suppressed without a single fire being shot and raised suspicions about his mismanaging of funds offered him by Fidel Castro - Brizola spent the first ten-odd years of the Brazilian military dictatorship generally left on his own in Uruguay, where he managed his wife's landed property and kept aloof from various opposition movements in Brazil. In the late 1970s, however, the emergence of a military dictatorship in Uruguay itself allowed the Brazilian government to pressure the authorities of Uruguay to seize Brizola, into the framework of Operation Condor, the cooperation between Latin American dictatorships for hounding leftist opponents. Brizola may have owned his physical survival to the efforts of the Jimmy Carter administration to curb Human Right abuses in Latin America, as in 1977 he was deported from Uruguay for alleged "violations of norms of political asylum", and was given immediate asylum in the United States.

According to recent declassified Brazilian diplomatic documents, on the 20th. of September 1977, Brizola and his wife went to Buenos Aires - from whence they would take a plane to the USA, and at the time a very dangerous place for Latin American exiles - followed by American CIA agents, staying overnight in a CIA safe house at the Argentinian capital, from where they boarded a nonstop flight to New York on September 22. Afterwards, Brizola moved from the USA to live in Portugal.

In the late 1970s the Brazilian military dictatorship was in the wane; in 1978, as passports were quietly being given to prominent political exiles, however, Brizola remained blacklisted, alongside with a core group of supposedly "radicals" as "public enemy number one", and was refused the right of return. It was only in 1979, after a general amnesty, that his exile came to an end.