The Outlaws

It was 8 in the evening before the last of the five judges had finished reading his opinion. In the muggy little courtroom, dignified Judge Francisco Sa Filho rose to pronounce the 3-2 decision of the Superior Electoral Court: Brazil's Communist Party was "inimical to the democratic regime," and as such illegal.

On the benches in Rio's downtown Floriano Peixoto Park, in the sidewalk cafes, cariocas grabbed for late-night extras. The suspension of the hemisphere's largest Communist Party and the most powerful party in Brazil's big cities had been talked about for weeks, had been expected for almost as long.

Back to the Basements. Communist Secretary-General Luis Carlos Prestes ordered his 150,000 party members to "remain calm and serene." They obeyed. Two days later, about 500 brown-suited policemen shut Rio's 445 Communist "clubs." It looked very much as though the Commies were going underground, where they might be far more dangerous than in the open. "The Brazilian Communist Party," said Prestes sardonically, "has been 'annihilated' many times."

Cardinal Camara threw all the Church's authority behind the Government. "Respect the verdict of the court," he told Catholics, thousands of whom had voted Communist in the election last March. But some non-Communists spoke out against the decision and President Caspar Eurico Dutra's simultaneous decree suspending the Communist-supported Brazilian Workers Confederation. Said Rio's liberal Correio da Manha: "Up to yesterday there was democracy in this country. From today on there is the unknown, for the time being called Dutrocracy. . . . With yesterday's closing of the Communist Party one does not have to be a prophet to foresee for some time in the future--how long depends upon the amount of stupidity accumulated in the Government--the victory for the Communist Party."

Old Army Game. By an irony, the man most responsible for these events was bedded with illness. Pedro Aurelio de Goes Monteiro, Army commander from 1937 to 1943, later War Minister, is happiest when he is bossing from behind the scenes. At present he is Senator from his native coastal state of Alagoas and not even in the Army. But as the military senior of plodding President General Dutra, the old and ailing General still gets his wordy, often unpredictable way.

Two years ago he returned from a mission to Montevideo saying: "I have come to finish the Estado Novo." Two months later the army overthrew Dictator Getulio Vargas and the New State. But in the revolution Brazil's Communist Party regained legal status. In the first elections to follow, it won 600,000 votes, sending 18 Communists to Congress; further elections last February upped its total vote to 700,000. President Dutra would have crushed the Reds then & there. Crafty Goes Monteiro bade him wait, do it within the framework of the country's new constitution.

Topmost Branch. Either way, the Army still runs Brazil. Over 100,000 strong, it is the fourth--and dominant--branch of government. In the backlands, where the officer shares pre-eminence with the priest, it operates railways, civilizes the Indians. It has produced many of the country's political leaders, not excepting Communist Chief Luis Carlos Prestes, a commander in a civil war in the '20s. Last week it quelled a revolt of noncoms who would have restored ex-Dictator Vargas.

But mostly Brazil's Army works hand & glove with the Church to reinforce the country's reactionary social pattern. Many a Brazilian liberal feared last week that the Army was out to silence not just Communists but all critics of the Dutra government. Its strongest allies: Brazil's fatalistic masses, who after a year and a half of democracy still do not know what to make of it, still accept the Army as the country's most potent and inevitable political force.

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