Edging Toward the Brink

There are soldiers who are armed but not loved

Mostly lost with their weapons in their hands

In the barracks they learn the old lesson

Of dying for the country and living for nothing.

There is hunger on the great plantations

And desperation marching through the streets

But still they take the flower as their strongest refrain

And believe that flowers can overcome the cannon.

When he wrote those words and set them to music last month, Brazilian Composer Geraldo Vandre had more than a song in his heart. He comes from the nation's impoverished Northeast, and he gave voice in Caminhando (Walking) to the growing impatience of millions of Brazilians with the way the military is running--or not running--the country. Overnight Caminhando became a hit. Taunting the regime, Brazilians sang it in the streets, hummed it in the favelas, and pushed it for an international prize.

The military hated the words. "A subversive lyric," said General Luis de Franca Oliveira, Rio's secretary of public security. "A musical cadence of the Mao Tse-tung type that can easily serve as the anthem for student street demonstrations." In a fit of anger, police in Rio's main street arrested one group of youths merely for listening to Caminhando outside a record shop.

Without Miracles. That ridiculous act reflects the tension that grips Brazil these days. A vast majority of Brazilians applauded the overthrow of Leftist Joao Goulart in 1964, and the cleanup started by the new military-backed regime of General Humberto Castello Branco was obviously necessary. When War Minister Arthur Costa e Silva was elected President by Congress in 1966, Brazilians listened to his promise to "humanize" the bureaucracy, promote a "Year of Education" and declare war on inflation. He did manage to slash the annual rate of inflation from 40% to 25%. The nation's gross national product edged up by 5%. Brazil's trade in coffee, cotton and other agricultural products came into balance.

But Costa e Silva held down the cost of living at great cost to himself. "We went through 1967 without any miracles," the President says. "I prefer a sure and measured success." Maybe some miracles are needed. Brazil should be taking off economically; it is barely holding its own. Education is a shambles: half of the population remains illiterate, and there is no room at the university for two of every three students who pass the entrance exam. Workers who earn only $40 a month must spend a fourth of that on bus fares to get to their jobs.

Continuing censorship, the military's failure to fulfill its promise of popular elections, the denial of political rights to hundreds of politicians and intellectuals have turned the public sour and left the country edgy. Here is a report on the situation from TIME Correspondent William Forbis:

In Sao Paulo, the National Students Union (UNE), outlawed by the military government, was playing cops-and-mouse with security police. No one had forgotten last summer's mass demonstrations (TIME, July 5). From all over Brazil, 739 student leaders descended on a remote farm in the heart of the artichoke country 40 miles southwest of Sao Paulo. As Police Commissioner Otavio Camargo later described the scene, "Boys and girls were heaped up in the farmhouse, sleeping in canvas beds or on the floor, and since there wasn't enough room in the house, many took cover in corrals. There were pigs in one pen, people in the next." The youths had planned to meet at 7 a.m., elect new officers and melt away, but neighboring peasants tipped off police. Breezing past a warning shot fired by a student sentinel, Sao Paulo cops rounded up all 739, carted them off in trucks and Jeeps and slapped them into jail. After questioning, most of the students were released and sent back home, but activist leaders of the movement were detained and will be indicted under "the law of national security."

Sao Paulo's influential Jornal da Tarde declared such a mass arrest of benefit only to those "who fight to install a totalitarian regime in the country." In Rio, 200 students invaded the Education Ministry offices on Flamengo Beach. They grabbed books and pieces of scenery belonging to the National Theater Conservatory and heaved the lot out of office windows. They blocked traffic and collected tolls on an ad jacent expressway. In Fortaleza, police broke up student demonstrations with what they called "family-size" nightsticks. In Sao Paulo, the students' midnight skulkers sprayed "UNE" in paint on sidewalks and cars.

Communist Hunters. Irked by the government's seeming inability to curb the protesters, rightist vigilante groups have taken on the task. Roman Catholic laymen have formed a "society for the defense of tradition, family and property" and collected 1.5 million signatures on a petition to Pope Paul warning against leftist infiltration among Brazilian priests. One group, calling itself the "Communist-Hunting Command" has fanned across the nation. The vigilantes have invaded even the theater, most of whose producers and actors sympathize with the left. In the midst of one performance of the theater-of-violence satire Roda Viva, a whistle blew and men armed with clubs, pistols and boxing gloves rose on signal, smashed chairs, cudgeled the audience and actors, ripped up the scenery, stripped the leading lady and sent her scurrying nude into the street.

One little impulse leads to another. Police stormed into the campus of Brasilia to arrest five students wanted for "subversion." The cops cracked heads as they moved from classroom to lab. Rising in Congress to protest the police conduct, Marcio Moreira Alves, one of the few remaining opposition Deputies, proposed a public boycott of the Independence Day military parades. Duly insulted by this, the Ministers of the Army, Air Force and Navy then moved, with President Costa e Silva's assent, to cashier Alves for abusing "his political rights." To some observers, it looked like the first step in a military effort to close down Congress.

The Absent One. In such an atmosphere, even conservative churchmen like Agnelo Cardinal Rossi of Sao Paulo have been forced to take sides. Perturbed by the military's deportation of a worker-priest for taking part in a strike last summer, the cardinal pointedly refused to join Costa e Silva's birthday celebrations earlier this month and rejected the National Order of Merit that the President had offered him.

And what is Costa e Silva doing in all this? Somehow, he seems far above all the diverse battles. "The great absent one," Senator Mario Martins labeled him. "The great shadow." At 66, the President thinks of himself as a kind of national grandfather, protecting both the savings and the morals of the country from a very real leftist threat. He remains aloof and distressingly out of touch; he does not seem to hear the words of Caminhando.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.