LASA and Response by Brazil’s Military Government
declaration distributed at the LASA meeting
In 1970 American academics, shaken by increasing reports on torture and human rights abuses in Brazil, took a political stand. The Latin American Studies Association’s second national conference marked a turning point in the campaign against the military regime as it became a forum for outspoken criticism among U.S. Latin American scholars. Activist scholars who attended the LASA meeting proposed a resolution that criticized human rights abuses in Brazil. The resolution denounced the regime’s academic purges, arbitrary arrests, and torture, and called on LASA’s Government Relations Committee to investigate the conditions in Brazil. An amendment criticized U.S. backing of the Brazilian government through USAID programs. Momentum among anti-dictatorship activists in the United States elicited a response by the Medíci government. Itamaraty directed the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, D.C., to gather intelligence about Latin Americanists who had positioned themselves against the Brazilian government.
Read a translated copy of “We Cannot Remain Silent” found in the São Paulo files of DEOPS. Notice the ticks next to each name indicating a file has been opened on that person. Click here to see the January–February 1971 LASA newsletter indicating the resolution on Brazil.
diagram of where Roett, Baer, and Pelaez were detained
Latin Americanists Arrested
On June 12, 1970, Werner Baer, Riordan Roett, and Carlos Peláez, three American professors from Vanderbilt University conducting research in Rio de Janeiro, were kidnapped, detained, and interrogated by a group of unidentified armed men. The arrests elicited responses from the Ford Foundation and the U.S. State Department, which demanded that the Brazilian government investigate the event. The Centro da Informação do Exército (Army Intelligence Center, CIE) report on the incident suggested Brazilian government concerns about links between U.S. academics and the international campaign against the military regime. Read “Arrest of American Researchers,” a U.S. State Department telegram about the incident. Read Riordan Roett’s arrest memorandum in English or Carlos Peláez’s arrest memorandum in English or Werner Baer’s arrest memorandum in Portuguese.
Academic Activists
The Brazilian Embassy’s correspondence with Brasília about denying Skidmore’s visa
In the wake of the kidnappings of American scholars, Professor Thomas Skidmore consulted the Brazilian Embassy’s cultural attaché about his plans to teach a summer course at the University of Campinas. A renowned Brazilian political historian and chair of LASA’s Government Relations Committee, Skidmore had been asked by activist scholars to sponsor LASA’s Brazil resolution. Like other Latin Americanists, he was on Itamarty’s radar and his visa application was rejected by the Brazilian government.
After the LASA conference, exiled Brazilian congressman Márcio Moreira Alves embarked on a speaking tour with American scholar Megan Crahan to university campuses on the East Coast and in the Midwest. In the midst of student protests against the invasion of Cambodia, the talks introduced students to the situation in Brazil and linked it to U.S. foreign policy and the war in Southeast Asia.