Answer to —
6. True or False? The 1964 right-wing coup in Brazil was carried out by the Brazilian military without CIA involvement.
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Answer: False
By this point in the quiz, you should have been able to make a good guess at the correct answer even if you were not aware of the actual history. The 1964 coup overthrew Brazilian President João Goulart and gave rise to two decades of a murderous and brutal military dictatorship and atrocities that led to the disappearance and death of close to 1,000 political opponents, and the systematic torture of over 30,000 more. Under the dictatorship, hundreds of Brazilian military and police officers were trained in torture techniques by the CIA—specifically, by agent Dan Mitrione. Mitrione had been a cop in the U.S., an FBI agent, and an adviser for the CIA in Latin America. He taught Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply to prisoners without killing them. This systematic torture was referred to officially as “Scientific Methods to Extract Confessions and Obtain the Truth.” Mitrione tested his torture techniques on street kids and homeless beggars from the streets of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Torture included electric shocks growing in intensity and sessions of “Pau de Arara” (suspension from a rod by the hands and feet). In 2007, Brazil’s commission investigating this period of military dictatorship reported that 280 different types of torture were inflicted on “subversives” at 242 clandestine torture centers, by hundreds of individual torturers—aimed at crushing opposition groups and intimidating and silencing any other opponents. Tens of thousands were rounded up and imprisoned and/or tortured during the years of military rule. Many of these techniques would be replicated across the region through the U.S.-sponsored Operation Condor, which spread a reign of terror against dissidents and rebels throughout South America (see answer to Question 4 for more on Operation Condor).
Tanks in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, April 1, 1964, during the coup
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