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A dark heritage As the world is transfixed by the World Cup in Brazil, it may be pertinent to recall that football was a British export. In the following piece, Jeremy Seabrook however reminds us that Britain's exports to her colonies - and, in this particular case, Brazil - included some intangibles which were less than savoury. THE success of the World Cup in Brazil has thrust into the background all the demonstrations by the people against vast expenditures by the Brazilian government that will enrich world football bodies but leave little residue for them. The country has come under some scrutiny as a result of the publicity generated by the World Cup; and the image of samba, futebol and partying conceals a darker history, one which still haunts Brazil and demonstrates some unpalatable truths about its past relations with the West. Few people now imagine that formal decolonisation actually liberated the captive peoples of the world from their colonial overlords. Emancipation from their tutelary power reckoned without the ambush set for the emerging entities by dissolving European empires. 'Development' may have appeared as a milder and more attainable prospect than socialism; but for its implementation, the severest circumstances were required. The creation of a middle class is almost invariably trumpeted as the surest evidence that 'development' is indeed taking place in any given country. This apparently laudable process means the setting up of the rule of law, the growth of competent professionals and legal oversight of commerce and business. But the most important role of this 'new' middle class and its modest privilege is to police the poor, in order to safeguard its own gains; and it will not shrink from whatever severity is necessary. In the case of Brazil, this also gave scope to former colonial powers (not, in this case, Portugal) to deploy their particular expertise gained in a long, doomed and bloody struggle to 'keep down' freedom-fighters, those struggling for an independence which, alas, often proved to be only an interregnum before the country passed back under the supervision of Western shackles, from which it was to have been permanently freed. There was a willingness among European powers to share their skills in oppressing people. It should not be thought that the British were so selfish as to keep to themselves, for instance, the lessons they had acquired in resisting liberation movements in Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya, Rhodesia or anywhere else. This has been the one area in which they have pooled their extensive knowledge: a common heritage of oppression has been the object of their generosity. So it was that during the multiple dictatorships sustained by the West during the Cold War, as well as the amply documented involvement of the US, there were also fruitful collaborations between the British and those dictators whose brutality could be overlooked because they were on the side of freedom and democracy. The observation - originally by Franklin D Roosevelt apropos of Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua - that 'Somoza may be a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch' was reiterated in relation to many other unsavoury regimes whose anti-Communism was the most important feature of their tyranny. A revealing example of how methods of repression were shared comes from recently released papers in relation to the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964-85. The BBC recently found evidence that the UK actively collaborated with the military regime in Brazil, and trained them in 'sophisticated interrogation techniques', many of which were subsequently deemed to be torture, and were banned by the authorities which introduced them; a prohibition which has not, however, prevented their more recent use in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the late 1960s, the authorities in Brazil and many other countries were caught up in a bitter conflict with the Left, which was seen as an ally of the Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union. It was a time of clamorous student upheaval, industrial unrest, popular activism; and the 'free world' had, as allies, a global network of repressive regimes whose purpose was to ensure that the poor and oppressed did not 'betray' their countries to Communism. For the prevention of this catastrophe, there was no limit to the excesses connived at by the Western powers: the slaughter of scores of thousands of leftists in Indonesia which made the 13 rivers that flow through Jakarta run red with blood; the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile and the installation of the murderous Pinochet; alliance with a list of ghoulish thugs, all in the name of the preservation of democracy - Mobutu, Zia ul Haq, Marcos, Park Chung Hee, Rios Montt, PW Botha, Trujillo, Noriega, Mubarak, Banzer, the Shah of Iran and even the later-repudiated Saddam Hussein. Each of these regimes, embodiments of the 'strong man' school of politics, was inflected in a different way, and although all specialised in detention without trial and suppression of human rights, some specialised in extrajudicial executions while others preferred 'disappearances' or kidnappings. The distinctive attraction of the Brazilian military - which 'disappeared' fewer victims than Chile or Argentina - was its embrace of torture as a means of silencing its opponents. After some years of rage against its enemies, which had the unfortunate consequence of leaving victims with scars, mutilations and all-too-tangible evidence of ill-usage, it took particular inspiration from methods used by the British in their long experience of 'insurgency' against recalcitrants of empire and, of course, 'at home', in Northern Ireland. In May 2014, the BBC's Newsnight current affairs programme showed that the UK had assisted the Brazilian military in interrogation techniques, justified at the time by the argument that these represented an improvement, or 'a step in the right direction', since these were an advance on more brutal traditional ways of extracting information. In 2012 Dilma Rousseff, president of Brazil and former victim of the dictatorship, set up a Truth Commission which, within two years, would bring to light some of the suppressed stories of that formative period in the recent history of the country. It was to be a conciliatory process - an amnesty law passed in 1979 (and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2010) ensured that no military officials accused of torture would face prosecution. Some victims - and a few of the perpetrators - have offered their testimony, which has revealed the secret role played by Britain in the work of torture, particularly of that elegant kind which can be accomplished without leaving tell-tale physical scars. One recipient of this treatment told the Commission he felt that the aim of the process was to destabilise his personality, to extract false confessions - sleep deprivation, hooding, freezing air condition, constant bright light. Such methods were referred to as 'the English system' and 'a leaf out of the British book'. In August 1972, the British ambassador to Brazil wrote a secret letter to an official in which, referring to the Brazilians and their desire to adopt more subtle modes of interrogation, he said, 'As you know, I think they have in the past been influenced by suggestions and advice emanating from us; but this connection no longer exists . It is important that knowledge of this fact should be restricted.' One of the torturers, Col. Paulo Malhaes, now elderly and confined to a wheelchair, in his long hours of evidence, not only told of his part in killings and mutilations, but also expressed his liking for psychological torture which could turn left-wing militants into effective infiltrators of their own organisation. He said the idea for this useful expedient originated in Britain, to where he admitted he had travelled to receive instruction in this fine art. Malhaes was murdered shortly after giving his evidence in a burglary at his home. 'Sensory deprivation' - a condition experienced by people who undergo catastrophic trauma, trapped underground or in the rubble of a collapsed building - was a contrived condition, known as the 'five techniques': these consisted of being made to stand against a wall for hours, hooding, exposure to noise of varying pitch, deprivation of sleep and minimal nourishment. These methods were banned by the British government in 1972, as a result of an outcry against their use in Northern Ireland. But like so many outdated imperial techniques, they had a vibrant afterlife in a Brazil where more 'civilised' techniques came as a welcome alternative to the violated and maimed bodies of victims of the military authorities. A former policeman told the Truth Commission that British agents also made the journey to Rio de Janeiro in order to offer courses on the benign methodology of untraceable torture on the frail structure of the human form. The World Cup held in Brazil this year and the Olympic Games to be held there in 2016 are no doubt calculated to relegate memories of the age of global military juntas to the pre-history of the day before yesterday; but the legacy of repression has scarcely been erased from a country which remains - despite the frequently published statistics that over half the population now belong to 'the middle class' and that 40 million people were 'lifted out of poverty' in the past decade - one of the most unequal in the world. In 2010 the top 10% of the population received 44.5% of its income and the poorest 10% just 1.1%. Three percent of the population still own two-thirds of arable land; and in the years between 1980 and 2010, there were one million homicides. More than half the deaths of young men in Brazil are murders. As for the serene untroubled progression of the model democracies of the world, both European and American, constant revelations of their covert actions are still coming to light; not the least significant of them being the discovery by Cambridge historian Peter Martland that Britain's MI5 intelligence agency recruited Benito Mussolini in 1917, in order to assist with keeping enthusiasm for the war alive in his country. Mussolini was then a newspaper editor, and he promised to use the paper as an instrument against disruptive strikes in favour of peace. Although guilt by association is contrary to the democratic ideal, it is difficult not to conclude that a Britain which keeps company with military rulers, dictators and a future Duce displays as much about its imperishable values as it does when reciting its litany of freedom, democracy and choice; and this scarcely enhances the high moral tone it still deploys in the affairs of that fictive and shifting entity known as 'the international community'. Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK. His latest book is The Song of the Shirt (published by Navayana, June 2014). |
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