Brazil Political and Business Comment - Brazilian Whodunnits

In mid-June of 2003 security guards protecting one of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s sons were shot at as they waited outside a building where he was with his girlfriend. One guard was killed and their car was stolen.
At the beginning of June two aides to the PT national leader, Jose Genoino, one of Lula’s closest advisers, were kidnapped and robbed when three gunmen hijacked their car as they waited for Genoino to join them outside his home. The two staffers were held for an hour before being released.
In October 2002 a bodyguard of the eldest son of São Paulo state governor, Geraldo Alckmin, was shot dead as he waited outside the building where he was with his girlfriend. Another security guard was wounded in the attack which was carried out by two gunmen who had tried to steal the car.

Were all three incidents just coincidence, part of the alarming levels of crime which affect the mighty as well as the rest of us? None of the politicians involved has suggested any political link and neither have the police, although they have considered the possibility.

Let us now go back a little further in history and highlight some other incidents.

On April 19, 1988 the communications minister, Sérgio Motta, died in São Paulo. Two days later on April 21, the leader of the government in the Lower House of Congress, Luís Eduardo de Magalhães, died in Brasília. Both were President Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s closest political fixers and both died of heart attacks. Whereas Motta was getting on in years, overweight and in poor health, Magalhães was only 40 and died after a jogging session. Motta was Cardoso’s main trouble shooter and Magalhães was tipped as a future presidential candidate.
In June 1996 Paulo Cesar Farias, a convicted criminal who acted as ex-President Fernando Collor de Mello’s campaign treasurer, was found shot dead in bed. By his side lay the body of his girlfriend, who is alleged to have committed suicide after killing Farias. Four armed policemen were guarding the house in the state of Alagoas when the killings occurred yet none heard the shots. Farias had been sentenced to four years imprisonment in January 1994 but in December 1994 was given conditional freedom by the Supreme Court.
Ex-president Collor’s brother Pedro died in December 1994 in his mid-30s, two and a half years after initially accusing Farias of corruption. His accusations later involved his brother and eventually led to impeachment proceedings and Fernando Collor’s resignation in December 1992. His death was said to be of natural causes.
Ulysses Guimarães, one of the architects of the 1988 constitution and a veteran politician who helped pave the way back to democracy after two decades of military rule, was presumed killed when a helicopter he was in crashed at sea in October 1992. His body has never been recovered.
Tancredo Neves, who was elected the first democratic president after the end of military rule, fell ill 14 hours before assuming office and died a month later without exercising power for a single second.
Janio Quadros who became president in 1961 resigned suddenly after only seven months in office, blaming “hidden reactionary forces.” Some historians say he made a blunder and had hoped that his resignation would not be accepted. Quadros never gave any satisfactory reason for taking such a step and took the secret with him to his death in 1992.
Juscelino Kubitschek, who was one of the 20^th century´s most dynamic presidents, was killed in a car crash in 1976 during military rule.
General Humberto Alencar Castelo Branco, the first military dictator, died in a plane crash in 1967, a year after stepping down from office.
Getulio Vargas, who stamped his print on Brazil as a virtual dictator over three decades, was found dead in his office in 1954 of what was said to be a self-inflicted gunshot to the heart. He had been under pressure to resign and killed himself.

What is interesting in most of these cases is that in general the official explanation has been accepted, whether people believe it or not. For example, most people do not believe that Farias’s girlfriend shot him and then committed suicide but, at the same time, no-one – police or journalist – has cared enough to investigate the affair and get to the bottom of it. Good riddance to bad rubbish was the general verdict. Yet, if the official version was wrong, who killed Farias and his girlfriend? Are they still around, perhaps, plotting new murders? In the case of Tancredo Neves, there were reports that he had, in fact, been poisoned while interned at a military hospital in Brasilia before being taken to São Paulo for treatment. According to Ronaldo Costa Couto in his book “Historia Indiscreta da Ditadura e da Abertura” a year after his death 36% of those polled in a survey believed the death of Neves had been premeditated.[2] As to the deaths of Guimarães, Kubitschek and Castelo Branco, perhaps they were genuine accidents. The deaths of Pedro Collor, Motta and Magalhães were also probably of natural causes but one still cannot help but wonder.

July 7, 2003

[1] Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), Hungarian journalist who wrote about Stalin’s show trials in his famous novel Darkness At Noon, spent his later years study of parapsychology and tried to prove pure coincidence was seldom “pure”. In Roots of Coincidence, (1972) Koestler tried to find in quantum physics a scientific basis for extrasensory perception. In The Challenge of Change (1973) he linked his theories on coincidence to those of Carl Jung on synchronicity. Like Getulio Vargas Koestler killed himself. Unlike Vargas Koestler’s wife joined him in a suicide pact.

[2] The survey appeard in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper in April 1986 and showed that 26% thought medical incompetence had been to blame and only 27% believed that the death had arisen from normal complications.