Carter, Brazil and human rights

On April 1st, 1978, I was with the Brazilian National Football Team in Paris, as a journalist, covering a friendly match against “Les Bleus” as part of the preparations for the World Cup that would be played a few months later in Argentina.

I didn’t know then, and the vast majority of the Brazilian population that followed the game on television didn’t know either, that on that very same day a meeting was held at Galeão Airport, in Rio de Janeiro, between the American President at the time, Jimmy Carter, and the São Paulo Archbishop, Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns.

I wrote about this encounter in my book “Caminho do Mar” (soon to came out as an eBook in English with the title “Call of the Sea”). Jimmy Carter was worried about the news that had reached him concerning human rights abuses by the Brazilian Dictatorship and had previously sent his wife, Rosalynn, on a kind of exploratory mission, because he was skeptical about the news.

Now, in person, Jimmy Carter had met President Ernesto Geisel, in Brasília, in order to voice his opposition to the Brazil-West German agreement to build nuclear power stations in Angra dos Reis. He thought there was a risk of nuclear proliferation.

I was in disagreement with Jimmy Carter’s opinion at the time, as I still am now. But his brief meeting with Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns was about something even more important to him: human rights. It was then that the São Paulo Archbishop handed him a report about cases of torture and death in Brazil, such as the ones involving journalist Vladimir Herzog and the laborer Manuel Fiel Filho.

That was the main reason Jimmy Carter was in Brazil for, unbeknownst to the Brazilian government.

The relations between the Brazilian and the American governments were not good then and got even worse after that.

Carter opposed the military dictatorships in South America at the time, not just the Brazilian one.

This policy would change when Ronald Reagan became the next President of the United States.