Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

by Samantha Power

  Arnaldo Vieira de Mello was a charismatic and highly cultured man. “Audacity is the winner’s gift,” he liked to say, as he urged his son to be bold in his intellectual and personal pursuits. But his own career stalled, and he never earned the rank of ambassador. Frustrated by this professional plateau, he became an increasingly heavy scotch drinker.When he brought the family back to Rio in 1962, he became a regular on the trendy nightclub circuit there, keeping up with the current fashions and socializing late into the evenings. On the nights he stayed at home, he disappeared into his study, where he immersed himself in a world of books and maps.While he maintained his day job as a diplomat, he managed to write a history of nineteenth-century Brazilian foreign policy, which was published in 1963 and became part of the curriculum for aspiring Brazilian civil servants. He also embarked upon an ambitious history of Latin American navies.5 It was Gilda who kept close The Vieira de Mello family (left to right: Sergio, Arnaldo, Gilda, and Sonia) in Cairo, December 28, 1956.

  watch on Sergio’s studies, promising to buy him gifts in return for high marks and taking him shopping the very day he received his grades.

  When Arnaldo was assigned to the Brazilian consulate in Naples in late 1963, Gilda, who had learned to live a life that revolved around her children more than her husband, thought it best to remain in Brazil. Their daughter, Sonia, had gotten married and was expecting a child, while Sergio was attending the Franco-Brazilian lycée, a Rio school popular with the children of diplomats. Arnaldo was afraid of flying, and since the steamer from Europe took more than a week, he returned to Brazil just once a year.

  The Brazilian military, which ended up running the country until 1985, would rule more mildly than other Latin American martial regimes. Still, the generals muzzled the press, suspended basic civil liberties, and ended up killing more than three thousand people.6 The military’s reign was neither as benign nor as temporary as Brazilians had expected.

  Some of the ruling generals proved especially ruthless. In 1965, the year after the coup, a group of hard-liners held sway. Sergio, who was by then seventeen, spent several afternoons each week volunteering at the Rio de Janeiro campaign headquarters of Carlos Lacerda, a charismatic local governor and anticorruption crusader who hoped to become Brazil’s president in the next election. But the generals turned on Lacerda, barring him from political office and dissolving all major political parties. Sergio’s uncle Tarcilo, Arnaldo’s youngest brother, was a brilliant congressman and orator who had gained fame as the leading proponent of legalizing divorce. As the generals tightened their grip, Tarcilo called on diverse political players, including Lacerda and the deposed president Goulart, to join forces in a Frente Ampla, or “Broad Front,” devoted to ending military rule and restoring democracy. But after he ran unsuccessfully for governor of Bahia in 1967, he dropped out of politics, and the generals maintained their grip on power.7

  Sergio had studied philosophy in high school, and in an essay in his final year, he reflected on the foundations of a just world, which, he argued, were rooted not in religious morality but in the “more objective notions of justice and respect.” International politics were no different from social intercourse, he wrote, in that the key to amicable ties was what he called “individual and collective self-esteem.” Only then could stability be built “on peace and understanding and not on terror.”8

  Later that year he enrolled in the philosophy faculty at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, which was plagued by teacher strikes. After one frustrating semester in the classroom, he asked his father, who had left Naples and become Brazil’s consul-general in Stuttgart, Germany, if he could travel to Europe for a proper university education. Arnaldo granted his son’s request, and Gilda traveled by ship with Sergio across the Atlantic in order to help him get settled. In Switzerland he met up with Flavio da Silveira, a Brazilian friend from childhood whose family lived in Geneva.The two friends enrolled at the University of Fribourg, in the picturesque medieval town an hour’s drive from Geneva.They spent a year studying the writings of Sartre, Camus, Aristotle, and Kant, with a faculty composed largely of Dominican priests. Their appetites whetted, they applied for admission to the Sorbonne in Paris. Sergio, who had been educated in French schools his whole life, was admitted, while da Silveira was not and went instead to the University of Paris at Nanterre. It was at the Sorbonne, studying under the legendary moral philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, that Sergio received an in-depth introduction to Marx and Hegel and proclaimed himself a student revolutionary.

  In May 1968 he was one of some 20,000 students who took to the streets against the de Gaulle government, demanding greater say in the national university system and calling for the abolition of the “capitalist establishment.” In the worst fighting Paris had seen since 1945, riot police stormed student barricades with tear gas, water cannons, and truncheons, arresting Vieira de Mello and nearly six hundred other student protesters. The gash he received above his right eye was so severe that he would require corrective surgery thirty-five years later. Arnaldo drove in an official car from the Brazilian consulate in Stuttgart to Paris to see his son. When Sergio learned that his father had parked in the Latin Quarter, he exclaimed, “Run back there and move the car! The students are burning all the cars there today!” The standoff would become so violent that the rector of the Sorbonne would close the university for the first time in its seven-hundred-year history.

  After a few weeks the French public began to turn against the protests, and workers who had joined the students in striking returned to work out of fear they would lose their jobs. After the student revolt had fizzled, Sergio penned a lengthy letter to the editor of the French leftist daily newspaper Combat complaining that the mainstream press was delighting in denigrating the student revolt. In his first published writing, he commended the violence as “salutary,” noting that if the students had staged only peaceful rallies on the university campus, the French public would have looked the other way. Street fighting had been necessary in order to get the attention of an indifferent public.“One can awaken the masses from their lethargy only with the sound of animal struggle,” he wrote.9 But unless the struggle became “global, irreversible, and permanent” and brought about the “demise of fossilized thought,” he argued, the students would go down in the French annals as “the organizers of a huge and laughable folkloric bazaar.” He closed his letter with a raging salvo against the “old scum.”“Let them cry over their repugnant past, let them worship their lost pettiness, let them fatten themselves at will,” he wrote.“One thing is now certain: their tranquillity has disintegrated.We may be walking toward our most resounding failure, but their victory will also be their hell.”10 Sergio was so proud of his irate debut that he passed around copies of the article to friends. Although he could not have imagined it then, May 1968 would prove the apex of his antiestablishment activism.

  Word of his contribution to Combat quickly reached his family in Brazil. His sister, Sonia, spotted a news item in one of the Rio newspapers describing a Brazilian student involved in the Paris clashes who had returned home and been abducted and murdered, presumably by the military regime. She panicked and passed the article along to a friend who was traveling to Europe. When Arnaldo saw it, he told his son that he should not risk returning to Brazil anytime soon. The French government had granted amnesty to foreign students arrested in the riots, but it required them to check in with the authorities at the police station on a weekly basis. This seemed a small price to pay for continuing his education at the Sorbonne, and Sergio went back to class in the fall of 1968 in the hopes of combining his credits from Rio, Fribourg, and Paris to graduate in 1969.

  Although he relished the educational rigors of the Sorbonne, he was lonely in Paris and nostalgic for Rio. “People don’t exist here,” he wrote to a girlfriend in Geneva in March 1969. “I spend my time with books.”11 His letters grew increasingly mournful as he noted that “for two years nothing has changed except myself. Complaining
of the crowds, cars, noise, and “an uninformed mass that I’m tired of, ” he wrote that he missed “the days where I could walk alone with my sea birds.”12

  But back in Brazil the military dictatorship was growing more repressive. Paramilitary forces roamed the country arresting and often torturing those suspected of subversive activity. Well-known Brazilian diplomats such as Vinicius de Moraes, who in his spare time had helped launch the bossa nova genre by writing the lyrics for such songs as “The Girl from Ipanema,” were dismissed from the foreign diplomatic corps. In the spring of 1969, five years after the initial coup, Arnaldo Vieira de Mello, who was neither well known nor openly critical of the military regime, was sitting at the breakfast table of his residence in Stuttgart, sipping his morning coffee, reading the morning papers, and flipping through Brazil’s diplomatic digest. As he scanned the list of civil servants whom the military regime had forced into retirement, his eyes fixed suddenly upon a name he had not expected to find: his own. He had been sacked by a government he had served for twenty-eight years.

  Sergio was in Paris when he learned the news. He raged at the Brazilian government for hurting his family and complained that his father had been fired for his political views. But Arnaldo’s colleagues and relatives speculated that his worsening drinking habit may also have been a factor. The military regime offered no explanation.

  As Arnaldo packed up his life in Europe, he told his son that he would not be able to pay for his graduate studies at the Sorbonne. In May, just two months before graduation, Sergio wrote again to the young woman he had dated when he was in Geneva. Sounding depressed and confused about his future, he informed her that his father had been fired. “The dictatorship is a reality,” he wrote.“I will be obliged to earn my bread starting in August.” He would try to find work but had “no idea” where. “My future is more than up in the air.”13

  In June he wrote to her that he expected to receive high marks in his philosophy exams. (He would in fact dazzle the Sorbonne faculty, finishing first out of 198 candidates in metaphysics.) “But for what?” he wrote sarcastically. If he had studied economics or marketing instead, “some American company would have assured me a ‘happy’ future strewn with dollars.” He would never sell out, he told her, and “just short of dying of hunger,” he would “never abandon philosophy.” The philosopher, he wrote, could become either “the most just man” or “the most radical bandit.” Either way, he insisted, “to do philosophy is to have it in your blood and to do what very few will do—to both be a man and to think everywhere and always.”14

  After trying briefly to find a philosophy teaching job, Sergio made his way to Geneva, where the da Silveira home had become his European base. He decided to try to find work with one of the many international organizations there. Knowing Sergio’s gift with languages (he already spoke flawless Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French), an acquaintance of his father’s put him in touch with Jean Halpérin, the forty-eight-year-old Swiss director of the language division at the United Nations. Halpérin had hesitated to take the meeting because he knew of no available jobs, but when they met, he was immediately taken in by the young man’s passion for philosophy. Halpérin offered to call the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which often needed ushers for large conferences on the preservation of cultural monuments. “Thank you very much,” Sergio said, smiling politely. “I know UNESCO, and it is not my cup of tea. My sense is that it is a lot of ‘blah, blah, blah.’” Surprised that someone unemployed would be so picky, Halpérin explained that his academic background would not leave him many options within the United Nations. “I’m very sorry, Sergio,” he said, “but the UN deals with everything under the sun except philosophy.”

  A few days later Halpérin received a call from a colleague at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which was looking for a French editor. UNHCR performed two main tasks—it gave people fleeing political persecution the material assistance they needed to survive in exile, and it tried to ensure that the displaced were not forced back to the countries that had driven them out. The United Nations required fluent English and two years of professional experience. Sergio spoke little English and had never held a full-time job, but he interviewed better than any of his fellow applicants and was given a temporary contract. He started his career at UNHCR in November 1969 and would spend the next thirty-four years working under the UN flag.

  “WHAT WOULD JAMIE DO?”

  Almost as soon as he took up his post at UNHCR, he began hearing tales of a man who was every bit his opposite.Vieira de Mello was a twenty-one-year-old Sorbonne-educated, multilingual Brazilian with a lean physique and a movie-star smile.Thomas Jamieson, UNHCR’s director of field operations, was a fifty-eight-year-old pale, balding, rotund, bespectacled Scotsman who had never graduated from secondary school. And although Jamieson had lived in and out of French-speaking countries since the Second World War, he prided himself on having never bothered to master French. Despite these cosmetic differences, Vieira de Mello quickly found a mentor in the man known as “Jamie.”

  Jamieson had joined UNHCR in 1959 after working with UN and nongovernmental groups to resettle German, Korean, and Palestinian war refugees.Vieira de Mello actively sought him out, peppering him with questions about his experiences.Warm and instantly accessible to those he liked, Jamieson was not an intellectual likeVieira de Mello’s father, but he placed a similar emphasis on audacity, and he shared Arnaldo’s taste for scotch. First-time visitors to Jamieson’s home near Geneva knew they had reached their destination when they saw the trash cans outside overflowing with empty whiskey bottles. Whether he was in his office at UNHCR or roaming around some dusty outpost in Nigeria, Jamieson always invited colleagues to join him for his close-of-business drink of Johnnie Walker Red Label. More than five thousand miles from his family and discouraged from returning to Brazil, Vieira de Mello seemed to prize the new bond.

  Jamieson explained that his overarching aim—and that of the UN—was simple: “Children should have a better and happier life than their parents.” He decried the refugee camps that had clogged the European continent after World War II.“If there is a way to avoid setting up a camp, find it,” he would say. “If there is a way to close a camp, take it.” His central message, conveyed to all who encountered him, was that “UNHCR ought to endeavor to eliminate itself.”15 Over long lunches in Geneva he warned Vieira de Mello that charitable enterprises could quickly grow more concerned with their own self-perpetuation than with helping the needy. Jamieson urged him to be sure to distinguish the interests of the UN, his place of employment, from the interests of refugees, his reason for working.

  Jamieson generally managed field operations from afar, spending most of his time at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva. But when he ventured overseas, he made the most of it, ostentatiously arriving back, in the words of one colleague, “with the red dust of the Sahara still on his safari suit.” He used slide shows and stirring oral accounts of the suffering of refugees to spice up the sterile and impersonal chambers of the Palais des Nations, where UN staff and ambassadors from donor countries gathered. Jamieson often sounded contemptuous of diplomats. “You’re all sitting here in comfort,” he would say after a trip.“I’ve come from the real world where the action is and where the answers are.” He was never shy about voicing his impatience with legal hair-splitting, UN red tape, or diplomatic pomposity, and he despised the incessant and interminable array of meetings his job required. It was not uncommon for him to stroll fifteen minutes late into a coordination session that he was supposed to chair. “Ohhhh so I see we are having a meeting. How charming,” he would say.“If there’s one thing in the world I like, it is meetings. Tell you what we are going to do: I’ll tell you what I have decided, then we can meet for as long as you wish!” Undemocratic in his approach, Jamieson got his way by relying upon his personal relationship with Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the powerful and visionary high
commissioner who ran UNHCR.2 Although Sadruddin could find Jamieson taxing, he valued his ability, in the words of a colleague, to “kick bean-counters with such finesse.”While Vieira de Mello had none of Jamieson’s willingness to make enemies, he shared his mentor’s distaste for bureaucracy.

  Vieira de Mello had joined UNHCR at an electrifying time. Under the leadership of Sadruddin, UNHCR shifted its emphasis from Europe, where refugees from World War II and the Soviet Union had commanded attention in the 1940s and 1950s, to Africa and Asia, where decolonization wars had created new refugee flows in the 1960s and 1970s. Of all the UN agencies, UNHCR had the best reputation among aid workers and donor governments. The U.S.-Soviet rivalry had neutered the Security Council, but UNHCR, which had its own governing board, or executive committee, had managed to thrive. It had already won one Nobel Prize—in 1954, for resettling European refugees after the Second World War—and was on its way to another in 1981, for managing the flight of refugees from Southeast Asia. As UNHCR expanded its work from Europe to Latin America, Africa, and Asia, staff members who spoke multiple languages or hailed from the developing world were put to use.Vieira de Mello, who had been UNHCR’s youngest professional staff member when he joined at twenty-one, rose more quickly than most of his peers.