Disney was on board. Later, he reflected, “This South American expedition is a godsend. I am not so hot for it, but it gives me a chance to get away from this god-awful nightmare and to bring back some extra work into the plant. I have a case of the D.D.’s—disillusionment and discouragement.”17
Whitney promised to accompany the party to Brazil, and the US government also agreed to underwrite the cost of the trip for Disney and his crew as well as a large chunk of the production costs of any short films that resulted from the trip. The Disney party left Los Angeles on August 17, 1941, taking the new, shorter plane route over mainland Brazil. To record the event and to maximize the publicity from it, Rockefeller arranged for staff from Life magazine to travel with the Disney party. The resulting photographs taken by one of the magazine’s leading photographers, Hart Preston, remain one of the truly great records of Rio during World War II.
The Disney party arrived in Rio some three days after departing Los Angeles, and set up in the Copacabana Palace Hotel, from which Disney traveled around the city meeting key Brazilian filmmakers. Disney’s family accompanied him, and the entertainment tycoon and his family enjoyed sketching in the city’s botanical gardens and from the hotel’s suite, which faced the beach. The perfect gentleman and diplomat, Disney said all the right things and was courteous to everyone he met.
On the morning of September 4, Disney, accompanied by Whitney, met with President Vargas at the Catete Palace. As was usual in meetings between her father and Americans, Alzira acted as the translator. Vargas explained to his two American guests how much he enjoyed watching movies—they were, he revealed to them, one of his best means of relaxation.18 Indeed, prior to the meeting, the Vargas family, Disney, and Disney’s daughter had attended a special premier of the Disney film Fantasia in Rio. All of this was carefully captured by Preston, whose images reveal two happy parties sitting together with a rather grumpy Jefferson Caffery, barely able to contain his displeasure at what amounted to a major propaganda coup for Rockefeller and his office.
Disney’s visit was a great success, and not just with Brazilians. Later, Disney created a Brazilian character, Joe Carioca, who—in a short film that Disney released in 1943—took Donald Duck on an imaginary trip to discover Rio and wider Brazil. Such cartoons proved highly popular with American audiences, despite the fact that (as some critics later pointed out) they contained no black characters—a pointed omission, given Brazil’s marked racial diversity. Their questionable sociocultural underpinnings aside, however, the films—like Disney’s trip itself—went a long way toward repairing the damage of Rockefeller’s ill-advised advertisement campaign earlier that year.
Forever restless and always looking for new ways to advance the US cause in Brazil, Rockefeller soon hit on a new propaganda scheme—this one involving the British embassy in Rio. Rockefeller realized that the British had a better-oiled propaganda machine in Rio than the Americans did at the time. He therefore was keen to develop ties with the British officials responsible for the program. As ever, Rockefeller was also looking to bypass Jefferson Caffery. At official events in Washington and Latin America, Rockefeller went out of his way to court British diplomats. He enjoyed their sense of belonging to an old boys club, and understood that Caffery had become a figure of loathing for the British officials in London and Rio.
The British, however, proved to be reluctant partners. The foreign office suggested that while cooperation with Rockefeller’s office was acceptable in theory, it likely would not work in practice because they were suspicious of his mission. Instead, the British promised to inform Rockefeller of their activities and in return Rockefeller offered to provide them with US newsreels. This was to prove of some use to the British embassy in Rio; the Brazilian authorities were constantly criticizing British newsreels and BBC reports for not being pro-Brazilian enough. And, while they would not be jointly producing propaganda, both Rockefeller and the British did agree to work together to try to limit the impact of Axis propaganda in Brazil.
Lourival Fontes, the director of Brazil’s department of press and propaganda (referred to in Brazil as the DIP), was central to American and British attempts to stop German propaganda; as the head of Brazil’s propaganda ministry, he had the power to effectively stifle the Axis’s voice in the country. The Allies regarded Fontes as a Nazi sympathizer, a charge he strongly denied. “I’m just a Brazilian and whatever should happen in the future in Brazil, I’ll be the scapegoat,” he allegedly claimed in private correspondence with an American journalist that was intercepted by British intelligence.19 Fontes added, “The army has been and is still hounding me all the time to color the news releases to favor Germany, but so far I’ve been able to resist.”20 Fontes went on to admit that while both Dutra and Góes Monteiro were, in his estimation, pro-German, the real leader of the Nazi element in official Brazilian circles was the chief of police in Rio de Janeiro, Major Filinto Müller. Dutra and Góes Monteiro may have been swayed by financial incentives for Brazilian cooperation—for example, German economic and military concessions—but, Fontes suggested, “Müller does not need financial encouragement to take the attitude he does.” Müller had played a part in a 1924 revolution in the city of São Paulo, and following its suppression was exiled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he worked as a taxi driver for six years—and where he presumably breathed a good deal of the country’s noxious political atmosphere.21 Following his return to Brazil he was appointed chief of police of Rio in 1933, and since then had been active in dealing with both the communist and Integralista threats. His service aside, Müller was not really trusted by anybody in the Vargas administration, and he had his share of enemies outside of it, too; the British regarded him as “the principal instrument of Axis intrigue in Brazil.”22
Fontes’s intercepted letter suggested that he believed it was in Brazil’s economic and military self-interest to throw its lot in with the United States. “Should the United States shut down on Brazil (cease to buy, for instance) Brazil would be ruined,” he observed. “And it is apparent that the United States from a military point of view is able to take care of itself and South America as well.”23 His comments indicated that the DIP was keen to climb on the American bandwagon as soon as possible, and that the Brazilian propaganda ministry was trying to shed its pro-Nazi image.
While it appeared to signal progress for the Allied propaganda effort in Brazil, however, the letter—and a separate, alleged meeting between Fontes and the same American journalist—may actually have been fabricated by the US or (more likely) British intelligence services. Fabricating so-called “intercepted” letters and using them for propaganda purposes was a specialty of the British intelligence services. Naturally, Fontes denied ever making the comments that were attributed to him in the letter.
Whatever the legitimacy of the letter and Fontes’s comments, in public the DIP continued to play both the Allies and Axis off against one another during the spring and summer of 1941. President Vargas sent a message of good health to Adolf Hitler on May Day, conveying to him the “felicitations of the Brazilian government and people for your personal happiness and the continued prosperity of the German nation.”24 The British would soon observe that Vargas’s policy “is entirely determined by his judgment as to who is likely to win the war,” and his overture to Germany was a case in point.25 With the Germans making good progress on the Greek island of Crete and with the rumors of continued disquiet in the military, Vargas had issued what Alzira would later refer to as “a reminder to the Americans not to take him too much for granted. Papai always got their attention,” she reflected, “when his continued support appeared a non-certainty.”
On the occasion of July 4, Vargas broadcast a message to President Roosevelt, reinforcing his warning to the president and the American people.26 This was an unusual move for Vargas, who previously had not publicly acknowledged Independence Day celebrations in the United States.27 Yet international events had made h
is timing appropriate. With the entry of the Soviet Union into the war following the launch of Operation Barbarossa—the German invasion of the USSR—on June 22, 1941, President Vargas felt that war was coming ever-nearer to Brazil and he understood that the Americans shared this view. Germany’s perfidious attack on her former ally had essentially pushed the Soviet Union into the arms of the Allies, swelling their ranks and splitting the German war effort between two fronts. If Hitler’s early successes had seemed incredible, his defeat now seemed more likely than ever. And if Germany was defeated, Vargas would have no choice but to throw in Brazil’s lot with the Allies—effectively eliminating the leverage he had been enjoying with the United States, and imperiling his grand vision for Brazil’s future.
For Vargas, and for Brazil, this was the optimum time to try to extract as much out of the United States as possible. The British understood that Vargas’s broadcast on July 4 was the start of a major Brazilian offensive to maximize its gains from the United States before the latter became too distracted by the deepening European war.28 Whether the Americans saw through this latest Brazilian ploy, on the other hand, is anybody’s guess.
Luckily for Vargas, he had the perfect bargaining chip. For some time, the United States had been trying and failing to get permission from the Brazilian administration for the stationing of American troops in the north of Brazil. During the previous year, fearing a German invasion in the area, Roosevelt had wanted to send one hundred thousand US military personnel to Brazil in what became known as Operation Pot of Gold. Vargas had resisted then, and in the middle of 1941 he still rejected the idea. Yet he knew the Americans remained keen to get their troops into Brazil.
The United States was indeed still concerned about the threat facing Brazil. On June 17, five days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, US army chief of staff George Marshall had outlined the dangers in a letter to Undersecretary of State Welles, in which he also reflected the widespread American suspicion of the Brazilian president:
The real hazard . . . which should probably not be mentioned to President Vargas, lies in the danger of an unsupported attack by German forces. The greatest peril in this situation lies in the possibility of a sudden seizure of airfields and ports in northeast Brazil by forces already in the country and acting in collusion with small German forces. The latter, arriving by air and perhaps by sea, would so time their movement as to arrive at these points immediately after the seizure. They would at once take over and organize these points for defense.29
The threat of a German invasion of the Americas was extraordinary, but it could not be ignored. The historical precedents were all too real: around the turn of the century, German emperor Wilhelm II had tried to frighten the United States by ordering plans drawn up for a transatlantic invasion; during World War I, moreover, the Germans had attempted to coax Mexico into entering the fight on the side of the Central Powers. Germany’s military ambitions in the Americas were well proven, if not especially credible—but the possibility was there.
All of this placed Osvaldo Aranha in a difficult situation. He appeared more isolated than usual. When Jefferson Caffery visited him on June 27, 1941, to gauge his reaction to the latest US request for a troop deployment to northern Brazil, he found the foreign minister irritated and unusually abrupt in his responses. After outlining the proposal for the stationing of US troops in Brazil and the dangers Brazil was facing, Caffery came straight to the point: “Will you take this proposal to the president?” Aranha responded: “It would be a mistake to ask President Vargas to permit the sending of United States troops to northern Brazil, especially in view of the failure of the United States to supply arms to the Brazilian military.”30
Aranha then turned to the question of the timing of any such request to Vargas. “President Vargas has been leaning more and more in your direction during the past months,” he told Caffery. “He is definitely on your side, but certainly the moment has not yet arrived when he could agree to this proposal and get away with it. He would think that I should know better than to put it up to him in this way at this juncture.”31 Aranha’s response illustrated the increasing fear in the Brazilian government that any stationing of US troops in Brazil would lead to a violent reaction from the Brazilian military and some Integralistas.
In the weeks preceding the meeting, both the British and the Americans had noted a subtle change in the after-dinner speeches that Aranha had been giving at official functions at the Itamaraty Palace. Unlike Aranha’s normal after-dinner remarks, which often focused on trade and political links with the United States, these speeches contained troubling references to increasing admiration for the German war machine. “Does Aranha now really believe the Germans are going to win the war?” wrote a worried embassy official. In reality, he was, as were Vargas, Dutra, and Góes Monteiro watching newsreel footage of spectacular German advances with the prospect of a quick German victory looking likely. General Góes Monteiro, for one, thought the US request to station troops in Brazil was hypocritical. Later in the summer, over lunch with Aranha, he argued, “the United States seems anxious to get troops into northeastern Brazil, but does not seem anxious to help Brazil defend that region.”32
Aranha’s troubling change in attitude resonated at the highest reaches of the US government and sparked a rare intervention by President Roosevelt. On July 10, Roosevelt attempted to bypass Aranha by asking Vargas directly to allow for the stationing of US troops in the north of Brazil. Roosevelt composed a long personal message for Vargas, which Caffery delivered in person to the Brazilian president at the Guanabara Palace during the evening of July 12.
Caffery enjoyed delivering such messages, because he was not usually allowed to disturb the president while he was in his residence. When the American entered the downstairs dining room of the Guanabara Palace, he found Vargas seated at the table, with Aranha and Alzira standing next to him, as if acting as his bodyguards. Without ado, Caffery presented Vargas with the message.
The letter was to the point. After outlining the new developments in the war following the German attack on the Soviet Union, Roosevelt tried to convince Vargas of the need to act swiftly and to allow the United States to send troops to Brazil. The American president was particularly worried about Natal, the capital of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Norte and a major hub on Brazilian’s northeastern coastline. Roosevelt warned:
A careful survey of typical German action makes it probable that their blitzkrieg tactics would give to us in the Americas no breathing spell to prepare defenses in any given spot after the Germans had suddenly occupied West Africa and the Cape Verde islands. For in such an event Germany might well launch an air and sea attack against Natal almost immediately.33
Having observed Germany’s spectacular early victories in Europe, the Americans had a wary appreciation for Hitler’s ability to strike quickly and without warning when given the opportunity. And his advances in the African theater made such an opportunity seem increasingly likely, for it would put German troopships and warplanes within the closest proximity yet to the Americas, north and south alike.
Roosevelt’s letter also contained a second and more intriguing request. The American asked if Brazil was willing to take part in the potential defense of the Portuguese Atlantic islands, better known as the Azores. The small group of islands were deemed to be absolutely vital to maintaining the southern Atlantic shipping corridor between the United States and Great Britain. Roosevelt believed that Portugal, while technically neutral, might be invaded at any moment by the Germans, and that—if it fell—their next move would be to occupy the Azores. Roosevelt argued:
In the interest of the defense of the western hemisphere such occupation would have to be prevented by the United States. In such an event I hope that the government of Portugal would request the United States or Brazil, or both, to assist Portugal in defending both the Azores and the Cape Verde islands.34
Roosevelt was
essentially suggesting a military collaboration between Brazil and the United States—but the subtext of his message was, in Vargas’s mind, an invitation for Brazil to join the war against the Germans.35
Years later, Cordell Hull summed up the thinking behind Roosevelt’s invitation, which was aimed as much at the Portuguese as the Brazilians. In his memoirs, Hull wrote, “We felt that a Brazilian force alongside ours would have a beneficial effect on Portuguese public opinion in such case and would offset German propaganda against us in Portugal.”36 The Portuguese, however, refused to agree to anything that might endanger their own neutrality in the war, and therefore declined to give the Americans or the British any assurance that its government would make such a request if Lisbon did indeed fall to the Germans. President Roosevelt and the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, would raise the question of the Azores with both Brazil and Portugal later in the war, as the strategic importance of the islands to the Allies became even greater. For the time being, however, American hopes—about this and the question of the defense of northern Brazil—would be dashed yet again.
Vargas replied to Roosevelt on July 28 with a short note that was warm in tone, but that stopped short of making any specific commitments to the US requests.37 Vargas simply argued that these issues should be discussed by the mixed Brazilian-American commission of general staff officers, which was due to meet in Rio.38 He had, in effect, passed the buck—and in so doing, had delayed any sort of promise that might diminish US uncertainty about Brazil’s position in the war.
Brazil : The Fortunes of War (9780465080700) Page 14
