Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (4 page)

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Authors: Samantha Power

BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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Part I
 
Sergio Vieira de Mello in what would become Bangladesh, November 1971.
 
 
One
 
 
DISPLACED
 
 
Sergio Vieira de Mello’s youth left him with the impression that politics disrupted lives more than it improved them. In March 1964, around the time of his sixteenth birthday, a group of military officers decided to unseat João Goulart, Brazil’s democratically elected president. Under Goulart the rural poor had begun seizing farmland, and the urban poor were staging food riots. The generals accused Goulart of allowing Communists to take over the country. Just five years after the Communist victory in Cuba, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson had similar concerns. The U.S. ambassador in Rio de Janeiro warned that if Washington did not act against Brazil’s “radical left revolutionaries,” the country could become “the China of the 1960s.”
1
In an operation code-named “Brother Sam,” four U.S. Navy oil tankers and one U.S. aircraft carrier sailed toward the Brazilian coast in case the generals needed help.
2
 
 
They didn’t. President Goulart had some support in the countryside, but much of the public had tired of him. On March 29 the front-page headline of the Rio newspaper
Correio da Manhã
declared “ENOUGH!” The next day it proclaimed “OUT!”
3
A force of ten thousand mutinous Brazilian troops marched from the state of Minas Gerais toward Rio. Goulart ordered his infantry to suppress the revolt, but they chose instead to join the coup, and Goulart fled with his wife and two children to Uruguay.
 
 
Young Sergio was no more political than most teenagers. His focus was on keeping up with his studies (he would finish first in his high school class), following the Botafogo soccer team (which that year would share the prestigious Rio-São Paulo Championship), and chasing girls on the Ipanema beach, just two blocks from his home. But his relatives and schoolteachers had led him to believe that Communism would be bad for Brazil and the military could be trusted to restore order. Brazil’s generals had taken power in 1945, 1954, and 1961 and had ruled benignly and only briefly each time. Since the leaders of the coup promised to hold elections the following year, he joined his family and friends in initially cheering the military takeover.
 
 
“THEIR TRANQUILLITY HAS DISINTEGRATED”
 
 
Arnaldo Vieira de Mello, Sergio’s father, had grown up in a farming family in the agricultural hinterland of Bahia, Brazil’s northeastern province.
4
Arnaldo and his four siblings had been sent away to a Jesuit boarding school in Salvador, the province’s capital. After attending university in Rio, Arnaldo worked as an editor and war commentator at
A Noite
(“The Night”), a leading newspaper at the time. He was determined to pass the entrance exams for the Brazilian foreign ministry, which he did in 1941. So poor that he could afford neither books nor notebooks, Arnaldo did all of his reading at the Rio public library, squeezing his notes onto the palm-sized forms used to order library books. He carried around plastic bags filled with stacks of such forms and arranged the bags by subject area.
 
 
In 1935 Arnaldo met Gilda Dos Santos, a seventeen-year-old Rio beauty. He quickly befriended her mother, Isabelle Dacosta Santos, an accomplished painter, and her father, Miguel Antonio Dos Santos, a man of many talents who was well known in Rio as a writer of musical theater, a French and German translator, and a poet who ran a jewelry store with his brothers. “Arnaldo is getting engaged to my father,” Gilda joked to friends. The young couple married in 1940 in Rio, and Gilda gave birth to a daughter, Sonia, in 1943 and then to Sergio on March 15, 1948.
 
 
The Vieira de Mellos lived a peripatetic existence typical of diplomatic families. In 1950 Arnaldo, then thirty-six, moved his wife and two children from Argentina, where young Sergio had spent his first two years, to Genoa, Italy. In 1952 Arnaldo was posted back to Brazil, where Sergio lived until he was nearly six. Arnaldo was next sent back to Italy to work at the consulate in Milan, where Sergio and Sonia were enrolled in the local French school. In 1956, the year of the Suez crisis, the family lived in Beirut, and in 1958 they finally settled in Rome, where they lived for four years, one of the longest consecutive stints Sergio would spend in a single city in his entire life.
 
 
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.

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