Brazilian Students in the United States: A Forgotten Chapter of the Cultural Cold War during the Rebel Years

The Inter-American University Association, 1962–1971

The creation of the AUI was an initiative to counteract communist influence in academic institutions. Communist influence from Cuba, which had recently carried out its revolution and invited sympathizers from Brazil and other parts of the world to visit, was foremost in the minds of its founders. The project showcased U.S. institutions to a select group of outstanding students, many of whom were advocates of leftist ideas. It was a response to the increasing number of student exchanges occurring between Brazil and socialist countries. For example, programs with the Soviet Union emerged during the Goulart government. One program in particular was Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, which provided full scholarships to students from Third World countries (Motta, 2014: 114). During this time, there was an increase in the number of scholarships granted to Latin American students. In 1959, only 25 students were recruited for strictly academic training in the Soviet Union. This number quickly rose to nearly 3,000 during the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, there were many Cubans scattered among various universities in the country (Rupprecht, 2015).

In a document entitled "Seminar on the American Way of Life for Brazilian Student Leaders," the AUI identified students as "a politically active and volatile group" that would gain leadership positions at the local and national levels. They were subject, it said, to various influences, among them personal experiences in foreign countries, especially Eastern European countries, and “the majority of them have a wrong idea of the United States and therefore do not recognize the richness of its culture and the strength of its society.” Its proposal was to send "a carefully selected group of students from various Brazilian universities" to a two-week seminar at Harvard University on "The American Way of Life and the Institutions Pertaining to that Country." They would also spend another "fifteen days traveling around the United States to see special events and visit small American towns.” The goals of the program were the following: “1. Present a comprehensive portrait of the United States, 2. Take note of some of the regional problems present in the U.S and compare them to similar problems in Brazil, and 3. Understand the manner in which the U.S struggles to solve its problems and compare it with techniques used to solve similar problems in Brazil.” The document described the AUI as an organization led and sponsored by "American citizens and Brazilians living in Brazil who are especially interested in the country’s leadership” and meant to complement the education of Brazilian elites and construct "a democratic leadership in Brazil." ¹

The number of students selected was around 80 a year. Within a decade, 839 students received AUI scholarships. All of them traveled together to the host country (accompanied by Brazilian professors, members of the AUI staff, monitors, and a doctor) in a chartered plane. Their stay took place in the month of July. They would usually spend the first week in family homes in the Boston area near Harvard University, where the summer course was held. Afterward, they would visit Washington, DC, and then New York. The idea was for these chosen students to have a brief but intense personal and collective experience of what could be considered the four institutional temples of the United States, which together made up the American way of life: the family, the basis of U.S society and its values; Harvard, the temple of scientific knowledge; Washington, DC, the temple of democratic power; and New York, the temple of modernity.

The AUI’s program required the cooperation of elites in positions of political and academic power in the United States. The students met with President John Kennedy and his brothers, Robert and Edward, Nelson Rockefeller, Walt Whitman Rostow, and other leaders and attended classes with eminent Harvard professors such as Henry Kissinger, David Riesman, and Gino Germani. The meetings with important people in the United States were intended to give them a feeling of importance and inclusion in the existing system and even included criticism of the system that was being promoted. (This was also the goal of Fidel Castro’s meetings with intellectuals when they visited Cuba.) In the context of the Cold War, the United States needed to maintain its continental hegemony at all costs through policies that oscillated between the use of force (as in the 1954 coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz) and efforts to persuade others of the necessity and importance of Latin American countries’ closing ranks against Soviet influence.

The Women Involved

The AUI was engineered by the wives of powerful executives and businessmen from the United States based mainly in São Paulo. Along with their husbands, they came from elite families and held in high regard their country’s political traditions and dominant values, which they believed were misunderstood by Brazilian students. The education program they supported viewed these students as its target audience. This undertaking was aligned politically not only with sections of the Democratic Party but also with some Republicans. These were people who put U.S. democratic traditions on a pedestal and considered the leaders of U.S. multinational companies as having a civilizing role in Brazil.

The project was led by Mildred Sage. She was the wife of Henry M. Sage, an insurance entrepreneur and one of the AUI’s financial backers. The couple lived with their three children in Chácara Flora, São Paulo. They came from the Boston elite and had close ties with other elites, especially in the Democratic Party. Mildred and some friends (such as Margaret Price, Guida Bates, Jeannete Igel, Berenice Villela, Ellen Bunker Gentil, Daisy Aldrich, and Patricia Bildner) received support from more than 140 companies (primarily multinationals) and from the U.S. government for the AUI’s first mission in 1962 (Paiva, 2008: 31). It would have been difficult to undertake such an endeavor without the cooperation of the State Department. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon signed on with particular enthusiasm. According to him (Gordon, 1987: 37):

Mildred Sage did a superb job. They had competitive contests to become selected for the program and she made it a point to lean in favor of left-wingers, not to take half Americanized types and give them this extra boost. They had representatives all over the country whose task it was to identify student leaders. The student organizations in those days, before the military take-over, were not uniformly radical, but they tended to be on the left or far left. The UNE, the National Union of Students, with its headquarters in Rio, was a very radical body.

AUI leaders were well connected within high circles of power, in which, according to Matias Spektor (2010), "liberal internationalism" prevailed. "Although frustrated in its design, [Gordon] had a deliberate plan for a peripheral modernization that was conservative but liberal in nature" in Brazil. The military’s refusal to relinquish power after 1964 forced Gordon to abandon this plan. The ambassador, who played a major role in destabilizing Goulart’s government and in the 1964 military coup, was “taken by surprise by the march towards a dictatorial regime” (Spektor, 2010: 150). This assessment (albeit debatable in relation to Gordon’s account) may be useful in characterizing some of the AUI’s organizers. In a letter to Henry Kissinger, Mildred Sage praised the ambassador as a paragon of efficiency and as a person whose views closely matched her own: “They almost managed to get rid of him and I am still not too sure they have not. What a way to get a certificate of effectiveness.” ² She did not say who these enemies were, but they may have been allies of the Goulart government whom she and others in her circle considered leftist.

Another important figure was Ellen Bunker Gentil, who was married to Fernando Gentil, a renowned oncologist from Ceará based in São Paulo. She had met Gentil when he went to study in the United States. Her father was Ellsworth Bunker, a wealthy businessman who was known as a “hawk” in opposition to the "doves," the more moderate officials in U.S. foreign policy. He held a position in the Organization of American States and would become ambassador to South Vietnam during the bloodiest years of the war, from 1967 to 1973. Bunker called himself “an old-fashioned patriot.” According to his obituary on the front page of the New York Times (September 28, 1984), he saw his country as occupying the moral high ground in its relations with other countries. He was a member of the AUI’s international sponsoring committee. In a letter to Kissinger inviting him to be a consultant to the AUI, Mildred Sage mentioned Bunker’s name as honorary chairman of the working board in the United States. ³ Another member of this international committee was Hickman Price, president of Mercedes-Benz in Brazil, who served as assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Commerce from 1961 to 1963. He was an important figure in the automotive industry, had ties to the Kennedy administration, and was an active member of the Democratic Party (New York Times, August 24, 1989). At one point his wife, Margaret Price, was in charge of managing the students’ visit to Washington, DC.

Other women who sympathized with Mildred Sage and participated in her project were her sister, Audrey Devereux Hale, Patricia Elman Bildner, and Daisy Aldrich. Aldrich’s husband was a member of the Republican Party and related to Nelson Rockefeller, the leader of the Republicans’ liberal wing. Rockefeller was a millionaire with close ties to Brazil from the Vargas years and a pioneer in promoting academic exchanges between Brazil and the United States (Tota, 2014: 123–124). He even talked with AUI students and took pictures with them on their visits to the United States. His brother, David, a key figure in the United States’ business relations with Brazil, did the same. Patricia Elman Bildner was especially active in the AUI’s activities. Married to the progressive businessman and philanthropist Albert Bildner, she had received a Master’s degree in physics from the Carnegie Institute of Technology before turning to journalism and had worked on the Manhattan Project, which was responsible for creating the atomic bomb for the United States. In Brazil she was the representative of the Fulbright scholarship program and a consultant to the Ford Foundation (New York Times, May 26, 1972). Her death in 1972 contributed to the end of the AUI’s activities. She also played a leadership role on a committee organized by the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom (IADF), a Pan-American human rights agency in whose creation the exiled former president of Venezuela Rómulo Betancourt played an important part (Ron and Perrone, 2003; Iber, 2015: 97–98).

The work of these latter women must not, however, be allowed to overshadow the crucial role of Mildred Sage, for whom the AUI was informally named the "Sage project" by the organization’s financial backers.

Covert and Overt Financing

When the AUI was founded, the main source of its funds was the foreign business community in Brazil. This situation quickly changed as the activities of the AUI became broader in scope. The AUI made it clear that it received funding from private companies and from the U.S government, but neither its budget nor the details concerning its sources of support were ever disclosed. These were a secret kept under lock and key, according to a letter from another prominent AUI organizer, Elisabeth George Washburne (later Wadsworth). She was married to George Washburne, president of an inter-American organization in charge of investments and a millionaire with ties to the Rockefeller group. She coordinated the New York part of the first program in 1962 and then became the executive of the Inter-American University Foundation (IUF), a nonprofit organization based in New York that organized the AUI’s activities on American soil (Paiva, 2008: 20, 22, 29). In 1964, she wrote to Henry Kissinger and other IUF directors about the AUI’s programming that year: ⁴

Our budget for 1964 is confidential. AID, the major contributor to the U.S. program, has requested anonymity. AID feels that if students learned how much the U.S. government is contributing through CU and AID, they would be disturbed. Pointed out to them that we have made no secrecy of our request for AID funds, and that we have never discussed amounts with students (though we have been frank about our government support), but we nevertheless agreed that no more would be said. You are therefore requested to keep the budget private and not to disclose to anyone that AID is among our contributors.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an organization that would later cement well-known 1965–1968 agreements with Brazil’s Ministry of Education and Culture after the military regime was established (Goertzel, 1974; Motta, 2014). These agreements, which reorganized areas such as higher education, met with heavy resistance from students, including most AUI scholars, who saw them as a form of imperialist meddling. This does not mean that the AUI was party to the agreements or that it had lost its relative autonomy, but any disclosure relating to its funding would probably have led leftist students away from the internship. This was a risk that the AUI was unwilling to take because leftist students were its main target audience.

Keeping the USAID funding a secret made perfect sense at the time. When Flavio Aguiar (an AUI student in 1968 and later a well-known literature professor, writer, and journalist) learned about the connection through his interview with me, he said, "The news that the AUI had a relationship, even an autonomous one, with USAID would have put an end to the program in Brazil" (interview, Berlin, October 2020). These words attest to the anti-imperialism of the student movement at the time, which considered the agreements between the Ministry and USAID similar to the failed Project Camelot. ⁵

Students were not the only ones fighting against the Ministry-USAID agreements. Their struggle was shared by the entire leftist intelligentsia. Delegates from the only approved opposition party, the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement—MDB), appeared in large numbers to criticize the agreements. According to the U.S. diplomats mentioned in the documents found by Rodrigo Motta, never were so many U.S. flags burned in the Brazilian streets as during the student protests of 1967 and 1968 against those agreements. They also note that there were bombings of several buildings occupied by U.S agencies, such as USAID, between 1965 and 1968 (Motta, 2014: 126–127). The AUI’s organizers had good reason to keep USAID funding a secret. They knew that the future of the program depended on it.

One document provided details of the cost of the international portion of the first AUI trip, in July 1962. It was budgeted at US$93,000, ⁶ close to US$800,000 in current dollars. ⁷ In addition, as the AUI expanded it incurred expenses in Brazil for the selection process, the semiannual preparation courses in eight capitals, and the hiring of teachers and other professionals. All of this increased the organization’s expenses in the United States as well. Converted to today’s currency, it is estimated that the AUI’s annual expenses were around US$1 million.

The AUI coincided with a series of initiatives led by foreign entrepreneurs in Brazil, especially those from the United States. Most of the time, these foreign entrepreneurs worked with local companies in projects with a political agenda. In a confidential aerogram to the State Department, the consulate in São Paulo listed some anticommunist organizations that received contributions from companies in Brazil, and among them was the AUI. This aerogram proposed sending to the United States "groups of university student leaders, including some hopefully redeemable leftists." ⁸

In its early days, the AUI solicited support from companies and organizations; among them was the Fundo de Ação Social (Social Action Fund—FAS), a business organization set up by the American Chamber of Commerce that raised funds from multinational companies and passed them on to the Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais (Institute for Research and Social Studies—IPES) with the "goal of financing ‘acts of war’ and creating a network to influence, defend, and inform the public in all three spheres [of government] in favor of multinational business interests in Brazil" (Bortone, 2020: 110). Two prominent FAS managers were members of the AUI supervisory board: Claude Kauffman and Duarte Vaz Pacheco do Canto e Castro. For his part, David Beaty, a businessman and second vice president of the AUI, "contributed $7 million to IPES" (Bortone, 2020: 114–116). ⁹

According to several studies, the IPES was an anticommunist corporate body that had helped engineer the 1964 coup (Dreifuss,1981). There are no reports of a direct link between the IPES and the AUI, but many entrepreneurs supported both institutions. However, the image of the AUI among the students was very different from the one they had of the IPES (which they saw as overtly anticommunist). As Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro (an AUI student in 1964) recalled, those who taught AUI courses "were not with the IPES and were not from the right-wing that supported the coup. Otherwise, I would not have had anything to with it [the AUI]" (interview, São Paulo, August 31, 2017).

Every witness confirmed that Mildred Sage and her team demanded that the AUI’s financial backers not interfere in its programs. To be fair, this autonomy was only relative, because the organization made sure not to go beyond what its sponsors would tolerate. Nevertheless, the AUI provided space for democratic sectors within the opposition to Brazil’s military regime to operate. These sectors occupied positions on the AUI’s staff and were represented in person by some of the professors recruited to teach the students, including Dalmo de Abreu Dallari, Henrique Rattner, Paul Singer, Leônidas Xausa, and Cláudio Accurso. The last three were removed after the promulgation of Institutional Act 5 in December 1968.

The Elite of Selected Students

To receive an AUI scholarship, one had to go through a very competitive selection process. The scholarship was advertised in major newspapers, involved a written test, and included interviews. Those who passed proceeded to a preparatory course that lasted a semester. This course took place on Saturdays in every state involved in the process. At first there were four of them (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, and Bahia), and soon there were four more (Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, Ceará, and Paraná), attesting to the desire of the organizers that the program be national in scope.

AUI scholars would go on to distinguish themselves in various areas. Some became politicians (among them Aloysio Nunes Ferreira, Roberto Freire, Sergio Guerra, Luiz de Gonzaga Fonseca Mota, Aírton Soares, Paulo Odone, Vicente Trevas, Márcio Fortes, and Nelton Friedrich). The list also includes members of the Federal Supreme Court (José Francisco Rezek) and the Military Supreme Court (Flávio Bierrenbach), artists (Alceu Valença, Oscar Araripe, Roberto Lerner, and Walter Queiroz), ministers and high government officials (Pedro Malan, Paulo Renato Souza, Luciano Coutinho, João Alves Filho, Sergio Amaral, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, José Paulo Cavalcanti Filho, Everardo Maciel, Maria Luiza Falcão Silva, and Antônio Rocha Magalhães), rectors and vice rectors (Cristovam Buarque, Helgio Trindade, Francisco Ferraz, Hélio Nogueira da Cruz, and André Villalobos), and diplomats (Luiz Felipe de Seixas Correa, Carlos Eduardo Paes de Carvalho, Flávio Miragaia Perri, Francisco Chagas Catunda Rezende, and José Artur Denot Medeiros). Many AUI scholars went on to pursue academic careers (in the humanities, for example, Ruben Oliven, Antonio Lavareda, José Vicente Tavares dos Santos, Lúcia Lippi, Brasílio Sallum Jr., Benício Schmidt, Marcos Müller, Lygia Sigaud, and Luiz Mott and members of the Brazilian Academy of Letters Francisco de Assis Barbosa Villaça and Marco Maciel).

AUI organizers did not see a need to establish quotas based on gender or ethnicity. A total of 147 women were chosen and made up 17 percent of the participants—a very low percentage of the female population in general and much lower than the percentage of Brazilian women in higher education (42.4 percent in 1970) (Rosenberg, 1994: 38). As the AUI searched for more students from among Brazil’s leadership (which was mostly male), female students were underrepresented even though the main leaders of the organization were women. This was equally true for nonwhites at a time when there were very few black students in Brazilian universities (especially among the ones that dominated the country’s university system). While the AUI did not keep track of participants’ color, interviews and class photos reveal that black students were very rare. The AUI’s goal was not to promote the social mobility of women and black Brazilians; students were chosen for demonstrating leadership. Promoting equality for black Brazilians and women would be the goal of some U.S. agencies (such as the Ford Foundation) only at the end of the twentieth century.

In a land of law graduates (especially during the AUI’s period of existence), it is not surprising that the largest number of those selected (222 out of 839, 26.4 percent) had a law background. The other two classic career paths were engineering (118 students, 14 percent) and medicine (113 students, 13.4 percent). Thus the three most traditional and powerful professions made up more than half of the participants. This percentage increases when we add the 105 students with a background in economics (12.5 percent), a science that was gaining prominence in a developing country such as Brazil. The number of participants from these four elite majors was 558 (66.5 percent). All in all, 29 other programs had their students chosen, but only 4 of them had more than 100 students and only 6 of them had more than 50. This shows a desire on the part of AUI organizers to choose students from a wide range of disciplines but especially students who would later become part of Brazil’s future political, social, economic, and academic elite.

Most AUI scholars became successful professionals and leaders in their respective fields. Many of them went on to graduate school in Brazil and abroad (particularly in the United States) at a time when graduate courses were still rare in Brazil. Many held public office and influenced institutional policies in their chosen careers. Some of them held government positions, some even during the dictatorship (1964–1985), and worked with either the ruling or the opposition party at the time. After democratization, they were integrated into federal administrations led by the MDB, the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (Brazilian Social Democratic Party—PSDB), and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT). They became city councilmembers, mayors, deputies, senators, governors, secretaries of state, ministers, and judges. The former AUI scholar Marco Maciel even became Brazil’s vice president. On the opposite end of the spectrum, two former AUI scholars, Boanerges de Souza Massa and Ruy Frazão Soares, were murdered by the military regime. The former AUI scholar Márcio Leite Toledo was killed by his own companions in the guerrilla organization he belonged to, his death being symptomatic of its desperation and disintegration (Serbin, 2019). At least 14 AUI recipients were tried by the Military Court, and some were arrested, tortured, or forced into exile.

The students selected by the AUI were trying to take advantage of the educational opportunities that the process of internationalization opened up for them as a result of the Cold War. They knew that the AUI’s program was an attempt to introduce them to the U.S. government and U.S. society in the best way possible, showing it in a light that contrasted with the anti-imperialist stereotypes they were used to seeing. This was an attempt to “win hearts and minds.” However, several students and professors who took part in the project did not see their participation in the AUI as a nod to U.S. foreign policy, support for the coup that overthrew Goulart, or collaboration with the military dictatorship (a regime that most of them opposed). The AUI scholars represented the university student body in Brazil at the time. They wanted change, development, and social mobility (Foracchi, 1977; Langland, 2013). Students and professors joined the AUI to pursue their careers and political goals. Even if they did not have full control of the intricate and obscure events that dominated disputes during the Cold War, they were far from being puppets of national governments and superpowers. They played the game as well as they could.

The professional success of AUI scholars and the details they gave in their interviews suggest that they became more politically moderate over time, but this cannot be entirely attributed to their experiences in the AUI. The international context tended to rule out the possibility of a revolution. The last successful revolutions occurred in Iran and Nicaragua in 1979, and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Soviet Union gave some the impression that the end of history and the triumph and universalization of liberal democracy had come. Although this prediction proved premature, the Cold War had indeed ended with the United States as the victor. However, the end of the Cold War did not end social conflict or leftist projects. Some former AUI members essentially preserved their old convictions. As one of them put it, "Among my friends, none to my knowledge came out of the AUI a convert, becoming, as was said at the time, an ‘Americanophile.’ All of us remain in the leftist camp, each with personal differences and a broader perspective" (Flavio Aguiar, interview, Berlin, October 2020).

Dangerous Ties

Feeling threatened by what they considered an increase in subversion at the end of the 1960s, many of the entrepreneurs who had sponsored the AUI’s project did not hesitate to finance the repressive state set up by the military dictatorship in Brazil. This support started with the dreaded Operação Bandeirante (Operation Bandeirante— OBAN). OBAN was a repressive organization outside the government that had resorted to asking for support from business leaders. This was the informal beginning of the future Destacamento de Operações de Informação–Centro de Operações de Defesa Interna (Department of Information Operations–Center for Internal Defense Operations—DOI-CODI). Unlike OBAN, this was an official institution with ties to the army (Joffily, 2013). To ensure its existence (Gaspari, 2002: 62–63),

what national companies paid depended on the will of their CEOs and other executives. Back then, U.S. multinational companies asked for advice from the U.S. consulate. If they talked by phone, the official in charge would say that funding depended on the discretion of each company. However, at least one entrepreneur received a complementary visit from a consulate official who eagerly showed him a list of the companies that had already decided to help in the fight against subversion.

The U.S. government did not deny aid to the repressive state created by the military dictatorship. Its participation in the 1964 coup had the unequivocal support of major political institutions (such as the press). This is seen in countless documents and was corroborated even by historians such as Fico (2008) and Green (2009) who were critical of histories seeking to simplify the political situation at the time in terms of the notion of Yankee imperialism. Green, analyzing the growing opposition to the Brazilian dictatorship in the United States after the 1964 coup, contended that in 1964 the Johnson administration’s support for the coup was hailed almost unanimously, even by opponents of Johnson’s policy in Vietnam.

During the Cold War, the Kennedy administration created the Alliance for Progress, which was geared toward Latin America and coincided with the missionary work done by organizations such the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps took young people from the United States to various parts of the globe in order to help poor countries modernize and develop. The goal was to try to prevent these countries from becoming communist satellites. Nine Brazilian states were the recipients of Peace Corps volunteers (Azevedo, 2008). After the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, U.S. initiatives began to multiply. This included organizations such as USAID, Food for Peace, and the American Institute for Free Labor Development. On top of this, the training of police and military officials “created a wall of support to fortify the country against Brazil’s supposedly imminent turn towards communism” (Green, 2009: 61). These initiatives complemented the foreign aid given to the IPES and the Instituto Brasileiro de Ação Democrática (Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action—IBAD), an institution that is well known from Dreifuss’s (1981) previously mentioned work.

In 1964, the United States Information Service (USIS) planned to spend close to US$2 million in Brazil. In addition, they spent US$5 million per year in 1965 and 1970 respectively strictly for propaganda purposes and other related activities (such as the production and distribution of publications and films to Brazil’s three main branches of government). This spending worked in conjunction with funding for journalists, scientists, professors, students, and, especially, military officials who were considered the most influential in Brazilian society and most likely to visit the United States (Fico, 2008: 80). The AUI (with its enlightened ideals) was considered part of this group.

The well-known delegate from the Department of Political and Social Order José Paulo Bonchristiano claimed decades later that he had participated "eight times in training courses in the United States (between 1963 and 1970).” These would have included "technical courses and courses relating to polygraph tests, intelligence techniques, and infiltration. There were also courses about communism (which was a real obsession of theirs). I left there convinced that they were certainly tough and willing to do whatever was necessary to defend their principles" (quoted in Amaral, 2012).

Entrepreneurs and the U.S. government itself funded initiatives like the AUI on the one hand and government repression on the other. This did not necessarily mean that the two initiatives were contradictory to one another. Rather, they represented an effort on the part of both groups to ensure the survival of "free enterprise." By maintaining order, they sought to guarantee the prosperity of their businesses. A good example of the speed with which U.S. projects relating to aid and persuasion in Latin America withered away in the 1960s (a trend that reinforced the interventionist policies that were customary during the Cold War) can be found in an account by Flávio Tavares. While being tortured with electroshock in the dictatorship’s underground cells, the journalist noticed that a portable radio functioned as a generator to "shock prisoners with modular electric discharges." On the device “was written in a clear lettering, ‘Donated by the people of the United States,’ and below it was the insignia for the Alliance for Progress that showed two clasped hands” (Tavares, 2005: 88). This passage reveals that the radio that had been donated for reasons of assistance and persuasion was later turned into an instrument of torture. However, the possibility of the radio’s being used in this way was perhaps not part of the original plan.

Epilogue

Keeping to its supposedly liberal ideals, the AUI never tried to organize the participants in its programs after their return to Brazil. Confident of the greatness of their country and the four temples of the American way of life, the AUI organizers seem to have been saying to them, “We have given you the opportunity to get to know the United States and receive an overview of the country and its institutions. We hope that this will remove all prejudices you have about the United States and will allow you to become our allies. However, what you do with this knowledge afterwards is a matter that each of you will have to decide for yourself.”

If the goal of the AUI was to help teach ruling elites, create networks among future leaders, and introduce students to new perspectives by showing them the complexity of U.S. society, then it succeeded. The AUI participants returning to Brazil were impressed with what they had experienced in the United States. Many of them would go on to become skilled professionals and leaders in politics, business, and academia. It turned out that U.S. society was more complex and contradictory than the organizers of the project imagined (even to the point of exceeding the limits of their own ideology). In the early 1970s the foundations of the four American institutional temples were shaken by challenges raised in the previous decade. The traditional family was breaking down as a result of rapidly changing customs (especially the social status occupied by women), the advent of feminist movements, the onset of sexual liberation, and the emergence of alternative ways of life proposed by different groups (such as the hippies). The temple of scientific knowledge was shaken by student protests whose rallying cry was opposition to the war in Vietnam. Washington, DC, saw its symbol of democratic power being continually questioned after the March for Work and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in which tens of thousands occupied the temple of power to call for social justice and the end of racial segregation. It was during this time that Martin Luther King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. As another testament to the deepening political crisis, there was a series of assassinations of leaders that included President Kennedy and his brother Robert (a senator and friend of AUI organizers). There was U.S. support for dictatorships in the Third World and direct and increasing involvement in the Vietnam War. Finally, New York, the great metropolis and temple of modernity, became a living example of institutional crisis as degradation and urban violence ran parallel to protests by movements (such as the Black Panthers) that were repressed for questioning the status quo. In short, the environment that existed when the AUI was created turned into something else entirely in the span of a decade, a period known as the Rebel Years.

In this context of political and social change, the success of the AUI becomes debatable. This is especially the case if the intent was to spread the American way of life and even more so if it was to place its scholars firmly in the U.S. orbit during the Cold War. Upon their return to Brazil, those who were leftists continued to be leftists. Many of them did see their convictions change over time, but it is difficult to assess how much the AUI contributed to this, since it was operating in a context of broad and profound change. What can be said, however, is that most of the participants took advantage of their experience in the AUI. It opened doors for them in Brazil and abroad, allowing them to build their careers and forge new personal and political contacts. This is seen in the dozens of interviews that AUI scholars gave and in analyses of what became of them after they left the program. They knew how to take advantage of the program and participate in a larger game as some of its main beneficiaries. They benefited from it even though they had no way of mastering its rules or understanding all its implications. Although they were young, they were actors with relative autonomy who were prepared to play the game. They were far from being mere pawns swept up in Cold War entanglements.

Leftists increasingly became convinced that it was worth fighting on foreign soil because of the contradictions in U.S. society at the time. They realized that it was possible to make alliances in a complex society such as the United States. It would be wrong to assume that everyone in the United States supported a monolithic, imperialist foreign policy. U.S. society is subject to change depending on the clashes that occur in the realm of domestic politics. The end of the Vietnam War was achieved largely through U.S. public opinion, and a solidarity network was created between Americans and Brazilians that influenced the Carter administration’s initiatives regarding human rights. As noted by Green (2009), these human rights initiatives irritated even many officials within Brazil’s dictatorial regime.

Many years later, Rodrigo Motta said that professors who worked for the USAID invited colleagues who were at odds with the military dictatorship in Brazil to do research in the United States on scholarships, with at least US$183 million (a large amount for the time) being spent on education alone between 1961 and 1973. Between 1950 and 1972, approximately 10,000 Brazilians studied in the United States. After its creation in 1961, funding from USAID and its predecessors contributed to supporting short-term postgraduate and technical courses (Motta, 2014: 137–139), and it is possible that funding for the AUI was included in these amounts. The numbers support my main argument that many Brazilian intellectuals and academics knew how to take advantage of these initiatives for a variety of reasons (both individual and collective). They were led to play the game at the height of uncertainty during the Cold War.

The conflict within established institutions that grew during the years of the AUI’s existence resulted in the implementation by heavy-handed governments of reactionary policies to guarantee law and order. These governments included those of Richard Nixon in the United States and General Emilio Médici in Brazil, whose regime was known for its brutal repression of groups and actors opposing its rule. Nixon was supported at the ballot box by the “silent” majority of the population who were afraid of losing their traditional way of life and willing to support their country’s aggressive foreign policy, which rarely did justice to the internal complexity of their own society.

Lack of resources was the main factor that contributed to the end of the AUI’s trips. The Nixon administration and U.S. entrepreneurs did not see any point in continuing the program, and the worsening situation in Brazil was a contributing factor. The Brazilian government started asking the AUI for lists of participants and selection criteria, requests that were ignored. Mildred Sage returned to New York, where she remained involved with some IUF activities until her death in 1990. Manoel Botelho (AUI Class of 1963, quoted in Paiva, 2008: 75) described

a meeting at the Jockey Club in São Paulo [with the] original AUI board of directors present led by the lawyer, J. M. Pinheiro Neto, with José Theophilo Ramos Jr. acting as liquidator. Soon after, tons of documents were stored at the headquarters of the United States Information Service (USIS), an organization attached to the American consulate. Over time, almost all of this material was incinerated.

The association between private enterprise and the U.S. government was revealed once more when the AUI closed its doors for good. Its board of entrepreneurs bequeathed its archive to a U.S. international agency in charge of disseminating information, but the archive was soon discarded. Under these circumstances, the climate was no longer favorable for soft-power initiatives like the AUI. Its sponsors felt that the spell had not only been broken but also had backfired against the wizards who had cast it. U.S. officials and entrepreneurs believed that the time had come to invent new ways to spread and maintain capitalist hegemony internally and internationally and preserve the power of the United States. This is a story that continues to this day.

What was supposed to be a celebration of the temples of the American way of life quickly became a mirror of the changes and disputes that were taking place on U.S. soil and within U.S. society as a whole. The AUI’s project no longer made sense to its financial backers. The U.S. government and its multinational companies no longer saw themselves as in control of the events unfolding around them. From their point of view, this lack of control did not serve as a model for visiting Brazilian students, and the AUI was an expensive and unusual experiment that they could no longer sponsor.