Washington officials knew, as did everyone else, that if Jango was going down, it would be the military that would depose him. Just as in Indonesia, the Armed Forces in Brazil were the country’s most reliably anticommunist force. But their allegiance to this ideology went far deeper than was the case in Indonesia. It was even deeper than the Cold War. In some ways the Americans could not hope for a better ally, and this perfect anticommunist partnership grew out of a powerful legend going back to 1935, when a younger President Vargas had used a sputtering left-wing revolt to crack down on
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