Word: costas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...alert, sent tanks rumbling down Rio de Janeiro's broad Avenida Brasil and, finally, suspended Brazil's constitution and shut down its Congress-both indefinitely. . Nest of Torturers. Alves, 32, is the chief parliamentary critic of the military strongmen behind Brazil's President Arthur da Costa e Silva. Last year, he wrote Tortures and the Tortured, a study of the brutal manner in which Brazil's military deal with their political opponents. The book was banned temporarily. After his September speech, in which he assailed the military as a "nest of torturers," the generals decided that...
...over to a small group of extremists the cleaver for their beheading." One by one the 369 assembled Congressmen left their seats in Brasilia's modern Chamber of Deputies to deliver the ballots. When the count was in, the government had suffered a stunning defeat. Nearly 100 of Costa e Silva's followers crossed party lines to vote with the opposition. By a margin of 216 to 141, the deputies quashed the government's motion to lift Alves' parliamentary immunity and permit his conviction for "publicly inciting animosity between the armed forces or between these...
Their joy was short-lived. Brazil's military wasted no time in acting. General Siseno Sarmento, commander of the crack First Army based in Rio de Janeiro, conferred for 50 minutes with Costa e Silva and other military leaders at Laranjeiras, the President's Rio residence. Having failed to remove Alves by legal parliamentary procedures, they decided to do away with the procedures themselves. Costa e Silva, a former marshal, resisted briefly, then caved in-as he almost invariably has since succeeding another retired officer, Humberto Castello Branco, 22 months...
...meek Congress dared to defy them. Radio stations were ordered to stop broadcasting the result of the Alves vote. Censors and policemen invaded newspapers and press-agency offices. The respected daily O Estado de Sao Paulo was ordered to kill its morning edition because a critical editorial warned Costa e Silva: "You can't run a country of 80 million people like an army division." So rapid and efficient was the clamp down on the press and radio that few citizens became aware of the crisis. Under the bright sun, workers left for their weekends and fishermen placidly cast...
...Luiz Antonio da Gama e Silva interrupted radio and television broadcasts to announce that the President had signed the Fifth Institutional Act, giving him full dictatorial powers in "defense of the necessary interests of the nation." The act, the fifth of its kind in the last four years, gave Costa e Silva the right to close Congress, rule by decree, cancel the political rights of any person, declare a state of siege, dismiss public officials, waive writs of habeas corpus, and permit the seizure of assets of those who illegally enriched themselves...