Brazil: Brizola Under Attack

Latin America's noisiest leftist south of Cuba is Brazil's Leonel Brizola, 41, President João Goulart's embarrassing brother-in-law and a federal Deputy from Guanabara state. On TV and before the crowds, Brizola rails against the foreign businessmen in Brazil, cries for expropriation of their property, demands friendship with Castro, and denounces everything Yankee. But now Brizola is getting better than he gives. In paid ads in Rio's papers, he wailed: "I beg for, I demand justice against the group which manipulates the powerful Diários Associados machine in its campaign of infamies and injurious attacks against me."

Diários Associados is the huge publishing empire (31 newspapers, five magazines, 20 radio and twelve TV stations) owned by ailing Press Lord Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand and now run by a triumvirate of editors who are militantly antiCommunist. Some weeks ago, Brizola attacked the group, hinting at shady dealings with the Bank of Brazil. Diários struck back by turning loose David Nasser, 46, Brazil's best-read and most-feared columnist. In a series of four articles in the big (circ. 425,000), slick O Cruzeiro magazine, Nasser laid into Brizola as "the beast of the Apocalypse," "an overfed revolutionary," "a Teddy boy of the pampas." "Saddened is the journalist who has the duty to dip his pen in your putrefied career and in your piffling figure."

More to the point, Nasser charged that Brizola had filled his pockets by manipulating rice production in Rio Grande do Sul. And though Brizola had boasted that he had practically given away one of his farms to 30 peasant families, Nasser claimed to have documents showing that Brizola bought the farm for $10,000 in 1958 and sold half of it to a peasant cooperative last January for a handsome $21,600. "As one can see," concluded Nasser, "Deputy Leonel Brizola is a liar. He is nothing but a reformist in his own benefit."

So stung was Brizola that he demanded help from the judiciary, from Congress, from the armed forces, and pleaded with his brother-in-law Goulart to force Chateaubriand to give him equal space. He threatened to bring a slander suit against Nasser. But for the moment, at least, Brizola had to take his lumps.