The 1964 Brazilian coup d’état appears in the novel as an early landmark in the spread of military rule across South America. Brazil’s dictatorship, established by Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, is set within a regional history of coups and authoritarian governments that helps explain the political climate surrounding the 1976 Argentine coup.

Brazil in a Regional Pattern

The account dates Brazil’s military dictatorship to 1964, when Castelo Branco established it. After his death in an accident in 1967, other generals continued the regime until 1985. Brazil thus provides an earlier example of military rule than the coups in Uruguay and Chile in 1973 and Argentina in 1976, while Paraguay had been under Alfredo Stroessner’s personal dictatorship since 1954.

This chronology makes the Argentine coup neither an isolated rupture nor the beginning of the region’s turn toward dictatorship. By placing Brazil among several countries governed by military or personal regimes, the narrative establishes the broader political setting in which Argentina’s generals took power.

Cold War Context

The novel connects the regional pattern to the United States’ National Security Doctrine in Latin America, a policy directed at combating left-wing movements and organizations across the continent. In its account, military dictatorships were treated as instruments of that campaign and received support from Washington. The Brazilian regime is named as one instance within this larger context, though the passage does not describe direct U.S. involvement in the 1964 coup itself.

The coup’s significance in the narrative therefore lies in its place in a sequence of authoritarian governments that preceded Argentina’s 1976 military takeover. That broader sequence sets the context for the National Reorganization Process and the state terror that followed in Argentina, without equating the specific history of Brazil with the Argentine regime’s particular methods or consequences.