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Costa e Silva represents the more liberal, reform-minded type of military leader who is coming to the fore in Latin America. Thanks partly to the $1.6 billion-a-year Alliance for Progress and partly to a gradual opening up of the continent, most of today's military officers recognize that the best defense against Fidel Castro and his threatened "wars of liberation" is to improve the degrading lot of the underprivileged and create a sense of community and nationhood in which everyone can participate. Like Brazil, Argentina has a military government that is trying to institute reforms; the army has also launched extensive civic-action programs in Venezuela, Peru, Colombia and Bolivia. Though Brazil's military shows little inclination at present to let civilians run the show again, army men in both Ecuador and Guatemala have recently returned their governments to civilian rule.
The Brazilian army is very much a part of the people, and has always welcomed all comers to its ranks. Of the country's $2.2 billion budget, $450 million goes to the military, and about $45 million of that is spent on civic action. "Our armed forces," says Costa, "are in a pioneering role. No civilian doctor will open his office in desolate country near the Bolivian border, so we send an army doctor. And the schoolteacher there may have to be an army man too." In fact, the military now runs an engineering institute and 33 elementary and secondary schools with a total enrollment of 11,500. Last year Brazil's soldiers paved 300 miles of road, laid 350 miles of railway tracks and worked on dozens of other national projects. Military pilots log 3,000,000 miles a year in the trackless interior, flying in supplies and helping peasants get their crops out to market.
Some Nerve. As a leader of Brazil's army, Costa e Silva has been involved in revolution on and off for many years. One of nine children of a shopowner in the small gaucho town of Taquari in Rio Grande do Sul State, he went to military school as a youngster and was at the head of his class almost from the first. As a student lieutenant colonel, he had as his subcommander a native of the poverty-stricken Northeast, a stubby ugly duckling named Humberto Castello Branco, who was destined to remain in Costa's shadow throughout most of his career.
While he was attending Brazil's version of West Point, where he finished third in his class, Costa took a shine to a very young girl named lolanda, the daughter of an instructor, and mentioned her to a fellow cadet one day as "the girl I am going to marry." "But she is only ten years old," said the cadet. Replied Arthur: "She'll grow up." While he was waiting, 2nd Lieut. Costa e Silva fell in with a group of officers fed up with the powerful landowners who were running Brazil, and later joined a brief and abortive rebellion that landed him in jail aboard a freighter in Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay. Through a friend, Costa smuggled out a note to lolanda's father, asking permission to marry her. "You have some nerve," the father said—but he finally consented.