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As ruin approached, Goulart turned desperately to the far left for political support, threatened to rewrite the constitution, which prevents a President from succeeding himself, and entrench himself in power. A left-run nation of permanent chaos loomed as an all too real prospect. And Brazil, of course, is no island; the largest and most important nation in Latin America, it could conceivably drag the rest of the continent down with it.
This prospect finally alarmed not only Brazil's conservatives but middlereaders and liberals as well. Even the radical groups Jango had tried to organize—unions, peasants, noncommissioned officers—in the end did not follow him. It was practically everybody against Jango and his ambitions, his ineptness, his phony reforms. At a party meeting in Rio, even the Communists turned on him. "As far as we are concerned," said one Communist leader, "Jango is dead. He was a stupid man."
Slow Groundwork. Spontaneous it seemed, but last week's revolt was actually hatched in October. At first, only half a dozen colonels were involved, and their plan was purely defensive; only if Goulart actually tried to seize dictatorial powers would they act. But as Goulart turned farther and farther left, as more and more of the demagogue came out in him, as fiscal madness multiplied, his opponents at last decided that they must act before he did, not after.
General Artur da Costa e Silva, 61, the army's senior ranking officer and one of Brazil's ablest tacticians, began organizing and planning. The plan was twofold. First, troops at Juiz de Fora, in Minas Gerais state, would rise up in rebellion. Then would follow a pause until Goulart's loyal forces were fully committed to crushing the trouble in Minas Gerais. Then a main force would march on Rio, and other commands would join the revolt. Costa e Silva's emissaries began crisscrossing the country, discreetly lining up support. "In the final days before the revolt," said Goulart's rebelling air force chief of staff, "we knew that if pilots in Rio were ordered to fly against us, they would refuse to go up."
Civilian political backing was hardly a problem. São Paulo's militantly anti-Communist Governor Adhemar de Barros had been plotting his own revolt for three months, and was in secret contact with the governors of several other Brazilian states. Carlos Lacerda, governor of pivotal Guanabara state, which consists mostly of the city of Rio de Janeiro, was Tango's declared enemy and would surely go along.
Planned Pause. A fortnight ago, the plot came to a boil when pro-Goulart navy and marine enlisted men rebelled against their officers and staged a sit-in strike in a Rio union hall, demanding passage of Goulart's broad and sweeping social and economic "reforms" (TIME, April 3). Far from cracking down on the mutineers for insubordination, Goulart's leftist Navy Minister gave them all weekend passes and full pardons. Newspapers, middle-road and right-wing politicians sensed that Goulart was bent on the swift formation of a socialist regime, and began a clamor of public protest.