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Independence & Aid. As Quadros affects the U.S., struggling to save the hemisphere from Communism, there is the shock of an old and trusted ally suddenly going it alone. Under past leaders—Getúlio Vargas, Café Filho, Juscelino Kubitschek—Brazil could be expected to line up firmly with the U.S. on any hemisphere problem. Brazilian expeditionary troops fought in World War II, the only Latin Americans to fire a gun. But such faithful alliance is by no means assured under Quadros. Said he: "I announce a policy of independence in full exercise of national sovereignty. No signed agreement—none whatever—will remain valid or be maintained as soon as it should prove contrary to Brazilian interests and convenience."
President Quadros asserted this "independence" soon after he took office. Staking out his own New Frontier, he greeted Adolf A. Berle, chief of President Kennedy's Latin American task force, with icy reserve. Berle had flown to Brasilia seeking Quadros' cooperation, or at least forbearance, in U.S. attempts to depose Castro. "Brazil," snapped Quadros, "repugns intervention in any nation and in any form: political intervention, economic intervention, military intervention."
The U.S. sought to thaw some of the ice. Well aware that Brazil was $176 million in arrears on its foreign-debt payments (a debt inherited from the inflationary building spree of Predecessor Kubitschek), the U.S. offered an immediate $100 million loan to help Quadros through his first 90 days. He turned it down and sent delegations behind the Iron Curtain in search of trade. He established diplomatic relations with Red Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania and Hungary, talked of ending the 14-year ban on relations with Russia. He named a commission to consider closing the embassy of Nationalist China ("that island") in favor of one from Red China ("How can the reality of 600 million Chinese be ignored?"), and announced that Brazil will vote for debate on admission of Red China to the U.N. this September.
In the end, the U.S. found itself supporting Quadros with the greatest outpouring of aid ever lavished on a Latin American nation. Swallowing the noisily "independent" outbursts, the U.S. sent Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon winging south to Brasilia to present a willing Quadros with the U.S. Government's $943 million share of a $1.3 billion free-world aid package. Old loans were stretched out, new loans were granted. It is, says one top State Department official, "a damned good bet."
Instinct & Record. To back its money, the U.S. has Quadros' oft-repeated statement that basically "we are bound to the West by Christian formation and democratic instinct." It also has his bright record as a champion of individual liberty and free enterprise, first as the man who helped build the city of São Paulo into one of the world's great industrial complexes, later as governor of the entire booming São Paulo state.