Courtesy of Aporrea, another skeevy spy story comes to light:
The Uruguayan ex-spy, Mario Neira Barreiro, asserted that the former Brazilian president, Joao Goulart, was assassinated in 1976 at the request of then-dictator Ernesto Geisel, who ordered “Operation Scorpion”.
In an interview with the daily Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper, Neira Barreiro said that the Brazilian political police ordered the assassination of Goulart by the Uruguayan Antisubversive Military Action Group (GAMMA), on the orders of dictator Geisel, who was in power from 1974 to 1979.
The ex-president, Goulart, died in Argentina in 1976, where he had been living since his ouster in 1964 by a military coup. The coup led to a dictatorship that lasted until 1985.
The ex-spy said that the so-called “Operation Scorpion” followed operations “Jakarta” and “Bandeirantes”, which persecuted Brazilian opponents of the dictatorships in the region before 1975.
Goulart headed a group of Brazilian politicians in favor of a negotiated exit of the military dictatorship.
The declarations of Neira Barreiro confirmed the existence of a repressive international network prior to Plan Condor.
Translation mine.
Well. I guess someone is going to have to change the official Goulart bio, which still erroneously lists his cause of death as a heart attack. By the way, that “official” cause has been disputed as long as Joao Goulart has been dead. And now his relatives are suing. The EFE news agency goes into more detail about it all:
“Jango,” as he was known, governed Brazil from 1961 to 1964, when he was deposed in a U.S.-backed military coup.
His 1976 death in Argentina, where he lived as an exile, was blamed on a heart attack.
But on Friday his family members said they were more convinced than ever that in reality their loved one was poisoned with pills placed in a medicine bottle by Uruguayan secret agents working for the Brazilian dictatorship.
Goulart’s death was effected “by order of the Brazilian military government in an international operation with the support of the dictatorships in the region,” son Joao Vicente Goulart said in an interview with Efe.
Jango was 57 when he passed away Dec. 6, 1976, at his country home near the Argentine city of Mercedes. His body was immediately transported to Sao Borja, in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, and buried without an autopsy.
[…]
The “living proof” that currently fuels the assassination thesis is a 53-year-old Uruguayan named Mario Neira Barreiro, a prisoner in the penitentiary in the suburbs of Port Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul.
Posing as a reporter, Goulart interviewed Barreiro a year ago for a documentary he is preparing about his late father.
Barreiro, a confessed criminal, gave indications of the alleged plot during an interview with the Uruguayan daily La Republica in 2002.
But this time he also related details of the domestic routine of the Goulart family in exile in Uruguay and Argentina.
“I don’t recall if we gave him Isordil, Adelpan or Nifodin. We managed to put a pill in the medications imported from France,” said Barreiro in the taped interview.
The poison, Barreiro said, was prepared by a Uruguayan doctor named Carlos Milles, who was later murdered in Montevideo to keep Goulart’s assassination a secret, he added.
One more fascinating chapter in the annals of Operation Condor. I’ll be watching the news for more of this, needless to say.
