Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Read Online Free Page A
Author: Samantha Power
operation code-named “Brother Sam,” four U.S. Navy oil tankers and one U.S. aircraft carrier sailed toward the Brazilian coast in case the generals needed help. 2
They didn’t. President Goulart had some support in the countryside, but much of the public had tired of him. On March 29 the front-page headline of the Rio newspaper Correio da Manhã declared “ENOUGH!” The next day it proclaimed “OUT!” 3 A force of ten thousand mutinous Brazilian troops marched from the state of Minas Gerais toward Rio. Goulart ordered his infantry to suppress the revolt, but they chose instead to join the coup, and Goulart fled with his wife and two children to Uruguay.
Young Sergio was no more political than most teenagers. His focus was on keeping up with his studies (he would finish first in his high school class), following the Botafogo soccer team (which that year would share the prestigious Rio-São Paulo Championship), and chasing girls on the Ipanema beach, just two blocks from his home. But his relatives and schoolteachers had led him to believe that Communism would be bad for Brazil and the military could be trusted to restore order. Brazil’s generals had taken power in 1945, 1954, and 1961 and had ruled benignly and only briefly each time. Since the leaders of the coup promised to hold elections the following year, he joined his family and friends in initially cheering the military takeover.
“THEIR TRANQUILLITY HAS DISINTEGRATED”
Arnaldo Vieira de Mello, Sergio’s father, had grown up in a farming family in the agricultural hinterland of Bahia, Brazil’s northeastern province. 4 Arnaldo and his four siblings had been sent away to a Jesuit boarding school in Salvador, the province’s capital. After attending university in Rio, Arnaldo worked as an editor and war commentator at A Noite (“The Night”), a leading newspaper at the time. He was determined to pass the entrance exams for the Brazilian foreign ministry, which he did in 1941. So poor that he could afford neither books nor notebooks, Arnaldo did all of his reading at the Rio public library, squeezing his notes onto the palm-sized forms used to order library books. He carried around plastic bags filled with stacks of such forms and arranged the bags by subject area.
In 1935 Arnaldo met Gilda Dos Santos, a seventeen-year-old Rio beauty. He quickly befriended her mother, Isabelle Dacosta Santos, an accomplished painter, and her father, Miguel Antonio Dos Santos, a man of many talents who was well known in Rio as a writer of musical theater, a French and German translator, and a poet who ran a jewelry store with his brothers. “Arnaldo is getting engaged to my father,” Gilda joked to friends. The young couple married in 1940 in Rio, and Gilda gave birth to a daughter, Sonia, in 1943 and then to Sergio on March 15, 1948.
The Vieira de Mellos lived a peripatetic existence typical of diplomatic families. In 1950 Arnaldo, then thirty-six, moved his wife and two children from Argentina, where young Sergio had spent his first two years, to Genoa, Italy. In 1952 Arnaldo was posted back to Brazil, where Sergio lived until he was nearly six. Arnaldo was next sent back to Italy to work at the consulate in Milan, where Sergio and Sonia were enrolled in the local French school. In 1956, the year of the Suez crisis, the family lived in Beirut, and in 1958 they finally settled in Rome, where they lived for four years, one of the longest consecutive stints Sergio would spend in a single city in his entire life.
Arnaldo Vieira de Mello was a charismatic and highly cultured man. “Audacity is the winner’s gift,” he liked to say, as he urged his son to be bold in his intellectual and personal pursuits. But his own career stalled, and he never earned the rank of ambassador. Frustrated by this professional plateau, he became an increasingly heavy scotch drinker.When he brought the family back to Rio in 1962,
They didn’t. President Goulart had some support in the countryside, but much of the public had tired of him. On March 29 the front-page headline of the Rio newspaper Correio da Manhã declared “ENOUGH!” The next day it proclaimed “OUT!” 3 A force of ten thousand mutinous Brazilian troops marched from the state of Minas Gerais toward Rio. Goulart ordered his infantry to suppress the revolt, but they chose instead to join the coup, and Goulart fled with his wife and two children to Uruguay.
Young Sergio was no more political than most teenagers. His focus was on keeping up with his studies (he would finish first in his high school class), following the Botafogo soccer team (which that year would share the prestigious Rio-São Paulo Championship), and chasing girls on the Ipanema beach, just two blocks from his home. But his relatives and schoolteachers had led him to believe that Communism would be bad for Brazil and the military could be trusted to restore order. Brazil’s generals had taken power in 1945, 1954, and 1961 and had ruled benignly and only briefly each time. Since the leaders of the coup promised to hold elections the following year, he joined his family and friends in initially cheering the military takeover.
“THEIR TRANQUILLITY HAS DISINTEGRATED”
Arnaldo Vieira de Mello, Sergio’s father, had grown up in a farming family in the agricultural hinterland of Bahia, Brazil’s northeastern province. 4 Arnaldo and his four siblings had been sent away to a Jesuit boarding school in Salvador, the province’s capital. After attending university in Rio, Arnaldo worked as an editor and war commentator at A Noite (“The Night”), a leading newspaper at the time. He was determined to pass the entrance exams for the Brazilian foreign ministry, which he did in 1941. So poor that he could afford neither books nor notebooks, Arnaldo did all of his reading at the Rio public library, squeezing his notes onto the palm-sized forms used to order library books. He carried around plastic bags filled with stacks of such forms and arranged the bags by subject area.
In 1935 Arnaldo met Gilda Dos Santos, a seventeen-year-old Rio beauty. He quickly befriended her mother, Isabelle Dacosta Santos, an accomplished painter, and her father, Miguel Antonio Dos Santos, a man of many talents who was well known in Rio as a writer of musical theater, a French and German translator, and a poet who ran a jewelry store with his brothers. “Arnaldo is getting engaged to my father,” Gilda joked to friends. The young couple married in 1940 in Rio, and Gilda gave birth to a daughter, Sonia, in 1943 and then to Sergio on March 15, 1948.
The Vieira de Mellos lived a peripatetic existence typical of diplomatic families. In 1950 Arnaldo, then thirty-six, moved his wife and two children from Argentina, where young Sergio had spent his first two years, to Genoa, Italy. In 1952 Arnaldo was posted back to Brazil, where Sergio lived until he was nearly six. Arnaldo was next sent back to Italy to work at the consulate in Milan, where Sergio and Sonia were enrolled in the local French school. In 1956, the year of the Suez crisis, the family lived in Beirut, and in 1958 they finally settled in Rome, where they lived for four years, one of the longest consecutive stints Sergio would spend in a single city in his entire life.
Arnaldo Vieira de Mello was a charismatic and highly cultured man. “Audacity is the winner’s gift,” he liked to say, as he urged his son to be bold in his intellectual and personal pursuits. But his own career stalled, and he never earned the rank of ambassador. Frustrated by this professional plateau, he became an increasingly heavy scotch drinker.When he brought the family back to Rio in 1962,
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