Olímpio Mourão Filho (9 May 1900 – 28 May 1972) was a Brazilian military officer known as the author of the Cohen Plan, a forged document used to justify the Estado Novo coup in 1937, and, as head of the 4th Military Region/Infantry Division, as the precipitator of the 1964 coup d'état that installed the military dictatorship in Brazil. He reached the rank of army general and ended his career presiding over the Superior Military Court (STM) from 1967 to 1969.
As head of the secret service of the Brazilian Integralist Action (AIB), under orders from Plínio Salgado, he wrote the script for a seizure of power by the communists. In the hands of the government, the text was disclosed and falsely attributed to the Communist International as a real insurrection plan, thus justifying the adoption of dictatorial powers by Getúlio Vargas. Accusations of having served to implement the Estado Novo harmed his career and created lasting distrust among other officers, even though he was acquitted in an Army Justification Council in 1955.
He served in the logistics of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force and worked in telecommunications in the government of Juscelino Kubitschek. After defending the inauguration of João Goulart in the Presidency in 1961, in the following years he considered Goulart a threat to the political system and conspired for his overthrow while serving in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo and Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais. He claimed to have devised the "greatest conspiracy in the Americas", but his plans were only one part of the conspiracy activity and other conspirators sought to control him. In Minas Gerais, he had as allies his subordinate, general Carlos Luís Guedes, and governor Magalhães Pinto. He carried out Goulart's deposition when, before the date foreseen by the other conspirators, he moved his 4th Infantry Division from Minas Gerais in Operation Popeye, initiating the coup.
His role in the continuation and victory of the coup was minor. In the resulting military dictatorship, he was sidelined from positions of power by the other coup leaders and relegated to the position of justice of the Superior Military Court. During the dictatorship, he criticized the governments of Castelo Branco and Costa e Silva, having an erratic political position, at first a hard-line and later critical of authoritarianism. In 1979, years after his death, the publication of his memoirs by journalist Hélio Silva created great controversy, as they harshly attacked the other military officers.
Biography
Personal life The son of Olímpio Júlio de Oliveira Mourão, deputy and state senator, and Mariana Correia Rebelo Mourão, a full teacher at the Normal School of Diamantina, Mourão attended the Diocesan College of the city until he was expelled. He abandoned the study of engineering in Belo Horizonte to enroll in the Military School of Realengo in Rio de Janeiro in April 1918., MOURÃO FILHO, Olímpio. His father, an important situationist politician in Diamantina, helped Juscelino Kubitschek start his political career in the city.
Mourão had two daughters with Almira Linhares Mourão, who died on 6 July 1955. He later married Maria Tavares Bastos. His daughter Laurita Mourão (born 1926)Livronautas – Laurita Mourão . Consultado em 31 de dezembro de 2020. worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and published several books, including Mourão, o General do Pijama Vermelho (2002) about her father. She says Mourão was misunderstood in 1937 ("he was scapegoated and deceived") and in 1964 ("he was never in favor of closing Congress").Pinheiro, Daniela (Fevereiro de 2009). A amiga do hipotálamo. Piauí n. 29. Consultado em 31 de dezembro de 2020.
Mourão's pipe-smoking habit was reflected in the name of Operation Popeye.
Political and military career 1920s and 30s Mourão joined the Brazilian Army on 30 April 1918, at the Military School of Realengo, where he was declared an officer candidate on 18 January 1921. His class was known as the "alfalfa class", and included Castelo Branco, Costa e Silva, Amaury Kruel, Octacílio Terra Ururahy and Macedo Soares. In 1963 he called it a "little course for the mentally feeble" – everyone, including those who failed, passed to the second period to fill positions made vacant by the Spanish flu, and difficult subjects were withdrawn by Congress – he also noted that it produced a number of Ministers of War, interventors and other illustrious people. By his third year he was ranked eighth out of 98 infantry cadets.
He went to serve in the 14th Battalion of Caçadores, in Florianópolis, where he was promoted to second lieutenant on 11 May 1921 and first lieutenant on 31 October 1922. During this period, he fought the rebels who took over São Paulo in the 1924 revolt.
The Army struggled to qualify officers and thus additional military training was necessary for their career progression. In Rio de Janeiro, Mourão attended the Officer Improvement School in 1926 and the General Staff School (EEM) in 1928 and 1930, finishing eighth in his class. He then interned at the General Staff of the 1st Military Region. While attending EEM in Rio de Janeiro, he sided with the Liberal Alliance and the 1930 revolutionaries, participating in the conspiracy that launched the 24 October coup in the capital. The resulting military junta sent Mourão to Minas Gerais to advise the state president Olegário Maciel of the transfer of power to Getúlio Vargas.
He was promoted to captain on 15 August 1931 and to major on 25 December 1937. Until 1936, his performance was praised by his superiors and even by the Minister of War himself. It was probably during this period that he assumed his political side, dormant in 1924; in 1932 he was again on the side of Vargas, fighting the Constitutionalist Revolution since 19 July in the Paraíba Valley. As a reward, until 1936, he was liaison commissioner between the Ministries of War and Transport on the Central do Brasil Railroad. It was a more civilian position that expanded his contacts in society.
Integralism
Militancy Motivated less by doctrine and more by feelings against communism, which he saw infiltrating the Army in Santa Catarina, in 1932 Mourão joined the Brazilian Integralist Action. The following year, he promoted the movement in Minas Gerais with Plínio Salgado, Olbiano de Melo and Gustavo Barroso. In 1934, the latter became head of the Brazilian Integralist Action Militia's national department, in which Mourão was chief of staff, organizing it along military lines with his knowledge of the EEM. In Santa Catarina (he returned to the 14th BC as deputy commander, from 1936 to April 1937) he had contact with many Integralists – 39 of the 43 municipalities in the state had an Integralist nucleus. In 1937 he entered the Chamber of the Four Hundred, the advisory body of the national leadership of the AIB.
In his Instrução da Milícia (Instruction of the Militia) he explained the concepts of nation, State, form of government and regime; he dedicated himself to explaining and distinguishing, in fundamental principles, philosophical bases, political bases and economic bases, liberal democracy (liberalism), marxism and integralism. Finally, he discussed the role of the Armed Forces in an Integralist State, stating that they would be the two sides of the triangle on which the State and the Nation rest: Army, Navy, and National Militia. "The triangle is the base of the pyramid, which is the State and whose apex is God".
In Do liberalismo ao Integralismo (From Liberalism to Integralism) he declared that liberal democracy, an "absolutely bankrupt system", should give way to Integral Democracy, and the economic order should be subject to morality and promoter of social justice, features absent in the liberal economy.A Revolução de 31 de Março e o General Olympio Mourão Filho. Frente Integralista Brasileira. Consultado em 1 de janeiro de 2021. His thinking at the time also appears in Rumos do Estado Moderno (Directions of the Modern State), published in the magazine A Defesa Nacional (The National Defense): economic or professional suffrage (a dictatorship would be unfeasible) and state intervention in the economy and, to repel communism, in education.
When the AIB was succeeded by the Popular Representation Party (PRP) in the post-war period, Mourão had already left integralism. In order to leave no doubt about his distance from the PRP, he joined the Partido Orientador Trabalhista, a "puny party that existed only in imagination" that elected a councilor in the Federal District and had his mandate revoked. In his memoirs, Mourão referred to integralism as "something that has been overcome". Soon after the 1964 coup, he still had contact with Plínio Salgado, who acted in his favor in Congress.
Cohen Plan
Head of the AIB's secret service and called from Santa Catarina to the General Staff of the Army in Rio de Janeiro, in August 1937 Plínio Salgado asked Mourão to write "Information Bulletin No. 4" on guerrilla tactics and communist revolutionaries, in order to concentrate the attention of the Integralists on anticommunism and not on the upcoming 1938 presidential election. The resulting text began with a preamble clarifying that it was a material for debate and not an actual plan of the Komintern. Then, based on an article about the seizure of power by the communists in Hungary in 1919, it described how a communist revolution would be carried out in Brazil and the integralist reaction.
Plínio Salgado disapproved of the text, with its "massacres, fires, kidnappings, confiscation of private property, attacks on the clergy, appeal to sexuality", as exaggerated and unrealistic. Mourão was a subordinate of Gustavo Barroso in the militia and Salgado possibly associated the content with Barroso's anti-Semitism, a point of contention between the two. Disappointed, Mourão took the plan to general Álvaro Guilherme Mariante, justice of the Supreme Military Court, who suggested that he showed it to Góis Monteiro, head of the EME, but Mourão did not want to show it to anyone who was not an integralist. Mariante kept the document for several days before returning it., PLANO COHEN.
While Getúlio Vargas was planning his coup in September, the plan was circulating in high ranking circles and shortly afterwards the newspapers announced the discovery of the plan for an imminent communist coup, which was confirmed by the authorities (especially the EME). The explanatory preamble was not exposed to the public. On 1 October, Vargas requested a state of war. The fake communist plan created acceptance for his coup, carried out on 10 November and followed by the institutionalization of the Estado Novo dictatorship.
The coup was already being prepared long before and would not necessarily need the Cohen Plan to occur. Like other coup leaders, Eurico Gaspar Dutra later dismissed the document as a historical factor. But the Integralists did not deny the plan, creating the impression that they had helped to implement the Estado Novo, and in fact Plínio Salgado had given his support in September. Salgado suspected that the released plan was the one he had requested, but he did not want to demoralize the Army as it was necessary against communism. Mourão, on the other hand, confronted Góis, who told him to keep quiet. As seen below, the Cohen Plan's issue had serious implications for Mourão's career over the next twenty years. After the Estado Novo coup, he left the political scene. Vargas banned the AIB in December 1937, and the Integralist Uprising that broke out in reaction was quelled. Mourão did not participate in the revolt.
1940s and 50s