The Prickliest Pundit

The knock on the door came shortly after midnight, but Brazilian Journalist Helio Fernandes was not surprised to find the three army officers standing in the hall. "You are under arrest," said the captain in charge. Fernandes asked to see the warrant. The captain's only reply was: "This is the army!"

ernandes, who has made a career of offering himself as his country's fastest-moving journalistic target, had been tipped off. He had already called a hasty press conference and told fellow newsmen the army was after him. "There is no arrest warrant," he told them. "The War Minister has no power to arrest me because I am not a military man." He was hauled off to a barracks, anyway, and placed under guard -- out of sight, sound and print for six days.

Secret Memos. Fernandes' transgressions were hardly a secret. In his col umn in his own Tribuna da Imprensa (circ. 50,000), he had printed verbatim transcripts of two top-secret memos from the new War Minister to his field commanders--one a warning that army demands for a whopping pay raise, which the military has since received (see THE HEMISPHERE), were really a ruse to create a "prerevolutionary climate," the other an order to punish any armymen caught supporting a general then under arrest. "Rare are confidential, secret or reserved matters I am not informed of the very next day," Columnist Fernandes crowed.

It was a typical Fernandes performance, the kind that has lifted him to his position as prickliest political pundit in all Brazil. Starting out at 19 reporting for Rio de Janeiro's O Cruzeiro, he bounced from paper to magazine to paper, always making a success, always eventually quitting after a scrap with the boss.

In 1955 he began a career as political insider, first as campaign manager for President Juscelino Kubitschek, later as confidant to President Janio Quadros. Meanwhile, he edited A Noite, the government-owned paper, put out a magazine singlehanded, then became a political columnist before taking control last December and making himself publisher, editor and director of Tribuna da Imprensa.

Through the years he sharpened his typewriter on fact, rumor and wild gossip, a melange that he now serves up at three-column length every day. His comments on politics and politicians are studiously uninhibited. A recent column started out with a take-off on the country's current President: "A surprising story is going around--Joao Goulart has decided to govern the country. Sources, despite their usual reliability, did not mention two things: 1) Where did Senhor Goulart learn to govern? 2) Where did he get enough energy to come to this conclusion by himself?" Act of Despotism. Fernandes got away with the attack. But the country's new War Minister, General Jair Dantas Ribeiro, got sore when Imprensa carried his two memos; he got even madder when he read Fernandes' followup, Page One commentary: "Those two confidential dispatches had no secret. They just disclosed the War Minister's immense capacity for being contradictory and vain." That did it. The army claimed Fernandes had exposed a secret code as well as violated Brazil's military penal law, and the country was split down the middle arguing the issue of freedom of the press.

Last week the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision freeing Fernandes. The confident columnist had already bought his ticket back to Rio where he promptly called a press conference. "I will continue to publish any information of interest, be it of a military nature or not," he said. Then he sat down and wrote about his arrest and army interrogations. He was not about to forgive and forget. He called his story "Diary of an Act of Despotism."

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