Back to Exile

Barely a month ago, Juscelino Kubitschek, the ex-President who had been stripped of his political rights, returned to Brazil from 16 months of self-exile in Paris. Only he knows what he hoped to accomplish. Arriving immediately after gubernatorial elections in which his P.S.D. party scored impressive victories, he might even have expected his dramatic reappearance to trigger a popular counterrevolution against President Castello Branco's revolutionary government. What it provoked was the anger of the linha dura (hardline) military officers behind Castello Branco and a harsh new Institutional Act (TIME, Nov. 5), which dissolved all political parties and effectively put Brazil under rule by decree. Kubitschek himself was hauled before a military tribunal for such intensive grilling about corruption during his 1956-61 term that he wound up sick abed with high blood pressure.

Last week Kubitschek gave it all up as a bad try. After arranging his visa through the U.S. embassy, he flew away once again--this time to exile in the U.S. The departure eased much of the tension created by his return, and probably ends his own ambition to regain the presidency. Leaving Rio, the 63-year-old Kubitschek said that he would not be back until things had cooled off, which might take "a month, a year or 20 years."

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