While Brazilian presidential front-runner Jair Bolsonaro’s overt embrace of authoritarianism may seem aberrant to many foreign observers, it differs only in degree from decades of United States influence in Latin America. Declassified Central Intelligence Agency and State Department records from the midst of the Brazilian military dictatorship reveal an official US policy of support for the very brutality Bolsonaro intends to revive.

Records from the CIA’s declassified CREST archives shows how Efraín Ríos Montt’s coup first took the Agency by surprise, with the U.S. government later embracing his violent counterinsurgency campaign, with Secretary of State George Shultz praising it as “impressive progress in human rights.”