History
Originally, the SNI was a civilian agency under the retired General Golbery do Couto e Silva. It provided Castelo Branco with an alternative intelligence source.
After the political dominance of Brazilian hard-liners, the SNI came under military control. The agency was the backbone of the regime's anti-communist actions. Although there have been secret police in Brazil since at least the Vargas era, military involvement reached new heights with the creation of the SNI. It grew out of the Institute for Research and Social Studies (Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais or IPES), which Couto e Silva had established to undermine the former Goulart government (1961-64).
In 1973, control over the domestic intelligence community with the opening of the Escola Nacional de Informações (EsNI or National Intelligence School) was established. The following year, the EsNI absorbed the Escola Superior de Guerra postgraduate intelligence course.
Supposedly, the EsNI did not train police agents and selected its own students. By 1980 some officers were saying that the EsNI would be as useful as the ESG to their careers.
Read more about this topic: National Intelligence Service Of Brazil
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“The whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)