February 4, 1957. About 6,000 Brazilian Army men participated, in relay, in the Suez Battalion during its ten-year presence in Sinai Peninsula. The definitive return of the forces to Brazil took place on June 13, 1967, after the Six Day War. Seven Brazilian soldiers died during the years of Brazilian military presence there. Military dictatorship With the resignation of Jânio Quadros who succeeded Kubitschek, a new institutional crisis opened up, exacerbated by the Cold War context, and in late March-early April 1964, the Brazilian Army (then led by General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco) seized power in the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état—its third—establishing dictatorship that lasted 21 years. The military regime was politically aligned with the interests of the United States government, and its rule was rife with human rights abuses.The coup of 1964 was the first of a series of coups d'état in South America that replaced democratically elected governments with military regimes. These dictatorships dominated South America until the 1980s. In this period, the Brazilian Army employed harsh means to suppress militant dissident groups: changing the law, restricting political rights, harassing and pursuing dissidents; and militarily, with support of police forces and militias, proceeding with methods of counter-guerrilla and counter-insurgency warfare to defeat the guerrilla movements that tried to combat the regime by force. The urban guerrillas were active in Brazil between 1968 and 1971, while in the rural areas the two main movements were subdued by the Army, one in the region where today are the Caparaó National Park (1967) and the other one in the region of Araguaya River (1972–74). Internationally, in 1965 the Brazilian Army joined forces with US Marines intervening in the Dominican Republic in Operation Powerpack. During the 1970s, strengthened interchange and cooperative ties with armies from other South American countries giving and receiving advisement about counter-guerrilla and counter-insurgency methods, as for example in the Operation Condor, a procedural coordination to find, capture and eliminate political dissidents in mainland. From Geisel period, the third Brazilian dictatorship sought greater independence in its foreign policy, leaving of automatically align with the US interests, especially in relation to sub-Saharan Africa and Middle East. In the mid-1970s, despite the dissent annulled (by elimination, detention or exile), the leftist guerrillas defeated and the legal opposition tamed, repression was not reduced. This added to the vices and the wear and tear of years of dictatorial power, plus the effects