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Between March 31st and April 1st sixty years ago, the Brazilian armed forces, with the support of some governors and the United States, organized a coup d’état that put an end to the government of President João Goulart, whom they accused of being at the service of communism. That day some generals established a dictatorship that lasted 21 years, which was characterized by the succession of five military governments and which persecuted and made thousands of people disappear: hundreds of political opponents and more than 8 thousand indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon.
The 1964 coup was engineered by civilians and military personnel who united to overthrow President Goulart. Three years earlier Goulart had been chosen as vice president by Jânio Quadros, elected in the 1960 presidential elections with almost 50 percent of the votes. But Quadros’s declarations of sympathy towards Fidel Castro in Cuba, the promise to replicate the Cuban agrarian reform also in Brazil, the decision to decorate the Argentine revolutionary and guerrilla fighter Ernesto Che Guevara and the intention to resume relations with the Soviet Union they aroused the distrust of the same parties that had supported him. Faced with growing opposition, Quadros resigned after just over two hundred days in government.
This opened a profound political crisis. In theory it was up to Vice President João Goulart to take over the leadership of the government, but at the time of Quadros’ abandonment, Goulart was in China where he had met Mao Zedong. In his absence, the hostility of the Brazilian armed forces grew and also of those political parties, supported by bankers, landowners and the urban middle classes, who saw in Goulart a new communist threat due to his closeness to workers and unions.
An attempt was therefore made to prevent his inauguration and Congress was forced to abandon presidentialism and transform the Brazilian political system into a parliamentary one.
João Goulart signs as the new president of Brazil, Brasilia, September 8, 1961 (AP Photo)
To circumvent the veto on his inauguration and obtain recognition from Congress, Goulart accepted a constitutional amendment which reduced the prerogatives of the President of the Republic and which provided for the establishment of a Prime Minister. However, the economic crisis and political instability allowed President Goulart to call a referendum. In January 1963, more than 80 percent of voters said “no” to parliamentarism and presidentialism was restored. Goulart, having returned to full power and supported by public opinion, initiated an agrarian reform and an education reform, defended workers’ trade union rights and in a famous speech on 13 March 1964, during a demonstration of around 100 thousand people, he announced the nationalization of the oil companies and committed to carrying out a series of reforms against poverty and inequality.
The world, meanwhile, was in the midst of the Cold War. Goulart was increasingly considered a threat to the United States, which was pursuing a very aggressive policy throughout the continent: at the end of March the government of US President Lyndon Johnson ordered ships and planes to be positioned along the Brazilian coast, ready if necessary to intervene.
Between March 31 and April 1, 1964, Brazilian army tanks, led by part of the armed forces and with the support of some governors, began to head towards Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro. Legitimist and rebel soldiers prepared for the clash. At the beginning, the armed forces that remained loyal to the government were in the majority, but then they gradually and more and more began to join the coup. The situation therefore turned to the disadvantage of Goulart who decided not to react. He was deposed and fled to Uruguay.
People fleeing in the streets of Rio de Janeiro during clashes between soldiers who remained loyal to the government and coup plotters, April 1, 1964 (AP Photo)
On April 3, 1964, the president of Congress declared the presidency vacant and on April 15, Marshal Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco became president.
Castelo Branco banned strikes, censored the media and outlawed all political parties, creating in their place a government party, the Aliança renovadora nacional (ARENA) and an opposition puppet, the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB). The new Constitution also granted the president extraordinary powers and the repression began.
In foreign policy, the regime supported Portuguese colonialism in Africa, developed trade relations with apartheid South Africa and carried out an economic project of modernization and expansion by accepting loans from international financial institutions.
Military troops towards Rio de Janeiro, April 2, 1964 (AP Photo/Erno Schneider)
After Castelo Branco (1964-1967), the military men Artur da Costa e Silva (1967-1969), Emílio Garrastazu Médici (1969-1974) and Ernesto Beckmann Geisel (1974-1979) succeeded each other as President of the Republic, while Brazil went through a period of very fast but unbalanced economic development because it depended on foreign countries and the influx of foreign capital, especially from the United States. Some great works were built: the Itaipú hydroelectric dam on the Paraná river on the border with Paraguay, the Rio-Niterói bridge and a long road that crossed the Amazon.
The Amazon was at the center of the economic-political projects of the dictatorship. The generals began to make propaganda for deforestation, to create government bodies for the development of the area, to guarantee financing and tax incentives for those who wanted to move their farms to the region, defined by the dictatorship as “the largest pasture in the world“, and to expropriate the Indians of their lands, forcibly removing them, voluntarily spreading diseases, arresting them, killing them or exploiting them, in conditions similar to those of slaves, for the construction of roads or in mines.
In 2014, Brazil’s National Truth Commission (Comissão Nacional da Verdade in Portuguese) concluded and made public a relationship relating to crimes committed during the dictatorship in which it is written that more than 8 thousand Indians they were killed during the dictatorship. The report also established that the violations of human rights in that period and the elimination of opponents were not isolated acts or “excess zeal” of some soldiers, as had been claimed up to that point in the official reconstruction of the facts, but practices systematics conceived and organized by the military government.
As in Argentina during the dictatorship that began in 1976, in Brazil there were structures within which the regime’s military, trained in the United States and the United Kingdom, tortured prisoners indiscriminately.
At the end of the 1970s the left began to reorganize itself politically and the Workers’ Party of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, who is now president of Brazil, was born. At the beginning of the 1980s, the effects of the economic boom which had kept national growth constantly above 5 percent per year for almost a decade began to wear off, leaving room for employment crises, increasingly marked inequalities and demonstrations in favor of return to democracy. In August 1979, the new president João Figueiredo promulgated an amnesty law for political crimes, dissolved ARENA and MDB (the two parties created by the regime after the 1964 coup) and allowed the formation of new political parties.
– Read also: Sócrates and the experiment of Corinthian democracy
In 1985 the direct election of the President of the Republic returned (Tancredo Neves became the first non-military president after more than 20 years), the right to vote was extended to illiterates and all parties were legalised. In 1986 the new Congress was elected, which also assumed the function of Constituent Assembly. The new Constitution was promulgated in 1988.