Juscelino Kubitschek’s election had come down, above all, to the issue of economic development. His most famous election slogan had been 50 anos de desinvolvimento en 5 anos de mandato (“50 years of development in 5 years of government”), and in its shortened form, this slogan would resonate throughout his administration. His Programa de Metas (“Programme of Goals”) set out 31 key objectives for development, spread over six broader areas: energy, transport, food production, basic industry, education, and what was called the “synthesis goal” — a plan to spur regional development and free the government of regional bias by building a new capital deep in the cerrados of the Brazilian Midwest.
This was by no means Kubitschek’s idea originally — ever since the colonial period, the population of Brazil had been clustered along the coast, and ever since then, this had been seen as a problem by those in charge. The large, resource-rich interior was seen as the key to tapping Brazil’s economic potential, and the fact that no one (well, no non-indigenous people) lived there was seen as a national security risk — with no settlement, if Brazil’s neighbours wanted to take over the border regions, there would be no stopping them. The framers of the 1891 Constitution had included a provision allowing the federal government to seize land “near the geographic centre of the nation” for the construction of a new capital, partly for the reasons stated and partly to symbolise the renewal of the Brazilian nation — Rio de Janeiro being seen as too linked to the imperial system (the fact that the Old Republic was run by planters from São Paulo and Minas probably didn’t hurt either). The provision had been copied into the 1934 and 1946 constitutions, and Kubitschek, having grown up in a small town on the cerrado, made fulfilling it a keystone of his political career.
Plans for the construction of Brasília (as the new city was dubbed) started almost immediately once Kubitschek had taken office. In March 1956, a presidential decree created the Companhia Urbanizadora da Nova Capital (New Capital Construction Company) or Novacap for short, a public agency tasked with building the new capital, and in September a law passed by Congress granted it the financial means necessary to support construction. By then, a site in east-central Goiás had been selected, and a design contest was well underway to determine the overall city plan. In spring 1957, the modernist urban planner Lúcio Costa was announced as the winner of the contest, and his Plano Piloto was adopted as the official master plan for Brasília.
The plan laid out the new city in a shape variously described as a cross (symbolising the Catholic faith of Brazil’s colonial settlers and the Southern Cross in its national emblem), a bow and arrow (symbolising the area’s indigenous heritage) or an aeroplane (symbolising innovation and hope for the future). The east-west axis was laid out along a massive green boulevard and would house the main government buildings, while the north-south curved axis was divided into a series of numbered “superblocks” which would house the vast majority of the population as well as most commercial functions. The different functions of the two axes were underscored by their different layouts — the east-west axis was intentionally made imposing and monumental, while the north-west axis was made intimate and comfortable, with strict building height limits and only limited car traffic within the blocks. Each block was supposed to act as a distinct, self-contained suburb, an idea very much in line with the architectural zeitgeist. All housing was to be owned by the state and rented out to residents, with the ideal of creating a city without class distinctions. Costa’s plan was designed for a city of half a million inhabitants, and intended for the city to be built to that standard from the beginning rather than expand over time.
Costa also brought along his friend and colleague, the architect Oscar Niemeyer, who was perhaps Brazil’s best-known architect and had helped design the UN headquarters in New York. Niemeyer had already worked with Kubitschek during his time in local politics, which made the collaboration between the three men a natural fit. Over the next four years, Costa would refine and implement the urban plan, Niemeyer would design the key buildings of the new city, and Novacap’s engineers and master builders would put their work into action on the ground. Some 30,000 workers were shipped in from all over Brazil, but mainly from the impoverished Northeast (more on that in the next chapter), and construction was carried out at all hours of the day in order to get the city ready for the target completion date of 21 April 1960 (the anniversary of the mythical founding of Rome in 753 BC, and of the execution of Tiradentes, the leader of Brazil’s first republican rebellion, in 1792). To house the workers, temporary barracks dubbed cidades livres (“free cities”) were constructed, and when Brasília was opened on schedule to great fanfare, it almost immediately turned out that Costa’s very ambitious plan had in fact provided insufficient expansion opportunities for the number of people that flocked to the new city. Many of the cidades were kept in place, turning into low-income suburbs, which in a touch of dark irony means that the idealised city of the future with no class distinctions ended up coming with pre-built favelas.
I could easily spend an entire chapter on Brasília alone, but well, this is supposed to come with maps, so it’s probably worth giving a thought to Kubitschek’s other achievements in government. A truly enormous amount of new roads were built and/or paved during his five years in office, most famously the Belém-Brasília Highway, which was opened along with the new capital in 1960 and linked it to the mouth of the Amazon across 1,800 kilometres of undeveloped jungle and cerrado. Less visible than this, but arguably more economically important, were thousands of miles of highway across the Northeast and Midwest, bringing large-scale paved road networks to parts of the country outside the industrial south for the first time. To ensure that average people would be able to profit from this, Kubitschek also encouraged the growth of a domestic automobile industry. Of course, this being the 1950s, no such attention was paid to the railways, which were largely left to wither and die.
In general, Kubitschek did not continue Vargas’ nationalist economic policy. Petrobrás and Electrobrás remained under state ownership, and expanded their activities greatly during his term, but for the other sectors of the economy, the administration encouraged foreign direct investment as a way to spur quick development. It’s sort of hard to argue with the results — from 1955 to 1961, GDP per capita grew three times as fast as the regional average for Latin America, industrial revenue increased by 80 percent, steel production doubled, and production of transport materiel increased sixfold. As mentioned, a key sector promoted by Kubitschek was car production, and both Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen set up factories in the southeastern suburbs of São Paulo, a region dubbed the “ABC cities” (Santo André, São Bernardo and São Caetano). These three companies continue to dominate the Brazilian car industry today, and their quick establishment drove the Brazilian-owned Fábrica Nacional de Motores, formerly the country’s leading make, into bankruptcy by 1968.
This sort of shows the downside of Kubitschek’s development policy. All this public spending created a conspicuous budget deficit, and the inflation issue that had hobbled Dutra and Vargas only got worse and worse. By 1959, the annual rate of inflation was close to 40 percent. Alongside Minister of Finance Lucio Lopes and President of the National Development Bank Roberto Campos, Kubitschek developed a stabilisation plan which was unveiled in 1958, facing stiff resistance from all corners. The UDN, which had spent most of Kubitschek’s time in power getting increasingly red-faced with anger over the spending plans, particularly hating and condemning Brasília as a ridiculous waste of money that would put the government out of reach of the people, now condemned the stabilisation plan for failing to halt the development spending that they saw as the thing causing the problem to begin with. It also probably bears mentioning that the UDN’s key backers, the industrial elite, tended to benefit from high inflation as it allowed them to make a killing off currency readjustment and speculation while making credit extremely cheap.
Meanwhile, the trade unions smelled a big fat rat in any mention of “fiscal responsibility”. Under Vargas, they had won an enormous increase in the minimum wage, and Kubitschek continued to increase it to meet inflation. Now that the administration was turning to controlling inflation as its primary goal, many working-class people feared that their wages would be first on the chopping block, which would only make the impact of inflation worse for them. In addition, the PTB-aligned unions continued to fear the encroachment of the United States, fears that were vindicated in 1959, when Kubitschek’s government applied for aid from the International Monetary Fund. The government expected a loan of $300m from American banks, to which the IMF attached a slew of conditions that Kubitschek found totally unacceptable, and which eventually caused him to abandon the stabilisation plan altogether.
Midway through this, just as the plan was being rolled out, there were parliamentary elections. These paint a somewhat contradictory picture — in the Chamber, the three main parties essentially all stayed put, with the PTB making minor gains at the expense of the UDN depending on your chosen source (Portuguese Wikipedia, and thus my map, say they were smaller than Dieter Nohlen, Wikipedia’s usual source for historical election results, does). In the Senate, however, the PSD were absolutely slaughtered, winning only four seats (again, Nohlen claims there were six, but I can’t find any details backing his figures). Fortunately for Kubitschek, only a third of the Senate was up for election, and his PSD-PTB coalition retained its majority in both chambers. Still, the 1958 results showed that the PSD was vulnerable, and its position as Brazil’s largest party would only continue to fall into question over the next few years.
(If you’re wondering why there’s a Prime Minister listed, trust me, we’ll get there)
So in summary, Brazil under Juscelino Kubitschek was very much a land of contrasts. On the one hand, massive economic development, a rising standard of living, and loads of cool modern architecture getting built. On the other hand, spiralling inflation and uncertainty about how long the good times could really keep rolling on. Kubitschek was also dogged by the sort of corruption rumours that always seem to dog people like him — at one point, Time magazine reported that he had amassed the world’s seventh-largest fortune through graft and kickbacks, and one of the UDN’s major criticisms of Brasília was that it looked a lot like a way for Kubitschek and his friends to skim public contract money. These rumours were largely untrue, as it turned out — after Kubitschek’s death in the 70s, it was revealed that his personal fortune was very modest — but the sort of people who think “populist” is a bad word were pretty implacably opposed to him by this point.
Of course, they were never a majority of the electorate. The key power brokers in Rio — the Army, the party grandees of the PSD and PTB, and the big businesses — still mostly supported Kubitschek remaining in power, even if they disagreed with some aspect of his policies. In particular, the Army’s preference for legalism ensured that Kubitschek would be able to serve out his five-year term in peace. Marshal Lott, the leader of the counter-coup of November 1955, was made Minister of War by Kubitschek, remaining in that post until 1960. He quickly became the most popular and recognisable general in the country, and despite part of his popularity coming from his lack of political affiliation, the grandees of the PSD decided he should be their presidential candidate in 1960. Most likely they saw him as their best bet given their own lack of notable figures, but their decision would turn out to be a fatal misstep.
