The Brazil that voted full executive power back to João Goulart in 1963 was not the same country that had elected him to the state assembly in 1947. The breakneck pace of population growth, economic growth, industrialisation and urbanisation had created the second-largest economy in the Americas, a country that was fast becoming a global power in its own right and whose population, long held back by underdevelopment and the negative self-image that came with it, found themselves more and more eager to take control of their own destiny. The car factories of suburban São Paulo were producing over a hundred thousand cars a year, bought by a rising middle class who could take their cars on a highway to almost anywhere in the country. More than a million Brazilian households owned a TV, on which they could watch Brazilian-made programming produced by any of three nationwide networks, whose names (Tupi, Record and Excelsior) reflected the rising tide of national confidence.
But all was not well. For all that the middle classes were prospering, that prosperity came at the price of constant runaway inflation. The efforts of the Vargas, Kubitschek and Goulart governments had kept the minimum wage rising in tandem with inflation, but that still meant the average Brazilian working-class family earned about the same amount in 1963 as they had in 1945. In a time of such rapid growth, this was a scandalous situation for the vast majority of the people to be in, and the free press and freedom of organisation meant that they knew it. On top of that, populist politicians like those aforementioned presidents had built their careers on the idea that they would fight for and with common Brazilian people. If workers’ self-organisation to elect a head of government was the highest form of democracy, then workers’ self-organisation to win more rights and better working conditions was surely also in line with the ideals of this brave new era.
This also answers one of the questions left unanswered by the previous chapters: when the PCB was banned, what did its former organisers go on to do? The answer, at least in the majority of cases, is that they became trade unionists. Over the Kubitschek years, the labour movement in Brazil underwent a radical transformation, as the old unions, tied to the PTB leadership, tightly controlled by the Ministry of Labour and limited to the manufacturing and transport sectors in the southeastern cities, gave way to a new generation of unions, many of which were led by former PCB cadres. These new unions organised across sectoral lines and all over Brazil, including government workers. Between 1958 and 1962, the number of strikes quintupled, with five nationwide strikes and nearly a hundred and fifty smaller ones in 1962 alone — and that growth was now driven primarily by states other than São Paulo and Guanabara, hitherto the main centres of union organisation. In August 1962, a national conference of new union leaders in São Paulo created the General Workers’ Command (Comando Geral dos Trabalhadores, CGT), a new trade union central that would fight for both political and social goals, including land reform and opposition to multinational involvement in the economy.
The CGT was not the most radical novelty of the Goulart era, though. For the first time, labour organisation was beginning to take root among the landless rural workers of the Northeast. Many of these were former slaves, and all lived in near-feudal conditions, selling their work for a pittance to (or leasing expensive, subpar land from) large latifúndios whose owners could still compel their tenants to work for them directly in a corvée-like system called cambão. Their existence was meagre and insecure, offering no protection either from the droughts that periodically wiped out harvests or from the whims of the landowner who could throw his tenants off their land with little warning. Ironically, it was urbanisation that helped bring about rural labour organisation, as migrants to the cities made the urban left conscious of the atrocious working conditions on the latifúndios and provided them with connections in the villages.
Over the Kubitschek years, so-called ligas camponesas (peasant leagues) sprung up all over the Northeast, quickly gaining a stronghold in the agreste regions of Pernambuco. Again, many of the leagues were founded by former PCB cadres, but the man who would become their leader was Francisco Julião, a lawyer from Recife whose sympathies lay with the left-wing opposition to Vargas which became the PSB. Julião was thoroughly middle-class, but was still hailed as a “saint” by the leagues, who were taking on somewhat religious overtones inspired by the rising tide of liberation theology. In 1961, a national agricultural workers’ congress was held in Belo Horizonte, at which Julião’s line of supporting immediate land reform clashed with the Communist line of prioritising the equalisation of rights for rural and urban workers without reaching a clear consensus. One of the first major legislative pushes by Goulart, once freed of the shackle of parliamentary government, was a law that vastly extended the rights of rural workers, including extending the minimum wage to them and requiring employers to offer paid vacation and work-free Sundays. This was a great victory for the leagues, but their main goal — the redistribution of arable land from the latifúndios to their tenants — remained unfulfilled.
But that was just the beginning. Over the course of 1963, as Goulart settled into the presidency, he began to unveil a programme of reformas de base, or “basic reforms”, which aimed to bring about a bottom-up transformation of Brazilian society. These included rural land reforms, but also measures to increase home ownership in urban areas, nationalise major industries, massively extend the public education system, and extend the franchise to illiterates and enlisted servicemen. The programme resembled that of Juan Perón in Argentina, or what Vargas had been trying to do ten years earlier (when he wasn’t trying to ratfuck the UDN, that is). Still, the usual suspects began to peddle fears that Goulart was going to turn Brazil into a dictatorship of the proletariat. There were strong hints that Goulart intended to restore the PCB to full legality, and that was more than enough to confirm him as a fifth columnist in the minds of his enemies.
Because it wasn’t just the workers who were organising on a level never before seen. The right, too, were growing stronger and better-funded by the day. A lot of that funding came directly from the United States, which took fears of a socialist turn in Brazil seriously, and fears of American business interests being seized under the Goulart administration’s reforms even more seriously. In 1961, the CIA contributed funds to the creation of the Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action (Instituto Brasileiro de Ação Democrática, IBAD), a hard-right think tank and campaign fund (something like a modern American SuperPAC) which funded 110 successful congressional candidacies in the 1962 election. This included around half of the UDN caucus, but also around a third of the PSD’s benches and even five PTB deputies. Both IBAD and the ESG (the major Army staff college), which was also heavily linked to American institutions, were increasingly dominated by coupist ideas — democracy, in their minds, had clearly shown itself to be a pathway to anarchy and mob rule. The people could be allowed to elect their leaders only so long as they did not choose to pursue their own material interests.
As hinted before, the battle lines over the Goulart administration were drawn across party lines. There were a few in the PTB who took IBAD funds and opposed the nomination of San Tiago Dantas (see the previous chapter), and a significant number of younger UDN deputies, dubbed the bossa nova faction, who supported Goulart out of a sense of economic nationalism. The PSD was possibly the most divided party of them all, which was appropriate given that it had almost no ideology to begin with. The young guard of the PSD, who had been instrumental in bringing Kubitschek forward for the presidency in 1955, now took the lead in setting up the Frente Parlamentar Nacionalista (Nationalist Parliamentary Front), which would become one of Goulart’s major support organisations, counting most of the PTB mainstream as well as the UDN bossa nova group among their members.
Still, Goulart would have his work cut out for him. More or less immediately after the plebiscite, the bottom went out of the Brazilian economy as foreign investors withdrew their assets in fear of nationalisation. GDP growth dropped by three quarters in a single year, even as inflation continued to skyrocket and severely restrict Goulart’s ability to act. When Goulart tried to respond by moderating his economic policies, a militant PTB left led by Leonel Brizola called him out for betraying the country to the Yankee imperialists, and began to organise the unions to pre-emptively resist any coup attempt. The peasant leagues were radicalising as well, and their activities prompted the landowners to begin arming themselves en masse.
With both Congress and the markets resisting his reforms, Goulart decided it was time to drop the hammer in February 1964. Aided by his supporters in the unions and the nationalist officer corps, he announced that he would be implementing the basic reforms by decree, and that he would announce the specific policies at a series of rallies to be held in Brazil’s major cities. On the 13th of March, at the Praça da República in Rio de Janeiro, the first of these rallies was held. Organised by the CGT, protected by the nationalist-dominated First Army, and featuring Brizola as well as Goulart on its list of speakers, the rally (known to history as the Comício do Central, since the meeting ground adjoined the Central Railway Station) was attended by nearly 150,000 people. Surrounded by a sea of red flags and union banners, Goulart announced that rural land not adequately used by its owner would now be subject to expropriation without compensation, and that his government was working on plans to extend the vote to all adults and to allow urban tenants to buy out their homes.
The next three weeks were, to say the least, a heady time for Brazil. Goulart’s mass rally scared the living daylights out of both his enemies and his erstwhile middle-class allies, who had been along for the ride but now feared losing their property to their tenants. On the 19th, a group of conservative Catholics in São Paulo organised the Marcha da Família com Deus pela Liberdade (the “Godly Families’ March for Freedom”), attended by nearly half a million people, which called for the restoration of family values and economic freedom and opposition to Goulart’s reform agenda.
On the 24th, a group of sailors in Rio de Janeiro mutinied/went on strike after the Navy Minister tried to arrest their union leaders for sedition, and Goulart’s response was to sack the Minister and announce an amnesty for the mutineers. The right-wing military leadership, who had already been plotting and biding their time for a while now, decided that there was no time better than the present. The coup was set for the end of March.
The first part of the coup was what was called Operation Popeye, in which the 4th Infantry Division, stationed in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, moved south to secure Rio. To their surprise, they faced no resistance from the units stationed between them and the city, and on the morning of the 2nd of April, they marched into the former national capital unopposed. They were aided in this by the United States Navy, which had sent a fleet led by the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal to Brazil in addition to a large amount of material aid. In this they were eagerly cheered on by Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, a liberal Democrat appointed by John F. Kennedy, who was nonetheless convinced that Goulart would turn Brazil into “the China of the 1960s” unless stopped.
Goulart had been in the city at the start of the operation, but abandoned it after receiving a phone call from one of the coupist leaders. General Amaury Kruel (yes, really) asked Goulart to publicly break with the left and outlaw the CGT as a condition for remaining in office. In response, the President is to have said he’d rather stick with his convictions, and advised the general to do the same by sending his troops out against the elected government. He flew to Brasília the next day, but soon realised that he had no friends left in the capital — Moura Andrade, who was still chairing the Senate, was already preparing a statement in support of the coup, and there was no chance that the nationalist caucus could be mobilised against it. So after gathering his wife and children, Goulart continued to Porto Alegre, where he and Brizola tried to recreate the conditions of the Legality Campaign, but the momentum was simply not on their side. Goulart holed up on his estancia for a couple of days before fleeing across the border to Montevideo, where he was joined by Brizola and a number of other supporters.
Back in Brasília, Moura Andrade and his allies duly promulgated their statement of support for the coup and declared the presidency vacant. It’s worth noting that they did all this while Goulart was still in the country, and as such had done nothing to “vacate” the presidency in fact except get chased out of the capital. Nevertheless, his opponents pressed on, electing President of the Chamber of Deputies Paschoal Ranieri Mazzilli to serve as acting president once again. By this point, it was pretty clear that the civilian politicians would not be able to rule the roost for much longer — Mazzilli served for a little over a week before Congress, pressured by the Army units out in force all over Brasília, elected Army Chief of Staff Marshal Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco to serve out Goulart’s term as President.
Castelo Branco was supposed to serve for about two years, clean up the political system, root out what he and his allies saw as the causes of Brazil’s failure as a democracy (of course, the only reason Brazilian democracy actually failed was because Castelo Branco, his allies and his friends in the Pentagon decided to overthrow it), organise fresh elections and then leave office. But by the time he was due to step down, the military was already beginning to get comfortable in power, and many of them foresaw an indefinite dictatorship. What was supposed to be two years turned into three, then seven, then ten, and finally twenty-one years, during which horrific abuses were carried out even as Brazil’s economy only kept growing. But that’s a story for another time.
(Sorry about the lack of maps, but as you can probably guess, not a lot of elections going on at this point in Brazilian history)
