1964 Brazilian coup d'état
The 1964 Brazilian coup d'état was the overthrow of Brazilian president João Goulart by a military coup from March 31 to April 1, 1964, ending the Fourth Brazilian Republic and initiating the Brazilian military dictatorship. The coup took the form of a military rebellion, the declaration of vacancy in the presidency by the National Congress on April 2, the formation of a military junta and the exile of the president on April 4. In his place, Ranieri Mazzilli, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, took over until the election by Congress of general Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, one of the leaders of the coup.
Democratically elected vice president in 1960, Jango, as Goulart was known, assumed power after the resignation of president Jânio Quadros, in 1961, and the Legality Campaign, which defeated an attempted military coup to prevent his inauguration. During his government, the economic crisis and social conflicts deepened. Social, political, labor, peasant, and student movements, along with low-ranking military personnel, rallied behind a set of "base reforms" proposed by President Goulart. He met growing opposition among the elite, the urban middle class, a large portion of the officer corps of the armed forces, the Catholic Church and the press, who accused him of threatening the legal order of the country, colluding with communists, causing social chaos and weakening the military hierarchy. Throughout his tenure, Goulart had faced numerous efforts to pressure and destabilize his government and plots to overthrow him. Brazil's relations with the United States deteriorated and the American government allied with opposition forces and their efforts, supporting the coup. Goulart lost the support of the center, failed to secure the approval of the base reforms in Congress and, in the final stage of his government, relied on pressure from reformist movements to overcome the resistance of the legislature, leading to the peak of the political crisis in March 1964.
On March 31, a rebellion broke out in Minas Gerais, led by a group of military officers with support of some governors. Loyalist troops and rebels prepared for combat, but Goulart did not want a civil war. The loyalists initially had the upper hand, but mass defections weakened the president's military situation. He traveled successively from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília, Porto Alegre, the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, and then to Uruguay, where he went into exile. By April 1, the coup leaders controlled most of the country, securing Rio Grande do Sul on the 2nd. In the early hours of April 2, Congress declared Goulart's position vacant while he was still within Brazilian territory. Efforts to defend his presidency, such as a call for a general strike, were insufficient. While some sectors of society welcomed the self-proclaimed "revolution" by the military, others faced severe repression. The political class anticipated a swift return to civilian rule, but in the following years an authoritarian, nationalist, and pro-American dictatorship took hold.
Historians, political scientists, and sociologists have offered various interpretations of the event, viewing it both as the establishment of a military dictatorship and the culmination of recurring political crises in the Fourth Brazilian Republic, similar to those in 1954, 1955, and 1961. On the international stage, the coup was part of the Cold War in Latin America and coincided with several other military takeovers in the region.
Terminology
After taking office, Castelo Branco defined the process that brought him to power as "not a coup d'état, but a revolution". The term "revolution" also appears in the first Institutional Act. This concept of revolution is more inspired by the pronunciamentos which overthrew a government and claimed to reaffirm popular sovereignty, rather than by a radical break with the established order, as in the Russian Revolution of 1917. It remained in use among the military during and after the dictatorship. However, for Ernesto Geisel, an Army officer who served as president from 1974-1979, what happened was not a revolution, because a revolution is in favor of an ideal and the 1964 movement was just "against Goulart, against corruption and against subversion". Gilberto Freyre praised what happened as "a 'white revolution', promoting political and social order".Current historiography uses the term "coup" for the process. There was a capture of state bodies by military force, and the new owners of power were above the previous legal order. This can be seen in AI-1's preamble — "constitutional processes failed to remove the government", and the "victorious revolution defines legal norms without being limited in this by the normativity prior to its victory". The seizure of power also occurs in a revolution, but in its modern sense this is followed by "profound changes in the political, social and economic system". What happened in Brazil was defined as the defense of the established order against disorder. The term counterrevolution is used by some military officers and academics, with both positive and negative connotations. There is also the term "countercoup". Rejection of the term "coup" to place the event in a positive light, as may take place in present political discourse, is evaluated as revisionism or negationism.
The classification of the coup as "civil-military" is widespread and is not recent. One of the first authors to use it was René Armand Dreifuss, in 1981; however, the term was used in the sense of "business-military", referring to specific civilians, and not generically to civilians as the entire non-military population. Since at least 1976, several authors have called the event a "political-military", "business-military" or "civil-military" "movement" or "coup". "Civil-military" is used because civilians not only supported, but also carried out the coup. The relative importance of the military was greater in the final stages and in the realization of the coup. It could only begin with the deployment of troops. Firepower, available armaments, vehicles employed, and troop size were important and purely military considerations, even though there was no combat.
Background
Political
The democratic period that began in 1946 after the ousting of Getúlio Vargas was marked by opposition between national-statists and liberal-conservatives, divided by their attitude towards foreign investment, alignment with the United States and state intervention in the economy and labor relations. In three moments — Getúlio Vargas' suicide in 1954, Marshal Lott's counter-coup in 1955 and Jânio Quadros' resignation in 1961 — some military personnel and politicians from the liberal-conservative bloc attempted coups, creating serious crises that neared civil war, but they did not have enough support in society and in the Armed Forces. In 1964, the conflict was between the same blocs, but the coup found sufficient basis to succeed. Given previous coup attempts, what happened in 1964 was not solely a result of the immediate situation.The three major parties were the Brazilian Labor Party, the National Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party. The PTB represented Vargas' labor legacy, the PSD was born out of Vargas' political machine, and the UDN came from Vargas' opposition. Increasing urbanization gradually expanded the PTB's votes. The PTB and PSD were allies for most of the period. The UDN represented the right, the PTB leaned to the left and the PSD was in the center.
The 1960 election installed Jânio Quadros as president, supported by the UDN but positioning himself above the parties, and João Goulart, from the PTB, as vice-president. Jânio and Jango were on opposing tickets, since in the electoral system at the time the president and vice-president were voted on separately. Once in power, Jânio isolated himself and, after a short time in office, he resigned in August 1961, probably in a political maneuver to have his resignation refused and to return strengthened to office. He counted on the strong rejection to his vice-president, who was on a trip to China, among the military. Jânio was popular among the military, and Jango, an old foe. In 1954, when Goulart was Vargas' Minister of Labor, he was already considered very leftist and was dismissed from office due to the "Manifesto dos coronéis".
Jânio's maneuver failed, and his resignation was accepted. But rejection to Goulart did materialize when the three military ministers, among them Odílio Denys, the Minister of War, vetoed the vice-president's return to the country and inauguration. Leonel Brizola, governor of Rio Grande do Sul, began the "Legality Campaign" to overturn the veto. He received widespread support across the country, and general José Machado Lopes, commander of the Third Army, joined the cause of constitutional succession. Both leftists and conservatives formed a coalition opposing the military ministers. Conservatives devised a solution to the crisis: Jango would take office, but under a new Parliamentary Republic, in which his powers were reduced.
The next presidential election was scheduled for 1965. The strongest pre-candidates were Juscelino Kubitschek, for the PSD, and Carlos Lacerda, governor of Guanabara and staunch oppositionist, for the UDN. The PTB's best options would be Brizola or Goulart himself, but the law did not allow re-election or the candidacy of relatives.
Socioeconomic
Both Jânio and Jango inherited from Juscelino Kubitschek a modernizing but unbalanced economy and were unable to overcome the Brazilian economic difficulties of the early 1960s, especially the growth of inflation and the deficit in the balance of payments. Inflation rose from 30.5% in 1960 to 79.9% in 1963 and 92.1% in 1964. Brazil's GDP grew by 8.6% in 1961 and only 0.6% in 1963. Wage erosion concerned both the middle and working classes. The failure to overcome the economic crisis was due in part to pressure from domestic and external interest groups. Increasing costs of living boosted the organization and activity of trade unionism. There were 430 strikes in the period from 1961 to 1963, compared to only 180 from 1958 to 1960. The General Workers' Command, which emerged outside union legislation, organized the "first strikes of an explicitly political nature in Brazilian history".According to a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute there were food shortages, pushing inflation and drawing attention to the countryside. The country was more agrarian than at present: in the 1960 census, only 44.67% of the population lived in cities. In Brazil's Southeast, this figure reached 57%, and in the Northeast, only 33.89%. The land had highly concentrated ownership and was worked with outdated technologies. Social mobilization also reached the countryside, where land invasions and violent conflicts took place. The Peasant Leagues, concentrated in the Northeast, reached their peak and radicalized, calling for "land reform by law or by force" in place of the moderate path proposed by the Brazilian Communist Party. They went into decline after 1963 due to the regularization of rural unionization by the government and the organization of unions by the Catholic Church and the PCB.
The period witnessed an intense popular mobilization. Unionists and members of the Leagues joined other members of the left. They were heterogeneous but united in their defense of banking, fiscal, administrative, urban, land and university reforms, collectively known as "base reforms", "in addition to extending the right to vote illiterates and enlisted ranks of the Armed Forces", legalizing the Communist Party, maintaining an Independent Foreign Policy, and achieving "control of foreign capital and a state monopoly of strategic sectors of the economy". Both the left and Goulart sought an alliance to achieve said reforms while simultaneously seeing themselves as autonomous actors. The left distrusted Goulart, heavily criticizing his efforts to conciliate with political forces to his right.
In the Armed Forces, movements of low-ranking personnel such as sergeants and sailors clashed with officers over internal demands, such as the rights to run in elections and to marry, and also advocated for reforms. There were organized intellectuals, and some Catholics formed the Popular Action. Students campaigned in the National Union of Students. The PCB was well organized and successful in the unions in cooperation with the PTB. Leonel Brizola stood out within the political class, attracted fame with the expropriation of American companies and had many followers. He unified groups in favour of the base reforms into the Popular Mobilization Front and mobilized his political base into the .
In the opposition, an important development was the rise of the Brazilian Institute of Democratic Action, linked to the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Institute of Research and Social Studies, which brought together the "cream of Brazilian business community". Beyond carrying out ideological propaganda, these organizations were a center of conspiracies.