#20358 - L5 Military Rule - Modern Latin American History

MILITARY RULE

Origins/causes

• Back to Vargas and suicide, 1954: why? Parallel moments

• Political polarisation: pro/anti-Vargas

• Economic problems: balance of payments; minimum wage; inflation; regional disequilibria

• Ideological framework: Cold War climate; role of state; extent of mobilisation

Parallel political crises, 1954 and 1964

• We can describe the causes of the coup as a collision of an economic crisis with a political crisis

• The economic crisis of 1964 was similar to that of 1954 – how to address the Balance of Payments deficits, how to fund economic development, and how to keep inflation down

• None of this could be done without increasing government spending, or without addressing structural inequalities

• The economy was still dependent on coffee in the 1950s, and when coffee prices fell on international markets, the balance of payments went into deficit reducing the capacity for government spending and causing inflation to rise

• In order to improve Brazil’s credit worthiness for international finance (commercial and governmental) and access foreign funding and thereby stablise the economy, “Vargas was forced to adopt a highly unpopular anti-inflation program.”

• Those with whom this program was unpopular were his voters and his party faithful – the Brazilian Workers Party (PTB)

• To retain their support, he had to take political decisions and actions that where “highly unpopular” with his opponents, namely the UDN and their military allies

• The problems in 1954 and 1964 were in essence twofold: questions of economic nationalism and economic equity

• These two key themes were therefore also the underlying causes of political polarisation and instability in both historical moments. In addition, the political divide was split along the same ideological and party political lines: the UDN and the PTB

• Faced with the same economic crisis in 1954 and 1964, Vargas and Goulart were presented with same political dilemma and unsurprisingly took very similarly political responses: a radical nationalist one

Vargas’s suicide

• The public mood and political direction had gone in the opposite direction to that which the UDN had wanted since 1945

• As a direct consequence of Vargas’s suicide, the UDN did not manage to secure a majority in Congress and could not win a presidential election

• The UDN won the presidential elections of 1960, however, the position of vice-president was won by the opposition, the PTB and João Goulart

1960 – 1961: Destabilisation

• Quadros did not remain in office for the full term. He resigned in the summer of 1961. His presidency had, though, started out well

• At the beginning of his presidency, Brazil was faced with high inflation and large debts to foreign countries

• In March 1961, and with IMF approval, Quadros's government announced an anti-inflation programme that simplified exchange rates and cut public spending

• The reforms meant Quadros was able to renegotiate Brazil’s foreign debts, and in return Brazil secured a total of 1.64 billion dollars of new loans

• This represented a breakthrough for the Quadros administration, as other Brazilian presidents and governments had repeatedly failed to renegotiate the debt.

• However, Quadros’s main campaign message was an anti-corruption one, and his symbol that of a broom

• He was going to sweep Brazilian politics clean of political corruption. This is likely to have been the source of his undoing as his attempts to reform Brazilian bureaucracy met with fierce opposition

• Unable to get his policies through congress, he resorted to passing measures by decree, using his executive powers

• This alienated his own supporters in government as well as his opponents

• Other actions made his opponents even more distrustful of him, especially his sympathies for Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union

• He had also awarded Che Guevara the Cruzeiro do Sul, the highest honour that Brazil could award a foreigner

• It is generally believed that Quadros’s resignation was an attempt to get his executive powers strengthened

• But if it was, this did not happen. Instead, his resignation was accepted, and he went into exile, only returning to Brazil in the 1980s and after the political amnesty of 1979

Jango: meltdown

• As Vice President, João Goulart was Quadros’s legal successor

• The military moved to prevent Goulart taking over the presidency, announcing that they would not permit it

• In their view, Goulart was an internal threat to stability, an agent of international communism who would promote a communist infiltration of Brazil, and a takeover of the Brazilian political system

• But the view of this high-ranking military faction was not shared by the Brazilian people, and even those in government preferred to respect the constitution rather than prevent Goulart taking office.

• In addition, Goulart’s supporters launched a campaign – known as the ‘legality movement’ – in defense of Goulart’s legal right to the presidency. It was led by his brother-in-law and ‘PTB firebrand’ Leonel Brizola

• The campaign also had the support of the Third Army in Goulart’s home state of Rio Grande do Sul.

• Those in the military who were in the legalist camp, although not Goulart supporters, stepped in to negotiate a deal that would allow Goulart to take up the presidency and maintain some political stability rather than a breakdown of democracy

Political deadlock, economic crisis (Sept 1963 – Mar 1964)

• Goulart was encouraged by those in the radical nationalist camp into thinking that this was not only a necessary political strategy but a winning one too

• Another way of describing the political left at this stage is as ‘crowded’; it comprised two communist parties (pro-Soviet Union and pro-China), the students union, trade unions, peasant leagues, and radical groups within the Catholic Church

• Moreover, the PTB was split too. Goulart had contenders within his own party, the most prominent of which was Miguel Arrães, the governor of Pernambuco

• The political situation was inflamed further by rumours of government backed attempts to arrest Arrães and Carlos Lacerda, the UDN governor of Guanabara

• Meanwhile, the military were concerned about divisions and lack of discipline within their own ranks.

• There was, for the example, an attempt to unionise enlisted men within the navy by a sailor who was also a member of the student unions (UNE)

• The sailor was disciplined by the Navy minister, to which Goulart responded by dismissing him, then replacing him with an ally by bringing an admiral out of retirement

• He then went before the nation on TV on 30th March, defending his actions and those of the sailor in question

• The first troops moved on Rio de Janeiro, arriving from Minas Gerais, with the full cooperation of the UDN governors of both

• The troops Goulart sent to crush the rebellion against him, joined them. Appeals for popular support failed to materialise, and instead, Goulart fled from Rio to Brasília, and then Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul, the exile in Uruguay

MILITARY RULE

Military coup proponents and supporters

• MILITARY GENERALS (hardliners vs soft-liners), UDN

• Brazilian business elite

• US & foreign business elite

• The main opposition party, the UDN, had formed in opposition to Vargas in the elections of 1945 and remained just as opposed to Goulart in the 1960s

• The UDN had never had one of their own politicians win in a presidential election. Instead, they had either lost or backed a candidate in a collation, as they had done with Jânio Quadros in 1960

• The Brazilian business elite supported the coup not just on account of the social unrest in the form of strikes, demonstrations and street-battles, but they were also concerned about the radical economic nationalists agenda, and the failure of the stabilisation programme

• Finally, the US and foreign business interests shared the concerns of many Brazilians who supported the coup. But clearly they had their sights on the hemispheric political trends in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution

Military rule: presidents

• From 1964 to 1985, Brazil was governed by a succession of authoritarian regimes, each headed by a four-star general

• But there were divergences within the military about the type of government that should be in place, and initially at least, whether this was a temporary corrective or if Brazil was not ready for democracy

• In the literature about the period these differences within the military are usually described as ‘hardline’ and ‘softline’

• And, as military rule continues, these differences emerge around key themes: about the extent of political participation, about the role of repression, and ultimately about how long the military should stay in politics and how it should leave when it does

Brazilian government in aftermath of coup

• Some of the changes Perreira refers to took place immediately after the coup while other happened later on during military rule.

• The military moved quickly to purge the political system and process of all vestiges of the previous administration, and rid key institutions of those who had been on the wrong side of the coup

• This meant that all politicians lost their political immunities, while others such as Kubitschek and Goulart, were stripped of their political rights entirely

• Kubitschek was a senator for Goias at the time and the military evidently wanted to eliminate him as a potential candidate for future presidential elections which some at that time thought would take place and soon

• In addition, the judiciary, higher education, federal and municipal governments, and the military ranks were purged too of those who were believed...