Brazil
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The disagreements between the rival factions within the armed forces were not over power per se, but about what should be done with it. In the periods leading up to the selection of a new president, these rivalries intensified.39 General Castello Branco was no exception. Every single one of the military presidents succeeded to the presidency and left office amid a serious crisis. In spite of what is often said, President Castello Branco’s government was anything but moderate. It institutionalized the limitations imposed on the Legislature and the Judiciary and constructed the basis for the political repression that was to give the dictatorship such a long life. Even so, there were sections of the army that were dissatisfied. The Minister of War, General Artur da Costa e Silva, became the leader of the faction in favour of a more authoritarian government and stricter societal control. It was these dissidents who successfully aided General Costa e Silva in promoting his own candidacy.
President Castello Branco died on 18 July 1967, soon after he had left government. As he was returning from a trip to Ceará, he was in an aeroplane crash stemming from a strange coincidence. The small twin-engine plane he was travelling in entered into a collision course with a squadron of air force jets.40 His successor, General Costa e Silva, built a government seemingly tailor-made to meet the aspirations of those officers interested in determining the future of Brazil. Among his nineteen ministers, ten were from the armed forces and one of them, the Minister of Interior, General Albuquerque Lima, was the leader of the most radical faction in the army. Nevertheless, President Costa e Silva’s mandate was to end amid an even more serious military crisis.41 In August 1969 he suffered a stroke and was officially removed from the presidency due to illness. The armed forces now faced an impasse. They could swear the vice-president into office, the National Democratic Union deputy from Minas Gerais, Pedro Aleixo, but they rejected him on the grounds that he was a civilian, and also because he was a moderate with democratic tendencies. Rumours were rife, the various factions competed with each other to influence the next step. Pedro Aleixo was put under house arrest, and finally a solution was found. The Executive was handed over to a junta formed by the three military ministers. The solution only lasted for three months. Meanwhile the crisis had deepened. The navy and the air force refused to accept that the next president be appointed by the army; meanwhile, more radical factions supported the candidacy of General Albuquerque Lima.
Before the situation degenerated into anarchy, the army suggested General Émilio Garrastazu Médici, the director of the National Information Service, the national intelligence agency set up by President Castello Branco. He was a taciturn military bureaucrat, virtually unknown, and with no popularity among the troops. Brazilians only became aware of his existence on 6 October 1969, when his name was confirmed by the high command42 of the armed forces as president of Brazil.
When he completed his term of office in March 1974, President Médici chose his successor seamlessly: General Ernesto Beckmann Geisel. The last major crisis of the dictatorship occurred at the end of President Geisel’s mandate, in 1979. His War Minister, Sylvio Frota, aimed to succeed him.43 General Frota behaved as if he were the official representative of the army’s position. He disagreed with President Geisel’s policies. He had made himself the self-appointed spokesman for the officers who, diverted from their original functions, were required to work in the state apparatus for dissident repression. President Geisel came from a family of German immigrants. He had an explosive personality and was feared among his colleagues. He dismissed General Frota, forbade the generals from participating in the succession, and decided himself who the next president would be. Once again the candidate, General João Figueiredo, was the director of the National Information Service. There were no complaints from the barracks. The recurring crises within the armed forces no doubt influenced the choice of the military presidents, although they did not alter the dynamics of the dictatorship. The period was marked by the emergency powers, repression, controlled public information, and a conservative development and modernization economic plan.
The years of the dictatorship were a sombre time for Brazil.
THE DICTATORSHIP
Although the dictatorship was a succession of generals exercising the presidency with imperial powers, between 1964 and 1985, that power was shared with the ministries of Planning and of Finance. All the ministers were civilians from the Research and Social Studies Institute, and they controlled the entire economy: Roberto Campos, Octávio Gouvêa de Bulhões, Antônio Delfim Netto, Hélio Beltrão and Mário Henrique Simonsen.44 ‘The channel between the government and the business sector was entirely open,’45 Delfim Netto – Finance Minister between 1967 and 1974, and Planning Minister between 1979 and 1985 – confirmed fifty years later. The Finance Minister had complete control of the budget, which, in ordinary circumstances, would have been subject to approval by Congress. ‘The Finance Minister had the power to authorize any expense he thought fit,’ former minister Maílson da Nóbrega recalled, and added that Delfim Netto had ‘powers that would make a mediaeval king die of envy’.46 The dictatorship’s economic development project facilitated foreign investment, reduced the active role of the state, and increased the rate of growth. ‘We did it all. There was no force, neither the legislature nor the judiciary that could oppose our economic policies,’47 former minister Ernane Galvêas later confirmed. President Castello Branco’s government had built the economic and financial foundation that sustained the development model. It prioritized an incentive programme for foreign investment and for exports. This was achieved through the devaluation of Brazil’s currency, the cruzeiro, against the dollar. The programme was based on a strict stabilization policy: wage control, reduced minimum working age, elimination of ‘job security’,48 repression of trade unions and prohibition of strikes.49
In 1967, when General Costa e Silva took over the government, the economy began to grow. However, by that time working-class wages and middle-class salaries were feeling the impact of the economic squeeze. With the cost of living going up and wages frozen, in April 1968 around 1,200 workers at the Companhia Siderúrgica Belgo-Mineira occupied the plant and demanded a salary increase, above the government-established wages.50 The Companhia Siderúrgica Belgo-Mineira is a steel mill located in Contagem, an industrial town seventeen kilometres outside Belo Horizonte in Minas Gerais. The workers occupied the largest plant in the complex. Three days later the whole of Contagem came to a halt, with the number of workers on strike reaching 16,000. The Minister of Labour, Jarbas Passarinho, was forced to travel to the town and negotiate with the workers in person. As he left the plant, he was booed. The town was occupied by the military police, workers were arrested, the trade union closed down and, from then on, the company provided workers transportation directly to the plant from their homes. Anyone who refused the transportation was fired. The strikers had taken the military by surprise and the government had to negotiate. The strike had been planned in such a way as to make immediate repression logistically more difficult. The strikers did not picket, did not call meetings, and had very few conspicuous leaders. The only known participants were Ênio Seabra and Imaculada Conceição de Oliveira from the city’s steel workers’ union. The mobilization of the workers took place inside the factories, in a semi-clandestine way, in committees of between five and ten people, linked to each other through an internal network. The strike in Contagem ended fifteen days after it had begun with a wage increase of 10 per cent and some hope that it would be possible to confront the government’s wage policies in the future.
Three months later, in Osasco, in the São Paulo industrial belt, the workers at Cobrasma, whose main activity was steel and mechanical construction, laid down their tools.51 The strike organizers intended to set off a chain reaction among workers’ movements and trade unions all around the country to protest the dictatorship’s economic policies. As had been the case in Contagem, the Cobrasma workers had been mobilized through committees inside the factory and t
he support was massive. On the first day 10,000 workers went on strike. But this time the military had no intention of losing face. On the second day of the strike, Cobrasma was invaded by soldiers with machine guns and two tanks. After the invasion, the military police occupied the town of Osasco and around four hundred workers were arrested. Those leaders who managed to escape from prison went into hiding – including the president of the Metalworkers’ Trade Union of Osasco, José Ibrahim. The brutality worked, both as an instrument of coercion and dissuasion. For the next ten years there were no more strikes in Brazil.
The military were improving their methods of repression – inside the factories and in society at large – the economy had expanded and inflation, instead of rising, began to fall. The cycle of economic growth began which, at its height, surpassed anything that had been seen before. The government began to refer to it as ‘the Brazilian economic miracle’.52 There is no denying the miracle occurred; but it had a more mundane explanation. The ‘miracle’ was the result of a combination of factors, including the repression of the opposition and censorship of the media to prevent any criticism of the economic model; government subsidies for exports and their consequent diversification; privatization of the economy with an increasing number of foreign companies entering the market; and centralized government control of prices and wages.
Automobile industry production tripled, the supply of cement for civil construction dried up, and people earned a small fortune on the stock exchange – there was a month in 1970 in Rio de Janeiro when the volume of trade surpassed that of the entire year of 1968. However, the ‘economic miracle’ came with a price tag. The process was accompanied by an ever-increasing concentration of income in the hands of the few as a result of the strict wage controls that prevented any productivity gains from being shared with the workers. Another result was the dramatic increase in the foreign debt, which made the country more vulnerable to instability in the international market. Brazil had taken out loans in hard currency, with longer terms and lower interest rates, and the industrial sector had received credit from private international banks at floating interest rates. Brazilians would only grasp the extent of the country’s economic vulnerability in 1973, when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reduced the supply of oil, and the price multiplied by four times. There was no alternative but to continue buying it, and the ‘miracle’ came to an end. Unlike most Brazilians, the generals in the Executive and the technocrats in the Ministry of Planning knew the economic growth could not be maintained and that consequences such as these were inevitable. But no one took any action. In fact, the dictatorship benefited enormously from the results. From the somewhat cynical viewpoint of General Médici, who was president at the height of the growth cycle, the country was fine; it was the people who were not.
Dictatorships are a combination of arbitrary leadership, tenacious opposition, and a population that needs to survive – part of which remains silent either out of fear or resignation. While the ‘economic miracle’ lasted, the cost of income concentration was latent. Many people, especially among the urban middle classes, benefited from easy credit, new professional opportunities, and incentives to consume new products, including colour televisions, cassette tapes, Super-8 cameras and cars – the Corcel, Opala, Galaxie and Chevette. And to complete the happy expectations of Brazilians, wage earners could finally plan to buy their own home, with a mortgage from the recently created National Housing Bank (BNH). The ‘economic miracle’ reached its peak between 1970 and 1972. This economic success explains President Médici’s popularity, in spite of his leading the country during the worst period of political violence in Brazilian history. He received very little criticism and much applause. The increase in the state apparatus for repression during his government was immense, but that alone would not have been enough to keep him in office. Every government needs support in order to survive, and in Brazil’s case the ‘economic miracle’ was the source of citizens’ satisfaction with the administration. Three days after he took office, in 1969, President Médici restructured a communications department created by his predecessor – the Special Agency for Public Relations (AERP) – and turned it into a formidable political propaganda machine. The agency’s propaganda was creative, with no ostensive signs of political marketing. Their productions emphasized optimism, pride and national greatness. They celebrated Brazil’s racial diversity, integration and social harmony. All of these messages were contained in short films communicated directly to the public with artfully chosen imagery and popular, catchy melodies.53 The agency’s television propaganda was equally successful.
The military had a development project of major proportions and were determined to integrate the whole of the country. Brazil was transformed into an enormous building site, all duly noted and celebrated by the Special Agency for Public Relations. The most famous of these construction projects – the Transamazônica54 – was part of the economic development project conceived by the Research and Social Studies Institute and the National War College programme of internal security. It was a gigantic highway, planned to be 4,997 kilometres long, of which 4,223 kilometres were built (although the work was of very poor quality). It was intended to cut across the Amazon Basin from east to west, connecting Brazil’s northeast to Peru and Ecuador. The construction of the Transamazônica was the basis of an ambitious plan to settle the area, which included the dislocation of close to a million people in the region. The goal was to leave no part of the country uninhabited and, for the first time, to control the frontiers. The highway was inaugurated by President Médici on 27 September 1972,55 and used to promote a triumphant image of a country fully geared toward modernization whose population had a strong sense of identity. But the reality was rather different. The construction of the Transamazônica destroyed the forest, consumed billions of dollars, and even today there are many parts of it that are impassable due to rains, landslides and flooding rivers.
The project burned money that did not exist, which Brazilians would only discover in 1980, when the ‘miracle’ was over and inflation reached three digits – 110 per cent. In 1985, when the military regime finally came to an end, it left behind a huge national debt and a 235 per cent annual rate of inflation. In 1978 the economist Edmar Bacha, cautiously avoiding the censors, had baptized the country Belíndia (a combination of Belgium and India) in an article entitled ‘The Economist and the King of Belíndia: A Fable for Technocrats’.56 In Belíndia, national wealth was calculated such as to conceal both the extent of the concentration of wealth in developed areas (‘Belgium’), as well as the backwardness of those areas that were underdeveloped (‘India’), where hunger, abject poverty, low life expectancy and high levels of infant mortality prevailed.
SUFFOCATING TEMPERATURE
On 14 December 1968 the Jornal do Brasil, one of the most important daily newspapers, published an edition especially planned to surprise its readers. Among other oddities the newspaper published a headline on the front page that read ‘Yesterday was the Day of the Blind’. The weather forecast also appeared on the front page: ‘Stormy weather. Suffocating temperature. Air unbreathable. The country is being swept by strong winds.’ The day was actually hot and sunny with a bright blue sky. The weather forecast was the paper’s way of warning readers that the censors had been in their offices. That night the military government had begun an operation to stifle the Brazilian press.
The newspaper also warned readers that the situation had gone from bad to worse. At 10 o’clock on the previous night, 13 December 1968, the Minister of Justice, Luís Antônio da Gama e Silva, had addressed the nation on national radio and television. After a brief introduction he passed the microphone to Alberto Curi,57 who proceeded, in a grave monotone, to read the entire text of the Institutional Act no. 5. The act had twelve articles and was accompanied by Complementary Act no. 38, which closed the National Congress for an indeterminate period of time. The AI-5 suspended habeas corpus, freedom of expression
and freedom of reunion; it permitted peremptory dismissals, the annulment of mandates and citizens’ rights; and it determined that political trials would be conducted by military courts, with no right of appeal. It was imposed at a time of political unrest and increasingly hostile opposition activity. There had been student protests, strikes, pronouncements by pre-1964 political leaders, and the beginning of armed resistance by the revolutionary left. The pretext for these acts was the refusal on the part of Congress to carry out judicial proceedings against Deputy Márcio Moreira Alves. Mr Moreira Alves was accused of offending the armed forces in a speech given in the Chamber of Deputies on 3 September that year. He was a courageous man who had denounced in the Chamber – based on proof – dozens of cases of torture that had occurred in military barracks during President Castello Branco’s government.58 ‘When will the army cease to be a refuge for torturers?’ he asked. There had been no repercussions for him at the time because Deputy Moreira Alves had spoken to a virtually empty house. But it served as an excellent pretext for the military. The Minister of Justice asked for permission to take legal action against the deputy, but Congress refused, and the crisis was solved with the issue of the AI-5.59