The arbitrary measures issued by his government in April 1977, which became known as the Pacote de Abril (April Package), postponed indirect elections for governors until 1982 and altered the composition of the electoral college in favour of the National Renewal Alliance (Aliança Renovadora Nacional, or ARENA). For the radio and television campaigns, President Geisel created what the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) referred to as the ‘deaf-mute’ rules. On television the candidates were only allowed to show a passport-size photograph, with their name and a brief curriculum vitae – no message of any type was allowed. The April Package also changed the composition of the Chamber of Deputies, increasing the number of representatives from the smaller states, where National Renewal Alliance support was stronger. President Geisel also created what became popularly known as the ‘bionic senator’ – a senator who was indirectly elected by the same electoral college that chose the state governors. The nickname was a reference to the television series ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’, whose hero, a cyborg, had artificial powers created by advanced technology.
Back in 1973, when President Geisel was waiting to be appointed president of Brazil by an electoral college selected for precisely that purpose, a group of twenty congressmen – known as the ‘authentic group’ of the Brazilian Democratic Movement – out of determination to form a true opposition party, used the very rules of the dictatorship to nominate one of their party leaders, Ulysses Guimarães, to run against General Geisel.7 It was an act of astuteness that showed a great sense of opportunity, even though the sole purpose of the electoral college was to ratify the government candidate. The nomination of a Brazilian Democratic Movement candidate appeared a waste of time. And worse, it ran the risk of demoralizing the party, should the nomination be viewed as capitulation, and unintentionally legitimizing the emergency powers of the dictatorship. And yet, the congressmen were right to make the nomination. It was clear that the Brazilian Democratic Movement strategy was not to really win the election, but rather to reaffirm its status as the opposition, find loopholes in the campaign rules, and mobilize the public at political rallies. Ulysses Guimarães adopted the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s line ‘Navegar é preciso, viver não é preciso’ (‘Navigation is vital, living is not’) as the slogan for his ‘anti-candidacy’, as he defined it in a memorable speech given at the party convention. Then he and his candidate for vice-president, Barbosa Lima Sobrinho – a liberal-minded politician and journalist who had been federal deputy and governor of Pernambuco – travelled around Brazil calling for the restoration of democratic values. They visited fourteen states, helped to structure the Brazilian Democratic Movement nationwide – the number of party offices increased from 786 to 3,000 – and increased coverage of the opposition’s activities in newspapers and magazines. The anti-candidacy required conviction and personal courage when it came to confronting the truculence of the National Renewal Alliance governors. In Salvador, Bahia, for example, the airport was surrounded by armed military police with dogs. But the threats did not work. Ulysses Guimarães’s anti-candidacy put an end to the former opposition strategy of protest, casting blank votes, and opened the way for the victory of the Brazilian Democratic Movement in the 1974 congressional elections. The party got four million votes more than the National Renewal Alliance for the Senate, and won 161 seats in Congress, compared to 203 for the National Renewal Alliance. The Brazilian Democratic Movement obtained a majority in the Legislative Assemblies of important states, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul. The role of the Brazilian Democratic Movement was no longer in doubt, and when General Geisel’s victory in the electoral college was announced, Ulysses Guimarães turned to the deputy beside him and said with a wry smile, ‘Now the fun begins.’
The Brazilian Democratic Movement confronted the dictatorship with a handful of courageous deputies, a remarkable president – Ulysses Guimarães – and a very clever slogan: ‘Vote for the MDB – you know why.’ The reform of the political party system, in 1979, was the last chance for the Geisel-Golbery team to phase out the plebiscite, the result of the extreme polarization between the government and the opposition. Their goal was to weaken the opposition by splitting it into a number of different parties, and to open the way for a new party, one that would not be so closely associated with the military government. Five new parties participated in the 1982 elections: the PMDB (the MDB under its new name, the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement); the Social Democratic Party, essentially a revamped version of the National Renewal Alliance; the Brazilian Labour Party (PTB), reinvented as a government sidekick; and two new opposition parties, the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) and the Democratic Labour Party (Partido Democrático Trabalhista, or PDT), founded by Leonel Brizola to combine the principles of the 1960s socialist movement of social democracy.8 In the 1982 elections the military finally got a dose of their own medicine: for the first time since the 1964 coup, they had lost their majority in Congress.
President Geisel’s style may have been imperious and authoritarian, but he knew exactly how he wanted to handle the abertura – the transition. For this he relied on two very able political operators, General Golbery de Couto e Silva and Petrônio Portella, then senator for Piauí and president of the Senate. The former worked from the inside, creating the strategy for a controlled abertura, while the latter – long-winded but crafty and discreet – knew the inside workings of Congress well and was a skilled negotiator. He became the intermediary between the government and moderate sectors of the opposition. Starting in 1978, Mr Portella and General Couto e Silva began a series of meetings, both with leaders of the Brazilian Democratic Movement and with representatives of civil institutions such as the National Congress of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB), the Brazilian Lawyers’ Association (OAB) and the Brazilian Press Association. They wanted to open negotiations over the opposition’s most urgent demands, and to assess the feasibility of a gradual re-democratization process, to be conducted in stages.
The armed forces intervened in public life in 1964, and remained in power for twenty-one years, because they thought it was in their interest as an institution, but also – and this is still the case – because they believed they acted in the best interest of Brazil. Such conviction lends the armed forces a sense of autonomous authority. While evaluating how to relinquish direct control of the Executive, they were also concerned with protecting their own interests. One of their demands was that the intelligence-gathering institutions be maintained. They also stipulated that all those who had engaged in political repression remain untouchable – there would be no retaliation. They required that weapons industry incentives that had been in effect since 1964 be maintained, as well as those incentives considered of key importance for state security, such as telecommunications and information technology.9
No one laid a finger on the military when they left power, nor has anyone done so since. But the armed forces lost prestige and legitimacy in the public mind. Moreover, their strategy failed. They did not maintain control over the process of re-democratization, nor did they substitute their government with a civilian government aligned with their ideas. None of the generals engaged in the abertura process had ever intended a complete return to democracy. Using the argument that Brazil had never had a truly democratic government, General Golbery de Couto e Silva, for example, refused to discuss democratization proposals and would not hear of restoring aspects of the 1946 Constitution. General Figueiredo agreed with him, but his approach was more didactic, ‘There are sweet oranges, blood oranges and navel oranges. They all have different flavours, but that doesn’t mean they’re not oranges […] There are different democracies too,’ he explained to newspaper reporters from Folha de S. Paulo in 1978. And he concluded, ‘You tell me, are the people ready to vote? […] Can Brazilians vote properly when they have no notion of hygiene?’10
There were a number of reasons why the military failed to replace the dictatorship with another authori
tarian regime. The most obvious is that they lost their trump card – a successful economy. At the end of the Geisel government, Brazil had one of the largest and most integrated industrial economies of any developing country, but the country had suffered the impact of the increase in oil prices and all its consequences: the volume of exports fell and international interest rates rose, accompanied by the foreign debt. Inflation was astronomic: in 1983 it reached an annual 211 per cent, and in 1984, towards the end of the Figueiredo government, 223 per cent. This had a severe effect on the daily lives of wage earners and the middle classes: prices were shooting up, government spending was out of control, the economy was in recession, and unemployment was rampant.11
FOR DEMOCRATIC FREEDOMS
The economic situation aggravated the polarization of society, but the opposition had also changed the rhythm, form and language of political confrontation with the dictatorship. In March 1973 a student, Alexandre Vannucchi Leme, was kidnapped, tortured and killed in a building that housed the Internal Operation Detachments (DOI) and the Operation Centres for Internal Defence (Codi) in São Paulo.12 He was a student at the University of São Paulo, a leader among university students in the city, and active in a revolutionary organization – the ALN. He was kidnapped while on the University of São Paulo campus (Cidade Universitária). His death caused a general outcry and the student movement took to the streets again. Three thousand students attended the Mass in memory of their murdered colleague, which was celebrated in the main São Paulo cathedral (Catedral da Sé) by the highly respected cardinal Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, one of the leading human rights activists in Brazil.13 The police surrounded the University of São Paulo, put up barriers in strategic points of the city, and set up a war apparatus in front of the cathedral. However, those who managed to get through the blockade and into the cathedral had an unforgettable experience. Twenty-four priests celebrated Mass with Cardinal Arns, a Mass that touched the entire country. Just before the communion, singer-composer João Lufti (Sérgio Ricardo) walked up to the altar and, accompanying himself on the guitar, sang the song ‘Calabouço’ for the first time, thus associating the murder of Mr Vannucchi with that of Edson Luís de Lima Souto, who had been shot dead five years previously in the Calabouço student canteen in Rio de Janeiro.
Although the events of 1973 marked the beginning of the more systematic organization of the opposition, the real turning point came in early November 1975, a week after the death of the journalist Vladimir Herzog, once again in the DOI-Codi building in São Paulo. Mr Herzog was a respected professional who directed the news department at São Paulo’s TV Cultura. When the police came to arrest him on 24 October, he said he would proceed to the Internal Operation Detachments the following morning, because he needed to finish the next edition of the news. At 8 o’clock the following morning, Mr Herzog arrived at the DOI-Codi building. That same day, in the afternoon, he was found dead in his cell.14 Vladimir Herzog died under torture and this time the military had no way of getting rid of the body – all the staff at TV Cultura knew he had gone of his own accord to the Internal Operation Detachments building. The military officials had no alternative but to forge a suicide. The commander of the Second Army issued an official note informing the country that Vladimir Herzog had committed suicide in his cell, using a strip of cloth – which he did not have with him – with his knees bent and his feet on the ground.
By 1975 the fraudulent suicides announced by the military had become routine. Almost five months prior to Mr Herzog’s death, Lieutenant José Ferreira de Almeida had supposedly committed suicide in the same cell, also using a strip of cloth that he did not possess, and with his body in the same position. Approximately two months after Vladimir Herzog’s murder, the police produced an identical story to explain the death of factory worker Manoel Fiel Filho in the DOI-Codi building. Mr Fiel Filho was the thirty-ninth case of a political prisoner who had committed suicide during the dictatorship, and the nineteenth to hang himself – in two of these cases the detained men had apparently hanged themselves sitting down.15 Vladimir Herzog, Lieutenant José Ferreira de Almeida and Mr Manoel Fiel Filho were victims of a major repression offensive carried out by the Army Intelligence Centre (CIE) aimed at neutralizing the Communist Party.16 During the campaign, more than two hundred people were arrested in São Paulo and sixteen of the party leaders killed. The offensive was a part of President Geisel’s strategy to control the abertura process and to expose the connections between the Communist Party and deputies of the Brazilian Democratic Movement. But Mr Herzog’s death led to a large-scale reaction, led by the Professional Journalists’ Union of the state of São Paulo, which denounced the farce of the alleged suicide and launched a protest movement against illegal imprisonment, torture and murder. Mr Herzog’s widow, Clarice, and their two sons, Ivo and André, refused to bury the body immediately and remain silent, as the army had instructed them. Rabbi Henry Sobel reaffirmed the denunciation that Vladimir Herzog had, in fact, been assassinated by having his body interred at the centre of the Israelite Cemetery of São Paulo, and not against the walls as dictated in cases of suicide. Mr Hertoz came from a Jewish family that had emigrated from Yugoslavia to Brazil to escape the advance of Hitler’s troops.
The shot backfired. Approximately 30,000 students brought São Paulo’s main universities to a standstill. A broad front began to mobilize against the dictatorship, formed by the Brazilian Democratic Movement, the Journalists’ Trade Union (ABI), the students’ movement, the Brazilian Lawyers’ Association and the National Congress of Brazilian Bishops. With virtually no planning, the mobilization went on for several days and resulted in an ecumenical worship held at the cathedral. The service was officiated by four religious leaders – rabbis Henry Sobel and Marcelo Rittner, Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns and Presbyterian minister Jaime Wright, in addition to a special guest who officiated from the altar, Dom Helder Câmara, Archbishop of Olinda and Recife. Around 8,000 people openly defied the dictatorship by attending the service. A silent, indignant multitude filled the nave, the steps and the square. At the same time, in Rio de Janeiro, 700 journalists squeezed into the auditorium at the Journalists’ Trade Union, in a silent tribute to the memory of Vladimir Herzog. ‘There are moments when silence speaks louder,’ Dom Helder Câmara told a journalist after the religious ceremony. And in a single sentence, he summed up the strength of what had just happened: ‘Today the ground beneath the dictatorship began to shake. It’s the beginning of the end.’17 Dom Helder was not mistaken. The ecumenical service in memory of Vladimir Herzog was a turning point. Brazilian society began to recover access to public space and the forces of the opposition began to form a network of alliances to fight against the dictatorship. The key demand that united the opposition forces was for a return to a legally constituted state and for the restoration of citizens’ rights. From that point on the opposition movements were to advance persistently towards democracy, not towards the controlled abertura proposed by the generals.
The opposition united under a single slogan: ‘For democratic freedoms’. Emphasis shifted from the armed struggles of the 1960s to a return to legal forms of conducting politics.18 From this point on, the opposition began to outline the direction that re-democratization would take, gradually adopting a different view of democracy itself. Democracy was no longer considered a means to an end – socialism, for example – but an end in and of itself. People began to advocate democracy as the best form of government for Brazil.
It took another ten years for the last generals of the dictatorship to depart from the seat of the federal government – the Palácio do Planalto. And the re-democratization process jogged along in fits and starts, but the opposition was changing the path of transition. First, they incorporated many diverse voices from across society, apart from underground organizations and groups from the left. Second, the core of the opposition movement had become less rigid and more accommodating to distinct forms of activism.
One of the most active citizens’
rights movements emerged in the outskirts of São Paulo, from associations that were almost invisible to the government, but typical of communities completely abandoned by the authorities. These associations included mothers’ clubs, residents’ groups and health committees. Meetings generally took place in the parish halls of local churches and were supported and protected by the structure of the Comunidades Eclesiais de Base (CEBs – Basic Christian Communities).19 The communities were first organized in 1970 and they soon became centres for the dissemination of Liberation Theology. They were made up of small groups of Christians led by a priest. There were Bible readings meant to awaken a sense of community and encourage group participation in constructive actions for change. By the mid-1970s there were thousands of Basic Christian Communities active throughout Brazil, in cities and in the interior. They often took on leadership roles in their communities. These organizations spawned new social movements throughout the decade – the Cost of Living Movement, the Friends of the District Society, the Favela Associations – and were essential for organizing participation in large-scale campaigns to put pressure on the dictatorship.
Encouraged by the civil rights movement, several political activist groups emerged in the 1970s, including the Unified Movement of Blacks against Racial Discrimination (MMUCDR), the Centre for Brazilian Women (CMB) and Somos (We are), a gay rights group. Such organizations added a new dimension to the fight for democracy. Many of them produced publications that combined the demand for recognition of diversity with the introduction of new categories, such as gender and sexual orientation: Nós Mulheres, O Lampião da Esquina and Sinba.20 These publications were just a small part of a far broader journalistic and political movement whose common denominator was the intransigent opposition to the military dictatorship. Between 1964 and 1980 about 150 such small-scale newspapers were published in Brazil. Many of them had innovative layouts and provocative texts, although not all of them had regular editions. They were called the ‘dwarf press’ due to their limited circulation and diminutive size, and ‘alternative’ since they expressed critical positions that contrasted with the editorial line of the country’s major newspapers.21 But they were also ‘alternative’ in the sense that these publications opted for political confrontation in a difficult scenario.
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