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$Unique_ID{bob00122}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Brazil
Chapter 1E.   The Interregnum}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Jan Knippers Black}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{president
quadros
kubitschek
goulart
congress
foreign
military
party
candidates
economic}
$Date{1982}
$Log{}
Title:       Brazil
Book:        Brazil, A Country Study
Author:      Jan Knippers Black
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1982

Chapter 1E.   The Interregnum

     Vargas' suicide electrified the nation and turned opinion completely
against those who had opposed him. Lacerda went into hiding and soon left the
country entirely. Delivery trucks of opposition newspapers were burned, and
mobs assaulted the United States embassy. Much of this violence came in
response to the suicide note left by Vargas, which deliberately took a
strongly leftist and nationalist position. Some doubts have been expressed
about the note's authenticity, although most observers accept it as Vargas'
own. The note, which significantly was addressed to Goulart, blamed
international economic interests, foreign enterprises, and national groups
allied with them as the forces that drove him to suicide. It movingly told
the Brazilian people "I gave you my life and now I offer my death." The note
concluded, "I leave life to enter history." The political reaction to the
suicide prevented the getulista opposition forces from capitalizing on the
president's death, and Vice President Joao Cafe Filho was sworn in as
president. Cafe Filho was rather more conservative than Vargas, however; he
included in his cabinet some figures associated with the UDN, especially a
finance minister who supported orthodox economic and financial policies.

     The elections of October 1955 precipitated a new crisis. Although the
president and vice president ran separately, there was a ticket system under
which presidential and vice-presidential candidates generally campaigned
together. For the election of 1955, the two parties founded by Vargas, the
PSD and the PTB, formed a coalition consisting of Juscelino Kubitschek, the
governor of Minas Gerais, as the PSD candidate for president, and Joao Goulart
as the PTB candidate for vice president. The anticommunist elements of the
military and middle class were furious at the candidacy of Goulart, whom they
regarded as the leader of left-wing infiltration.

     The UDN and the small Christian Democratic Party (Partido Democratico
Cristiano-PDC) nominated Juarez Tavora as their presidential candidate.
Tavora, a former tenente and collaborator with Vargas, had subsequently broken
with Vargas at the time of the proclamation of the Estado Novo and had been
active in the conspiracy that led to Vargas' suicide. The situation was
complicated by the candidacy of Barros, the populist leader of Sao Paulo, and
of Plinio Salgado, the fascist leader. Feelings ran high during the election.
The anticommunists, frustrated because Vargas' suicide had denied them the
power that his overthrow would have brought, concentrated their fire on
Goulart. Goulart, a vacillating left-wing opportunist, was depicted as the
Kremlin's leading Brazilian agent. In the election, Goulart won the vice
presidency with 40 percent of the vote; Kubitschek won the presidency with
36 percent of the vote to 30 percent for Tavora, 26 percent for Barros, and
8 percent for Salgado.

     The narrow margin of victory encouraged the right wing. Lacerda again
went on the attack, launching a virulent campaign that called on all true
patriots to put a stop to the communist attempt to seize Brazil by preventing
the inauguration of the elected president and vice president. Ironically, it
was the UDN, heir of the liberal constitutionalist tradition, that was calling
for a coup, while the two parties begun by the dictator Vargas represented
constitutional legitimacy.

     The war minister, General Henrique Teixeira Lott, made clear that
regardless of personal political feelings, he would stand by the
constitutional rules and would not countenance any attempt to interfere with
the inauguration of Kubitschek and Goulart. On November 1 Colonel Jurandir
Mamede, one of the authors of the "Colonel's Manifesto" of February 1954,
made an inflammatory speech calling for a coup. Lott decided that Mamede had
exceeded the permissible bonds for an officer on active duty and should be
disciplined. Because Mamede was on the staff of the Superior War College
(Escola Superior de Guerra-ESG), he was under the direct authority of the
president rather than that of the war minister, and the president had to make
the decision.

     On November 3 Cafe Filho suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized.
The president of the Chamber of Deputies, constitutionally next in the line
of succession, was Carlos Luz, a member of the PSD from Minas Gerais but an
opponent of Kubitschek; he was sworn in as interim president. On November 9,
at Luz's first cabinet meeting, Lott requested that the president authorize
disciplinary action against Mamede. Luz refused, whereupon Lott submitted his
resignation. Realizing that this would make possible a coup to prevent the
inauguration of Kubitschek and Goulart and concluding that Luz had led him to
resign to facilitate such a coup, Lott mobilized the army command in Rio
before his resignation was made public and on November 11 staged his own
"preventive" coup.

     Luz was deposed as president, and the Chamber of Deputies voted to
install the next in line of succession, Nereu Ramos, the presiding officer of
the Senate. The vote was along party lines, the PSD and PTB voting in favor
and the UDN, against. Subsequently, Congress refused to allow Cafe Filho to
resume his presidential powers when he was released from the hospital on
November 21. Instead, it approved state of siege powers for the Ramos
government-essentially a facade behind which the military and Lott were in
command-until the new president could be inaugurated.

President Juscelino Kubitschek

     Elected with little more than one-third of the vote and opposed by an
important segment of the military and political establishments, the future of
the Kubitschek administration seemed dim indeed. Kubitschek, however, was to
become one of only two freely elected presidents to complete their terms in
the half-century following the subversion of the First Republic (the other
being Dutra). The new president was a physician who had served as mayor of
Belo Horizonte and then as governor of Minas Gerais, where his administration
was notable for its construction of public works. One of the factors of
Kubitschek's success was his warm and gregarious personality. Another was his
flexibility and political skill. A third was his economic program, which was
designed to avoid conflict by accelerating the rate of economic development
so that all sectors would benefit. He published a "Programa de Metas," a
program of objectives that promised "fifty years' progress in five," and there
can be no doubt that the economy grew rapidly during his term. Industrial
production grew 80 percent at constant prices, with a gross domestic product
(GDP-see Glossary) per capita growth rate of 4 percent, substantially greater
than any other country in Latin America. By 1960 there were 110,000 industrial
establishments employing 1.8 million people.

     Before Kubitschek, the basic alternatives of economic policy had been
either to attempt to develop national industry by raising a protective tariff
wall and keeping out foreign goods or to follow a regime of free trade. It was
Kubitschek's great contribution to Brazilian economic policy, one that has
been followed by most governments since his time, to devise a third strategy.
This has been called by its opponents "associated" or "dependent" development.
It consists of developing Brazilian industry in conjunction with foreign
capital, combining a nationalist and developmentalist emphasis with an
openness to the world economic system (see Growth and Structure of the
Economy, ch. 3).

     The legal basis for this approach was found in the Instruction 113 of
SUMOC, which dated from the Cafe Filho administration. SUMOC (Superintendency
of Money and Credit) was the monetary board, and Instruction 113 gave
preferential treatment to foreign investors who would bring into the country
industrial machinery and equipment to develop industries in conjunction with
Brazilian capital. In attracting foreign capital, Brazil possessed an
advantage that other countries did not share: a colossal internal market and a
wealth of raw materials waiting to be tapped, not to mention wage rates below
those of most developed countries.

     Typically, Brazilian administrations chose a major project as their
legacy to the country. Kubitschek's pet project, and his other great
achievement beyond forming the basis for Brazil's future economic development,
was the construction of a new capital in the interior of Brazil. This had been
a project mooted since the 1820s; in fact, the name Brasilia had been coined
by Jose Bonifacio under the empire, and the constitution of 1891 had mandated
the building of a new capital. It fell to Kubitschek to realize that old
dream. A site was selected in the state of Goias on an unpromising plateau,
and Kubitschek commissioned architect Oscar Niemeyer and city planner Lucio
Costa to draw up the plans.

     In line with the general "developmentalism" of Kubitschek's policies,
the building of the new capital was designed to open up an unsettled area of
the country and to develop agriculture along the highways that would spring
up between Brasilia and the major cities of the country. The construction of
the capital would also make available hundreds of contracts that could be
spread around, thus building up the president's support, just as the
attraction of foreign investors who had to have Brazilian associates would
make available new opportunities for Brazilian industrialists.

     Meanwhile, the military was also pampered with pay increases and new
weapons, including a former British aircraft carrier. Moreover, Kubitschek
built close relations with the United States, which undermined anticommunist
attacks against him; he also closed the Rio dockworkers' union on the charge
that it was a communist front organization. American investors were treated
well. At the same time, the government closed down Lacerda's Tribuna da
Imprensa, which had gone so far as to say that the Kubitschek government was
dominated by traitors. Goulart got into the spirit of things and made a visit
to the United States in which he protested his own anticommunism. The fall of
Peron in Argentina had weakened somewhat the identification between Goulart
and Peron that the right-wing press had tried to build up.

     In addition, Kubitschek established a special agency to try to develop
the country's most backward area, the drought-ridden Northeast. This was the
Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast (Superintendencia do
Desenvolvimento do Nordeste-SUDENE). He also proposed the so-called Operation
Panamerica, which would be a United States-financed Marshall Plan to develop
Latin America. No one took this seriously until President John F. Kennedy
proposed his own Alliance for Progress, by which time Kubitschek had already
left office; nevertheless, Kennedy acknowledged the inspiration of Kubitschek,
among others.

     It was too much to expect that a headlong development program, including
something for everybody, could be implemented without inflation. The building
of Brasilia proved extremely costly, and all attempts to stay within the
budget were abandoned as the pressure rose to complete the new capital before
the end of Kubitschek's term. The government ran up an enormous budget deficit
and resorted to foreign borrowing in order to overcome a chronic balance of
payments crisis. Kubitschek attempted to secure International Monetary Fund
(IMF-see Glossary) support for a stabilization program that would reduce
inflation. IMF approval of such programs was critical in assuring foreign
lenders of a government's creditworthiness. However, the IMF's demands for a
deflationary policy were drastic, and their implementation would have made the
government extremely unpopular. Kubitschek, therefore, rejected the IMF
demands, winning popular acclaim but allowing inflation to worsen.

     As Kubitschek's term of office neared its end, the political panorama
was murky. Kubitschek remained a popular figure. The economy had grown during
his term, as had the population, now at the 70 million mark. The new capital
had been built and inaugurated before his term of office expired. Industry
had expanded, and foreign investment had grown. At the same time, inflation
had gotten out of hand, and corruption had become widespread. The voters were
disillusioned with politicians who promised a great deal but did better for
themselves than they did for constituents. In a dramatic demonstration of this
alienation from the political system, in 1959 voters in the city of Sao Paulo
elected a rhinoceros from the city zoo as municipal councilman.

     It was in this atmosphere that the UDN, tired of losing presidential
elections saw its chance. In 1960 it nominated for president Janio Quadros, an
independent politician who had been a popular mayor of the city and governor
of the state of Sao Paulo. A melodramatic political entrepreneur and
impassioned orator, Quadros stood for ruthless honesty, financial orthodoxy,
and an independent foreign policy. Enjoying the all-out support of Lacerda, he
won 48 percent of the 11.7 million votes cast. The unsuccessful candidates
were Lott and Barros. Lott, an undistinguished campaigner, had been nominated
by the PSD and PTB, partly in gratitude for his having assured the
inauguration of Kubitschek, partly because of his prestige in the military,
and partly because of his reputation as a nationalist; he received 28 percent
of the vote. Barros, heading his own personalist party, won 33 percent.
Quadros beat Barros in Sao Paulo state by almost two to one, repeating his
earlier feat of beating the aging populist leader for the governorship.
Goulart was again elected vice president.

Political Dynamics under the Second Republic

     To understand how a politician, without the support of a major party and
without high military rank or personal wealth, could go all the way to the
presidency of the country, one needs to understand the peculiar dynamics of
Brazilian politics under the Second Republic. For executive positions, such as
mayor or governor, several parties might run candidates, but the field still
was a limited one. For legislative elections, however, such as those for the
state legislatures or the federal Congress, a complex version
of proportional representation was in effect.

     Each party presented a complete slate for all of the positions to be
filled. (During the period there were generally a dozen or so active parties;
15 parties were legally registered at the national level in 1950.) Thus, in
Sao Paulo in 1958, for example, 895 candidates were entered on 12 party lists
for 75 seats in the state chamber of deputies. The state's 44 seats in the
federal Chamber of Deputies were contested that year by 253 candidates,
registered on eight party lists. During the same election in the state of
Guanabara (the former Federal District, now the state of Rio de Janeiro), the
17 seats for federal deputy were contested by 108 candidates.

     These candidates all ran at large throughout the state. That is, the
voter had to designate the individual candidate he or she wished to support
for the office in question; in other words, the voter had to choose a
candidate not only from the parties competing against each other but also
from among the list of candidates put up by a party. The votes won by all the
candidates running on the same party list were then totaled, which gave the
official vote for that party. The seats available were divided among the
parties on the basis of proportional representation. The seats won by each
party were in turn allocated among the candidates for that party in descending
order of the votes won by each.

     Under this system a candidate for legislative office competed not only
against candidates of other parties but also against candidates from his own
party. A premium was thus set on the ability to get across to the voter the
name and characteristics of the individual candidate. Money, under this
system, was extremely important in mounting a highly visible propaganda
campaign. But candidates also had to distinguish themselves through dramatic
oratory or through striking, even bizarre, political behavior. Given the fact
that votes cast for an individual legislative candidate were added to a party
total and could help elect others on the party list, parties customarily
shopped around for popular individuals to serve as candidates in order to
benefit from this "coattails" effect.

     Quadros had begun his career as a school teacher and had never had major
financial backing. In his early years on the Sao Paulo city council he had
called attention to his humble beginnings in dramatic and eye-catching ways.
One gimmick was to pull a sandwich out of his pocket and eat it during the
city council session, thus signaling that he was not willing to waste the time
or money to indulge in the expensive lunches favored by his colleagues.

     Quadros was thoroughly populist in style, always willing, even as mayor
and later as governor, to talk to the most humble constituent. He frequently
appeared in public without a tie, and he traveled about the city by public
transportation rather than by limousine. His oratorical style, likewise, was
designed to appeal to the masses rather than to the intellectual elite. But
while populist in style, Quadros' policies were, in content, of a middle-class
"good government" tendency; that is, he displayed no inclination to promote
change in the social structure. Quadros was scrupulously attentive to honesty
in the handling of public funds, economical in spending, demanding of a full
day's work from public servants, and keen on balancing the budget. His victory
was welcomed, therefore, by the Brazilian middle class, by the international
financial community, and by the United States government, hopeful that he
would put Brazil's finances on an even keel after the inflation of the
Kubitschek years. The honeymoon, however, turned out to be brief.

Janio Quadros as President

     Quadros moved full speed ahead to reestablish Brazil's finances on an
orthodox basis. In his inaugural address, he referred to the country's
financial situation as "terrible." A large sum was due on the foreign debt,
payable within one year. A huge federal deficit was in prospect, and exports
did not promise to bring in the needed foreign exchange. Moving quickly,
Quadros devalued the cruzeiro by 100 percent and raised US$2 billion in
foreign funds, refinancing the foreign debt he had inherited. The price for
the reestablishment of confidence in Brazil's finances with international
institutions was, of course, a domestic economic stabilization program.
Subsidies on consumer goods were eliminated or reduced, the government deficit
was cut, wages were frozen, and credit was sharply restricted.

     These policies provoked considerable public opposition, although there
was a general feeling that something had to be done and it was bound to be
unpleasant. The new president's policies were especially unpopular among
bureaucrats and politicians. The inflexibility Quadros showed on financial
matters was carried over into his supervision of the bureaucracy. He
terrorized civil servants by showing up at offices at the beginning of a
working day to see if all were at their desks. Government agencies dragging
their feet about moving to the raw chaos of Brasilia from the delights of Rio
were made to understand that they had better move-or else.

     Members of Congress resisted the financial stabilization measures that
were certain to make them unpopular. Moreover, many legislators were concerned
that President Quadros' drive against corruption might involve them
personally.

     In foreign policy, Quadros exasperated some conservative supporters by
resolutely taking a Third World line, publicly attacking imperialism and
redirecting Brazilian foreign policy toward greater independence than it had
ever shown in the past. Quadros established economic relations with the Soviet
Union and East European states, implementing an agreement signed under the
Kubitschek administration. He even took the occasion of a stop-over made in
Brazil by Che Guevara, the Cuban minister of industries, to award Guevara
Brazil's highest decoration, an act that infuriated anticommunists in Brazil
and abroad.

     It was in the area of relations with Congress that the final crisis came.
Congress was reluctant to go along with any further unpopular economic
measures. Quadros, impatient by temperament and sure of his own correctness,
was known to admire the strength and independence then being shown by France's
Charles de Gaulle under the constitution of the Fifth Republic. Lacerda, the
destroyer of Vargas, was governor of Guanabara, but he continued making
inflammatory radiobroadcasts. On the air he charged that Quadros' justice
minister was planning a coup that would make Quadros a Gaullist-style
dictator. Quadros had indeed asked Congress to give him emergency powers to
legislate by decree, powers that he claimed were made necessary by the
economic crisis, but Congress had refused to do so. On the day following the
airing of Lacerda's charge, Quadros sent to Congress his resignation as
president.

     It may have been that Quadros had simply become discouraged by the
problems he was facing and that the broadcast by Lacerda was the last straw.
The most credible interpretation of the resignation, however, is that he
expected Congress to decline the resignation and instead to give him the full
powers he had requested. President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt and Prime
Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba had used the same tactic. Quadros himself had
used it before, resigning his candidacy for the presidency until the parties
supporting him made clear that he would not be bound to any commitment to them
if he resumed his candidacy. In this case, however, if that was his intention,
Quadros had miscalculated. Congress was delighted to have his resignation,
which it accepted with alacrity.

The Crisis of 1961

     The thesis that Quadros expected that Congress would refuse his
resignation, or would change its mind and recall him to power, is strengthened
by the fact that he knew that Vice President Goulart was less acceptable to
Congress and far less acceptable to the military than he, despite the fact
that Goulart had been elected with 40 percent of the votes cast. Goulart had
been feared by the economic elite since his period as Vargas' minister of
labor. Their fears were aggravated by the coincidence that, at the time of
Quadros' resignation, Goulart was on an official visit to China, sent by
Quadros to try to establish economic relations. There were those, including
several governors of major states, who urged Congress to refuse Quadros'
resignation. But Quadros had prepared no organization that might have moved to
demand his return. Moreover he had alienated too many important people for the
political class as a whole to be sorry that he had left power.

     In the minds of those opposed to Goulart but unwilling to have Quadros
recalled, an alternative existed. This was to accept Quadros' resignation but
to prevent Goulart from assuming the presidency. When the Chamber of Deputies
accepted Quadros' resignation, Ranieri Mazilli, presiding officer of the
chamber, was sworn in as acting president. On August 28, 1961, Mazilli sent a
message to Congress stating that the military ministers in the cabinet
regarded Goulart's return to the country and assumption of the presidency as
inadmissible for "reasons of national security." The hope of the military
ministers and other conservatives, apparently, was that Congress would act as
it had done in November 1955, when it had gone along with Lott's preventive
coup by removing acting president Luz and allowing the president of the Senate
to succeed as interim president. There were differences between the two
situations, however: in the first place, in 1955 Luz had been suspected of
complicity in a conspiracy to prevent the constitutional succession of
Kubitschek; in the present situation, the military ministers were the ones
attempting to prevent a constitutional succession. In the second place, Lott's
action in 1955 had been in favor of the candidate of the PSD-PTB coalition,
the majority in Congress; in this instance, Mazilli's request was against the
interests of the leaders of the PTB. The attempt to prevent Goulart's
accession to the presidency thus had neither constitutional arguments nor a
congressional majority in its favor.

     Congress, unwilling to yield to military pressure and countenance a
rupture of legality but not necessarily enthusiastic about the prospect of a
Goulart presidency, came up with a compromise proposal that would also have
the merit, from their point of view, of strengthening the powers of Congress.
This was to let Goulart be inaugurated but to create a parliamentary system
under which the president's powers would be greatly reduced; Goulart would be
chief of state, but the head of government would be a prime minister
responsible to Congress. This was a proposal that had been around for some
time and that had wide appeal among the legislators.

     It soon appeared that the military ministers had gone too far. The
governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Leonel Brizola, who happened to be Goulart's
brother-in-law, hastened to organize support for Goulart's inauguration. Able
to appeal to a long tradition of gaucho defiance of the central authorities,
Brizola organized mass demonstrations in support of Goulart's accession to
power. A national chain of radio stations sprang up to promote pro-Goulart
sentiment throughout the country. Brizola even had several ships sunk in order
to block the entrance to the harbor of Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande
do Sul, so that the national military command could not send ships to halt the
pro-Goulart movement. Brizola also mobilized the state militia for combat,
which forced the military leaders to reconsider very seriously the risks
involved in seeking to block Goulart's presidency.

     Lott issued a statement calling for Goulart's inauguration in keeping
with the letter of the constitution and was promptly arrested. But the key
factor in turning the tide in Goulart's favor was the announcement of General
Machado Lopes, the commander of the Third Army, stationed in Rio Grande do
Sul, that he would take orders only from Goulart as constitutional president.
The ministers of the three armed services then realized that Goulart's
supporters were willing to go to actual combat. Rather than risk division of
the military and civil war, the ministers yielded. On September 2, 1961,
Congress adopted an amendment establishing a parliamentary system, and on
September 7 Goulart was sworn in as president.