In 1964, the military took over Brazil’s government for a period that would end up lasting 21 years. At the time, the United States government and many Brazilians thought that overthrowing president João Goulart and his government was a necessary action to stop the spread of communism. Even though more than 50 years have passed since the coup, it seems that many Brazilians still hold very different opinions regarding their own history.
A few weeks ago, I spoke to Pedro Guimarães, son of Jací Guimarães, a military general that fought in World War II and that was friends with two of the country’s leaders during the dictatorship: Castello Branco and Emílio Garrastazu Médici. When I asked Guimarães why his father initially supported overthrowing Goulart’s government, he affirmed to me that Brazil was on the brink of becoming communist. “João Goulart was a leftist man and he made a speech on the 13th of March in 1964 that was totally radical in which he pinned a Brazilian affiliation to the communist party. It is obvious that the military didn’t accept this,” said Guimarães.
When I spoke to Liszt Vieira who was a former member of a leftist guerilla organization, Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária Palmares, and who later became a state-level congressman in Rio de Janeiro, he shared a completely different view of Goulart. To Vieira, Goulart was simply a reform-minded president. “I think that is absurd,” he said when I told him of how Guimarães believed Goulart was a communist. “There was no possibility for João Goulart to implement communism. What he did was agrarian reform. Agrarian reform increases the number of private landowners. Agrarian reform gives land to a farmer that does not have a plot of land… He never proposed to nationalize land. He proposed to give land for those that don’t have land to farm – abandoned lands. He was actually fortifying capitalism,” said Vieira.
Professor James N. Green who teaches Brazilian history at Brown University blames the Cold War for creating this image of Goulart. When I asked Green about the possibility that Goulart would have transformed Brazil into a communist dictatorship, he said, “the argument that he would have done that is part of the discourse of the Cold War really pushed by ambassador Lincoln Gordon who emphasized through a series of meetings and many telegrams that there was an imminent threat of a socialist revolution.”
Green also said, “the communist party was the largest group of the left, but it wasn’t that strong. There was a slight influence in his government – he had a press person that was linked to the communist party and some of the major trade unions were led by communists but there was no possibility of a second revolution like the Cuban revolution at all in Brazil.”
In his speech on March 13th, 1964 that both Vieira and Guimarães referred to, Goulart spoke of his commitment to democracy undermining the argument that his government would have taken subversive actions, but also argued for the necessity of social reform. “Democracy, my fellow workers, is what my government has been trying to accomplish, as is my duty,” said Goulart in a translation by Lanna Leite taken from We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Military Dictatorship by James N. Green.
In regards to land reforms, Goulart said, “from West to East, there is great protest to reform its foundation and structure, above all for agrarian reform, which would be the equivalent of the abolition of bondage for tens of millions of Brazilians who vegetate in the interior with deplorable working conditions… The unforgettable Pope John XXIII teaches us, the Brazilian people, that human dignity, as a basic principle for life, demands the right to proper use of the goods on this earth, which corresponds to the fundamental obligation [of the state] to concede property to all.”
He then speaks of the decree he just signed. “The decree, with vested social interest, intends to put in effect expropriation of lands… to make productive the unexplored or underutilized areas that are still intolerable speculative trading,” said Goulart. Unlike Agrarian Reform, however, the Supra Decree did not financially reimburse the old landowners since according to Goulart that was not in the best interest of the people.
Nowhere in his speech does he indicate an affiliation to the communist party, but many Brazilians at the time, including Jací Guimarães, believed that his words strongly suggested the inevitability of a communist dictatorship if Goulart was not deposed.
After the military overtook the government, there was a period of time where the population was still allowed to enjoy some freedoms, but that all changed once the government passed the Institutional Act Number Five in December of 1968. Liszt said, “[The act] radicalized the dictatorship, [and] eliminated rights. You couldn’t go out in the streets and protest against the dictatorship and ask for liberty any more. [In 1964], they established the institutional frame for the dictatorship but there were still some liberties… There was a certain tolerance, but after AI-5, they radicalized the dictatorship in a violent form.” After the act was passed, Liszt told me of how the police searched his home for documents which forced him to flee the city to avoid imprisonment. A few months later, however, he ended up in DOI-CODI, Center for Internal Defense Operations, where he was tortured and imprisoned until he was finally freed in exchange for the liberation of a German ambassador that a leftist organization had kidnapped.
When I spoke to Guimarães about the institutional act, he told me of a conversation his dad had with Médici about it in their annual lunch to celebrate their graduating class. “In this lunch, Medici asked my dad, “Jací, what do you think of the situation?” and my dad responded, “From pal to pal, I think that any act of force is not desirable but I recognize that it is necessary. Is it an institutional act? Yes. Is it an extreme act? Yes. Is it a dictatorial act? Yes. But you should not revoke the act because there would be too large of a risk of you being deposed,” said Guimarães.
Guimarães tells me of how his dad was indeed a democrat, but thought that the specific moment in history required an act like Institutional Act Number Five to make sure Brazil continued to run smoothly. Even though the act allowed the government to persecute, imprison, and torture its citizens, Guimarães assured me that his dad was always against torture and said so to Medici. “My dad thought a regime of force is all right because it saved the country, but a dictatorship like Getulio Vargas’ that included torture was unnaceptable as there are other forms to exercise power. Medici said that he agreed but that in his position, he could not retreat,” said Guimarães.
Later in our conversation, however, he told me of how his father metaphorically compared the dictatorship to an olive: “to eat an olive, you have to swallow and if the pit comes with it then you have to swallow it too,” said Guimarães. As I heard this, it seemed as if Jací Guimarães claims he is against torture but was willing to endure it if it meant the country would continue to be politically “stable” in his opinion and it seemed as if his son agreed.
After the act was passed, the country entered a period of strict military rule until 1985 when it began to re-democratize itself. However, despite our new constitution and the re-democratization, it seems that we were never able to turn over a new leaf as a country. We continue to be conflicted as a nation when it comes to our past.
When I expressed this sentiment to Green, he explained the clear reason behind it. “The military already in 1974, 10 years later, realized they had to find an exit strategy… They were very concerned that there would be a possibility of them being charged for crimes of violating human rights so they developed a strategy for slowly opening up the country for democratization that they would control so they could make sure that at the end of the day, laws were passed that would absolve them of any potential prosecution for the crimes they committed,” said Green.
The military eventually created the Amnesty Law that allowed all the political exiles to return home, but also pardoned all of the military’s crimes. “In that process, they established a culture in which people were supposed to turn the page on the past and not think about the dictatorship… Basically, the military insisted that the past not be discussed and there would be no evaluation of what had happened. As a result of that, there is no memory except for people who study history or live this history about what the military was. In Germany, after the war, there was the Nuremberg trials and a serious educational process about what Hitler had done, and it just didn’t happen in Brazil,” said Green.
When I asked Green about the National Truth Commission in 2014 implemented by Dilma Rousseff committed to exposing the crimes and human rights violations conducted during the dictatorship, he told me that the military also worked its way around that. “The military did everything possible to prevent information coming out including one of the military people that had become a christian and was really guilty about what he had done and was about to reveal a lot of information and had information in his computer. He was murdered and his hard drive mysteriously disappeared. So the military made sure that no more revelations [came out] so very little new information came out in the commissions,” said Green. Even when the nation attempted to recognize its history, the military prevented it from doing so fully.
As a nation, we live in ignorance. We refuse to learn the darkness of our past, and thus risk repeating it. By electing Bolsonaro, we endangered our democracy and made it likely that we will have to pay the price of not accurately addressing our history.
Liszt said, “Bolsonaro always supported the military dictatorship, supported torture and said that they should have killed more people. If it were for him, he would have closed the congress and the highest court.” Green agrees with Liszt as he said that, “he has authoritarian tendencies and characteristics. I think he’s not able to do more because he does not have enough political power…He does not believe, much like Trump, in the judicial system. He doesn’t respect civil rights and democracy.”
If we do not act against his authoritarian tendencies, we might find ourselves reverting back to the past. “Bolsonaro is also facing a serious problem because his son and his other sons are now being investigated for corruption and I think as that happens he will become much more aggressive towards the institutions of the country to try to shut them down to the extent possible,” said Green, “it’s serious because it is possible that he might mobilize a sector of the military to justify an authoritarian takeover especially if things polarize. They haven’t polarized now… At some point, they [the progressive left] will reorganize and become stronger again and if they really threaten Bolsonaro and especially if Bolsonaro is threatened with his own imprisonment in the future for corruption, he could certainly take extreme means.”
The last thing we want as a country is to find ourselves regressing backwards, to lose our freedoms and to live in silence. We must celebrate the democracy we have obtained, but all the while being aware that we have not had it for long. Bolsonaro will not take our democracy away from us if we hold him accountable and if we recognize the consequences that would ensue. The military dictatorship must be remembered and not for how it possibly avoided a communist dictatorship, but for how it limited freedoms, violated human rights, and tarnished Brazil’s history forever.
