The military dictatorship of Brazil was a military government that was in charge of Brazil for over two decades between 1964 and 1985. It came to power following a coup d’état in late March of 1964 in response to a spiraling series of crises in Brazil. Unlike near contemporary dictatorships in Chile and Paraguay, which were characterized by the one-man rule of Augusto Pinochet and Alfredo Stroessner, the Brazilian military junta saw a regularly rotating leadership within the army high command. Some of these leaders were more liberal than others, notably Ernesto Beckmann Geisel, who began a transition back to democracy while in office between 1974 and 1979. Free and open elections were once again held in 1985, marking the end of the military dictatorship. Though not as severe in its human rights abuses as some other regimes in South America in the 1970s and 1980s, the Brazilian military junta was guilty of many crimes all the same. Many people sought to leave Brazil as a result, but the regime implemented policies which sought to restrict both inward and outward migration.[1]
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Military dictatorship of Brazil chronology of events
Brazil is a country which has shuffled through different forms of government at remarkable speed over the last two centuries. It acquired independence from Portugal in 1822, following which the Empire of Brazil was ushered in. The First Brazilian Republic followed in 1889. It came to an end in 1930 when the shock of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression saw the rise to power of Getúlio Vargas, a quasi-dictatorial populist who dominated Brazilian politics for the next quarter of a century in much the same way the more well-known Juan Perón did Argentina during the middle of the twentieth century. The Vargas era ended in 1954, ushering in a renewed period of democracy. Yet Brazil was troubled by a range of economic and political difficulties thereafter that paved the way for the military dictatorship.[2]
The immediate cause of the 1964 coup d’état was the entry into office of Joao Goulart as President of Brazil in 1961. He was a left-leaning socialist who attempted a wide-ranging reform program with mixed success. This led in March 1964 to the Sailors’ Revolt when elements of the Brazilian Navy mutinied. Goulart’s handling of the revolt outraged the military high command and just days later, on the 31st of March 1964, they launched a coup which succeeded in claiming control of Brazil virtually overnight without violent clashes. The military junta would rule for the next 21 years, moving through five different leaders during that time, as well as shorter periods of collective rule by military council.[3]
The rule of the military dictatorship can largely be divided into two time periods. The first ran from 1964 to 1974 and was when the junta was at its most repressive. Torture and incarceration without trial were employed as a means of crushing leftist dissent. There were also human rights abuses towards indigenous groups in the Amazon and the south of the country. Extrajudicial killings and disappearances of those who opposed the regime became features of Brazilian political life. This being said, the junta which ruled Brazil was less violent than the military dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 and the regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile between 1973 and 1990.[4]
The Brazilian junta softened from 1974 onwards following the election of Ernesto Geisel as President of Brazil. He adopted more moderate policies and loosened the campaign of political repression which had characterized the first decade of the junta. Crimes were still committed, though with less severity than before. He also realigned the country politically, moving away from Brazil’s overt alliance with the United States, which had aided the coup of 1964 in response to fears of Brazil falling into the Soviet camp in the Cold War as Cuba had at the end of the 1950s. Geisel’s successor, Joao Figueiredo, continued the reform program of his predecessor and in 1985 the junta came to an end when free and open elections were held.[5] The transition back to democracy was not seamless. Economic disorder followed and Brazil fell into a period of hyperinflation in the late 1980s which it took many years to emerge from. Moreover, Brazilian democracy remains precariously balanced, with strong antagonism between left- and right-wing forces down to the present day.[6]
Extent of migration during the military dictatorship
Brazil has historically been a country of inward migration, ever since the Brazilian Gold Rush began in the late seventeenth century, triggering a mass movement of Portuguese people to the hitherto neglected South American colony. That process accelerated hugely in the second half of the nineteenth century as millions of people arrived to Brazil from all over Europe. Although dampened by economic decline in the decades after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it, migration to Brazil still continued in the middle of the twentieth century. The military junta ended this. Migration levels to Brazil collapsed in the second half of the 1960s. For instance, where an average of around 4,000 Spanish people migrated to Brazil between 1950 and 1963, the number fell to less than 500 per year between 1965 and 1975. A similar collapse in Italian and Portuguese migration to Brazil occurred. The most dramatic collapse concerned Japanese migrants. Nearly 50,000 Japanese people moved to Brazil between 1955 and 1964. The figure fell to less than 4,000 in the first decade of the junta.[7]
A parallel development was a fall in the number of people migrating out of Brazil as the junta restricted efforts to leave the country by those seeking political asylum abroad. Thus, the era of the military dictatorship was one of more limited migration both inwardly and outwardly. However, it was immediately followed by a wave of increased migration. As democracy returned in the second half of the 1980s pent up demand to leave Brazil found expression and hundreds of thousands of people left. Many headed to the United States, driven also by the years of hyperinflation that began in Brazil following the end of the junta’s rule and which peaked in 1990.[8]
Demographic impact of the military dictatorship
The demographic impact of this was minimal in some respects, as the dictatorship restricted rather than encouraged migration. As such, the foremost impact of the military junta from a demographic perspective was in restricting change instead of encouraging it. Had it not come to power more people would have migrated to Brazil, particularly so during the most repressive decade between 1964 and 1974. On the other hand, the hyperinflation that occurred between 1986 and the early 1990s, which was an indirect result of the collapse of military rule, had a considerable impact on the growth of the Brazilian American community. These Brazilian Americans congregated in a number of specific places on the East Coast, notably in Massachusetts, with Boston and Framingham becoming especial centers of Brazilian settlement.[9]
See also
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References
- ↑ Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, A Present Past: The Brazilian Military Dictatorship and the 1964 Coup (Liverpool, 2023).
- ↑ Joel Wolfe, ‘Getúlio Vargas and His Enduring Legacy for Brazil’, in Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 31, No. 2: Getúlio Vargas and His Legacy (Winter, 1994), pp. 1–3.
- ↑ Timothy J. Power, ‘The Brazilian Military Regime of 1964–1985: Legacies for Contemporary Democracy’, in Iberoamericana, Vol. 16, No. 62 (July, 2016), pp. 13–26.
- ↑ https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-04-01/brazils-dictatorship-repression-torture-slaughter-of-indigenous-people-and-censorship.html
- ↑ Scott Mainwaring, ‘The Transition to Democracy in Brazil’, in Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 149–179.
- ↑ https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2024/04/01/60-years-since-the-coup-brazil-has-not-come-to-terms-with-the-past-and-lives-with-the-legacy-of-the-dictatorship
- ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/migration-brazil-making-multicultural-society
- ↑ G. Tullio and M. Ronci, ‘Brazilian Inflation from 1980 to 1993: Causes, Consequences and Dynamics’, in Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3 (1996), pp. 635–666.
- ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/brazilian-immigrants-united-states-2017