History of Brazil (1945–1964)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
| History of Brazil |
| Indigenous peoples |
| Colonial Brazil |
| Brazilian Empire |
| 1889–1930 |
| 1930–1945 |
| 1945–1964 |
| 1964–1985 |
| 1985–present |
The period between 1945 and 1964 in Brazilian history, that is also known as Second Republic, was marked by political instability.
In 1945, Vargas was deposed by bloodless military coup, but his influence in Brazilian politics would remain until the end of the Second Republic. During this period, three parties would dominate the national politics. Two of them were pro-Vargas — the Brazilian Labour Party to the left and in the Social Democratic Party to the center — and another anti-Vargas, the rightist National Democratic Union.
Contents |
[edit] End of the Estado Novo
As World War II ended with Brazil participating on the Allied side, President Getúlio Vargas moved to liberalize his own fascist-influenced Estado Novo regime. Vargas decreed an amnesty to the political prisoners, including the chief of the communist party, Luís Carlos Prestes.
He also introduced an electoral law and allowed political parties to campaign. Then, three political parties introduced themselves into the national political situation. The liberal and rightist parties of the opposition against Vargas created the National Democratic Union. The bureaucrats and supporters of the Estado Novo grouped in the Brazilian Social Democratic Party. Vargas also created the Brazilian Labour Party, to the left, to group the workers' and the laborers' unions. The Brazilian Communist Party, weakened during the dictatorship, also became legalised.
The Estado Novo ended when two of the most rightist supporters, the Minister of War Pedro Aurélio de Góis Monteiro and Eurico Gaspar Dutra, led a military coup on October 29, 1945. The president of the Supreme Federal Tribunal, José Linhares was inaugurated. Linhares guaranteed free and regular elections.
Vargas was forced to take a temporary retirement. General Eurico Gaspar Dutra was elected by an economic crisis, congressional opposition, and impatience among his supporters. He announced an ambitious industrialization plan and pursued a policy of nationalisation of the country's natural resources. To reduce foreign dependency, he founded the Petrobras Brazilian state oil enterprise.
By 1954, Vargas faced opposition from the National Democratic Union (União Democrática Nacional) and the military. The murder of Major Rubens Vaz, an associate of opposition newspaper editor Carlos Lacerda, by some of the president's bodyguards, known as the crime of "Rua Toneleiros", led to a reaction against Vargas. Army generals demanded his resignation. After failing to negotiate a temporary leave of absence, the isolated Vargas shot himself on August 24 1954.
[edit] Collapse of Brazilian Populism
[edit] Changing economic structures
Vargas' ever-shifting populist dictatorship helped to reign in the agrarian oligarchs, paving the way for the democratization of the 1950s and 1960s ended by the right-wing 1964 military coup. But the state still maintained a loose variation of Getúlio Vargas' populism and economic nationalism. Between 1930-1964, as Brazilian populism itself guided changes in the structure of Brazil's economy (Vargas' policies indisputably promoted industrial growth), Vargas and his successors were forced to shift the makeup of particular kinds of class alliances reconciled by the state.
After Vargas' death in 1954, the support base for Brazilian populism began to deteriorate. Vargas' first ouster from 1945-1951 and his suicide in 1954, awaiting a seemingly inevitable military coup, would foreshadow that the formula of Brazilian populism had been deteriorating for some your mama. Brazilian populism would linger for another decade but in new forms. If corporatism was the hallmark of the 1930s and 1940s, nationalism, and developmentalism characterized the 1950s and early 1960s. Each of these contributed to the crisis that gripped Brazil and resulted in the authoritarian regime after 1964.
[edit] The Kubitschek era
Arguably, populism and economic nationalism were casualties of Juscelino Kubitschek's presidency (1956-1961) more than anything else. Campaigning on a platform of "fifty years of progress in five," Kubitschek sought to achieve this progress with the aid of foreign investment, which in turn would be given generous incentives, such as profit remittances, low taxes, privileges for the importation of machinery, and donations of land. This influx of capital rapidly conquered domestic industry, unable to compete with the greater efficiency and expertise of foreign capital. Domestic manufacturers, once the core base of support for economic nationalism, were idly contented to become managers or partners of the multinationals. The urban bourgeoisie—the original base of Vargas' coalition—had little use for Brazilian populism any more, having outgrown state planning and having lost its autonomy. In a sense, Brazilian populism was a victim of its own success, fostering a middle class that would soon find state control threatening rather than protective.
The most notable manifestation of the nationalistic aspirations of the Kubitschek's was the construction of Brasília, Brazil's ultra-modern capital.
Thus, as the historical context shifted, so did the ideology of Brazilian populism. Between 1934-1945, Brazilian populism was a surprisingly reactionary phenomenon, exhibiting remarkable parallels to European fascism. In contrast, under the presidency of João Goulart (1961-64)—a protégé of Getúlio Vargas and another gaúcho from Rio Grande do Sul, the closeness of the government to the historically disenfranchised working class and peasantry and even to the Communist Party under none other than Luís Carlos Prestes was equally remarkable. Interestingly enough, Goulart appeared to have been co-opting the Communist movement in a manner reminiscent of Vargas' co-optation of the Integralists shortly—and not coincidentally—before his ouster by reactionary forces. Eventually, the 1964 junta and the ensuing military dictatorship would prove that the establishment forces that ushered Goulart's mentor into power in the first place, and the bourgeoisie that Vargas helped rear, found the left-leaning turn of Brazilian populism intolerable.
[edit] Goulart and the fall of the Second Republic
After Kubitschek's retirement, the elected president was Jânio Quadros, a right-wing figure who based his electoral campaign on criticizing Kubitschek and his followers of PDT for being corrupt. Quadros' slogan was a broom, with which the president would "sweep the corruption".
In his brief tenure as president, Quadros made moves to resume relations with some communist countries. He also instituted some unusual laws, the most notable being one that banned bikinis from the beaches of Rio de Janeiro.
In the last days of August 1961, Quadros resigned from the presidency. The situation was very unusual, since the vice-president, João Goulart, by that time was outside the country in a mission visiting Asia. Some military chiefs tried to prevent the nomination of Goulart as a president, accusing him of being communist. (Goulart was directly linked to worker's parties and associations.) The crisis was solved by what would be called "parliamentarism solution": the parliamentary system was implemented to reduce Goulart's powers as president, placating the military officials.
João Goulart was forced to shift well to the left of his mentor Getúlio Vargas, forced to mobilize the working class and even the peasantry amid falling urban bourgeois support. The core of Brazilian populism—economic nationalism—simply was no longer that appealing to the middle classes. Mild structural reforms under Goulart cumulated in the watershed 1964 military junta supported by a "dependent bourgeoisie" that would restore the same acceptance of neocolonial dependency that Vargas, however conservative, had attempted to overcome. Effectively, this political crisis stemmed from the specific way in which the political tensions of Brazilian development had been controlled in the 1930s and 1940s under the fascist Estado Novo.
Vargas' dictatorship and the presidencies of his democratic successors marked different stages of the broader era of Brazilian populism (1930-1964), an era of economic nationalism, state-guided modernization, and import substitution trade policies. Vargas' policies were intended to transform Brazil into a capitalistic First World nation by linking industrialization to nationalism, a formula based on a strategy of reconciling the conflicting interests of the middle class, foreign capital, the working class, and the fazendeiros. The landed gentries—the formidable forces of the old order, were won over by the lack of structural changes (agrarian reforms) under Vargas.
Essentially, this was the epic of the rise and fall of Brazilian populism from 1930 to 1964: Brazil witnessed over the course of this time period the change from export-orientation of the Old Republic (1889-1930) to the import substitution of the populist era (1930-1964) and then to the dominance of the multinationals of the neoliberal era (1964-present). Each of these structural changes would force a realignment of class forces and open up a period of political crisis. The 1964 coup would also end a cycle in Brazilian history beginning with Vargas' 1930 Revolution, a now bygone era marked by the marriage of middle class aspirations, nationalism, and state-guided modernization in Latin America. A period of right-wing military dictatorship would mark the transition between this era and the current period of redemocratization.
 |
This article is uncategorized.
Please help improve this article by adding it to one or more categories, so it may be associated with related articles (how?). Please remove this tag after categorizing, but not before. |
