The military dictatorship in Brazil ( ), sometimes called the Fifth Brazilian Republic, was established on 1 April 1964, after a coup d'état by the Brazilian Armed Forces with support from the United States government against President João Goulart. It lasted 21 years, until 15 March 1985.
The military coup of 1964 was planned and executed by the seniormost commanders of the Brazilian Army and was supported by almost all high-ranking members of the military, along with conservative sectors in society, like the Catholic Church and anti-communist civilian movements among the middle and upper classes. The coup was supported by José de Magalhães Pinto, Adhemar de Barros, and Carlos Lacerda (who had already participated in the conspiracy to depose Getúlio Vargas in 1945), then governors of the states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Guanabara, respectively. The U.S. State Department supported the coup through Operation Brother Sam and thereafter supported the regime through its embassy in Brasília. The military regime, particularly after the Institutional Act No. 5 of 1968, practiced extensive censorship and committed human rights abuses. Those abuses included institutionalized torture, extrajudicial killings, and forced disappearances. Despite initial pledges to the contrary, the regime enacted a new, restrictive Constitution in 1967, and stifled freedom of speech and political opposition. Its guidelines were nationalism, economic development, and anti-communism.
The dictatorship reached the height of its popularity in the early 1970s with the so-called "Brazilian Miracle", even as it censored all media, and tortured, killed, and exiled dissidents. João Figueiredo became president in March 1979; the same year, he passed the Amnesty Law for political crimes committed for and against the regime. While combating "hardliners" inside the government and supporting a redemocratization policy, Figueiredo could not control the crumbling economy, chronic inflation, and concurrent fall of other South American military dictatorships. Amid massive popular demonstrations on the streets of Brazil's biggest cities, the first free elections in 20 years were held for the national legislature in 1982. In 1985, another election was held, this time to indirectly elect a new president, being contested between civilian candidates for the first time since the 1960s and won by the opposition. In 1988, a new Constitution passed and Brazil officially returned to democracy.
Brazil's military government provided a model for other military regimes and dictatorships throughout Latin America, being systematized by the so-called "National Security Doctrine", which was used to justify the military's actions as in the interest of national security in a time of crisis, a rationale upon which other military regimes relied. In 2014, nearly 30 years after the regime collapsed, the Brazilian military recognized for the first time the excesses its agents committed during the dictatorship, including the torture and murder of political dissidents. In 2018, the U.S. government released a 1974 memorandum written for Henry Kissinger when he was Secretary of State confirming that the Brazilian leadership was fully aware of the killing of dissidents. It is estimated that 434 people were either confirmed killed or went missing and 20,000 people were tortured during Brazil's military dictatorship. Some human rights activists and others assert that the figure could be much higher, and should include thousands of indigenous people who died because of the regime's negligence, but the armed forces dispute this.
Background
Brazil's political crisis stemmed from the way in which the political tensions had been controlled in the 1930s and 1940s during the Vargas Era. Vargas's dictatorship and the presidencies of his democratic successors marked different stages of Brazilian populism (1930–1964), an era of economic nationalism, state-guided modernization, and import substitution trade policies. Vargas's policies were intended to foster autonomous capitalist development in Brazil 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 landed oligarchy.Estevam, Douglas (2005). «Projeto de reforma agrária do governo João Goulart - 1964». In: Stédile, João Pedro (org.). The agrarian question in Brazil: Agrarian reform programs, 1946-2003. São Paulo: Expressão Popular. ISBN 9788587394712
Essentially, this was the culmination of the rise and fall of Brazilian populism from 1930 to 1964: Brazil witnessed over the course of this period the change from export-orientation of the First Brazilian Republic (1889–1930) to the import substitution of the populist era (1930–1964) and then the moderate structuralism of 1964–1980. Each of these structural changes forced a realignment in society and caused a period of political crisis. The military dictatorship marked the transition between the populist era and democratization.
The Brazilian Armed Forces acquired great political clout after the Paraguayan War. The politicization of the Armed Forces was evidenced by the Proclamation of the Republic, which overthrew the Brazilian Empire, or within tenentism (lieutenants' movement) and the Revolution of 1930. Tensions escalated again in the 1950s, as important military circles (the "hard-liners", old positivists whose origins could be traced back to the Brazilian Integralist Action and the Estado Novo) joined the elite and middle classes, and right-wing activists in attempts to prevent presidents Juscelino Kubitschek and João Goulart from taking office due to their supposed support for communism. Kubitschek proved to be friendly to capitalist institutions, but Goulart promised far-reaching reforms, expropriated business interests, and promoted economical-political neutrality with the United States."The Brazilian Military Dictatorship and the 1964 Coup", Accessed February 1, 2025.
After Goulart suddenly assumed power in 1961, society became deeply polarized, with the elites fearing that Brazil would, like Cuba, join the Communist Bloc, while others thought the reforms would boost Brazil's growth and end its economic subservience to the U.S., or even that Goulart could be used to increase the popularity of the Communist agenda. Influential politicians, such as Carlos Lacerda and Kubitschek, media moguls (Roberto Marinho, Octávio Frias, Júlio de Mesquita Filho), the Church, landowners, businessmen, and the middle class called for a coup d'état by the Armed Forces to remove the government. The old "hard-line" army officers, seeing a chance to impose their economic program, convinced the loyalists that Goulart was a Communist menace.
Goulart and the fall of the Fourth Republic
After Kubitschek's presidency, the right-wing opposition elected Jânio Quadros, who campaigned on criticizing Kubitschek and government corruption. Quadros's campaign symbol was a broom, with which he would "sweep away the corruption". In his brief tenure as president, Quadros made moves to resume relations with socialist countries and approved controversial laws, but without legislative support, he could not follow his agenda.
In the last days of August 1961, Quadros tried to break his impasse with Congress by resigning as president, apparently intending to be reinstated by popular demand. The vice president, João Goulart, was a member of the Brazilian Labour Party and had been active in politics since the Vargas era. At that time, Brazil's president and vice president were elected on different party tickets. With Quadros's resignation, high-ranking military ministers tried to prevent Goulart, who was on a trip to China, from assuming the presidency, accusing him of being a Communist. The military's actions triggered the Legality Campaign in support of Goulart. The crisis was solved by the "parliamentary solution", a political compromise in which Goulart would take office, but with reduced powers, by turning Brazil into a parliamentary republic with a prime minister, Tancredo Neves.
Brazil returned to presidential government in 1963 after a referendum, and as Goulart's powers grew, it became evident that he would seek to implement his "base reforms" such as land reform and nationalization of enterprises in various economic sectors. The reforms were considered Communist and Goulart sought to implement them regardless of assent from established institutions such as Congress.
Goulart had low parliamentarian support after his attempts to win support from both sides of the spectrum came to alienate both."Brasil: Uma Historia - Eduardo Bueno" http://www.brasilumahistoria.com.br/ Over time, he was forced to shift to the left of his mentor Getúlio Vargas and to mobilize the working class and even the peasantry amid declining urban bourgeois support.
On 1 April 1964, after a night of conspiracy, rebel troops led by general Olímpio Mourão Filho made their way to Rio de Janeiro, considered a legalist bastion. São Paulo's and Rio de Janeiro's generals were convinced to join the coup. To prevent civil war and knowing that the United States would openly support the rebels, Goulart fled to Rio Grande do Sul, and then into exile in Uruguay, where his family owned large estates.
United States involvement
U.S. ambassador Lincoln Gordon later admitted that the embassy had given money to anti-Goulart candidates in the 1962 municipal elections and encouraged the plotters; many extra U.S. military and intelligence personnel were operating in four U.S. Navy oil tankers and the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, in an operation code-named Brother Sam. The ships were positioned off the coast of Rio de Janeiro in case rebel Brazilian troops required military assistance during the 1964 coup. A 1963 document from Gordon to U.S. President John F. Kennedy describes the ways Goulart should be put down, and his fears of a communist intervention supported by the Soviets or by Cuba.
Washington immediately recognized the new government in 1964, and hailed the coup as one of the "democratic forces" that had allegedly staved off international communism. American mass media outlets such as Henry Luce's Time magazine also favorably assessed the dissolution of political parties and salary controls at the beginning of Castelo Branco's term. According to Vincent Bevins, the military dictatorship established in Brazil, the fifth most populous nation in the world, "played a crucial role in pushing the rest of South America into the pro-Washington, anticommunist group of nations."
Brazil actively participated in the CIA-backed state terror campaign against left-wing dissidents known as Operation Condor.
Alleged communist threat The argument used to justify the establishment of military dictatorship in Brazil was the imminence of a "Communist threat" in 1964. The historian disputes that communism had sufficient support in Brazil to threaten the democratic system in 1964. In an interview, Motta said:
Instead, Motta argued that the assertion of a "Communist threat" was fabricated to unify the Brazilian armed forces and increase their support among the general population.
The Intercept reported that the asserted threat of Jango's "guerrillas", the weapons in possession of the Peasant Leagues, and the communist infiltrations into the armed forces were nothing more than fantasy, and that "there was no resistance" to the 1964 coup. Moreover, the Communist armed struggles only appeared after the implementation of the dictatorship, not before it, and in fact never put Brazilian democracy at risk.
Divisions within the officer corps