Archive
On Guatemala and the US in the Cold War
I am remiss in posting this (travels took me away from the computer when it went up) but Rob Farley (of the University of Kentucky Patterson School and of Lawyers, Guns & Money) and I recently discussed the genocide conviction (since annulled) of Ríos Montt, the Cold War in Latin America, and democratization in the Americas in the last 30 years. You can watch the whole discussion here at Bloggingheads TV.
Get to Know a Brazilian – Comba Marques Porto
While women like Vera Sílvia Magalhães and Maria Augusta Carneiro Ribeiro played key roles in the radicalism and student activism that challenged Brazil’s dictatorship, theirs was not the only way in which women could and did mobilize to challenge the military regime. Even as the dictatorship entered its most repressive phase under presidents Artur Costa e Silva and Emílio Médici, students found new ways to organize and mobilize, and new issues to confront, throughout the 1970s. Comba Marques Porto is an example not only of the role women students continued to play in challenging the dictatorship in the 1970s, but also of the struggle for women’s rights during military rule and in the post-dictatorship context, both in student movements and in society more generally.
Comba Marques Porto was born in 1945 in Rio de Janeiro. Her father was a journalist, and her mother a housewife, as was common in many urban middle class families at the time. Comba Porto seemed destined to be an elementary schoolteacher, another profession that women, especially single women, dominated (or were limited to, depending on one’s perspective). In Brazil at the time, teachers at the elementary level could be certified based on their performance and training in high school. And like many young women from her background, she remained relatively apolitical, in spite of the political context of the dictatorship and of some of her own family members participating in the student movements. However, after finishing her secondary schooling and getting her teaching certification, in 1966 Comba Porto decided to take the entrance exams for university. She passed, and began to attend Guanabara State University (UEG, now called Rio de Janeiro State University) in the city of Rio.
By the time she had enrolled and begun studying in UEG, the political and social atmosphere was intense, as the semi-illegal National Students Union (UNE) was gaining strength and becoming a key voice in challenging the military regime and its increasing use of repression. Thus, the already-strong history and tradition of student mobilization was only intensifying when she began attending classes.
However, things had changed significantly by the end of her second year of studies. In the face of growing protest not only from students but from parents, white-collar professionals, artists, and others, the hardliners were getting increasingly uneasy. In October 1968, the arrested around 900 students at the semi-clandestine UNE Congress in the interior of São Paulo state; Comba Porto, one of the delegates, was among them, and briefly served time in jail. Perhaps more importantly at the national level, in September 1968, Congressman Marcio Moreira Alves gave a speech on the floor of Congress a few days before Brazil’s Independence Day celebrations. Known retrospectively as the “Lysistrata speech,” Moreira Alves called on women to protest the regime by refusing to dance with, kiss, or date soldiers. Though the public paid the speech little attention, the generals were outraged (or feigned outrage). They demanded Congres strip Moreira Alves of his congressional immunity so that the military could prosecute him for offenses to the nation. On December 11, Congress not only voted to allow Moreira Alves to retain his immunity; they sang the national anthem, openly defying the military’s attempted monopolization on nationalism. The military acted swiftly. On Friday, December 13, Costa e Silva, with the support of other hardliners in the military, issued the Ato Institucional No. 5 (Institutional Act Number 5; AI-5), indefinitely closing Congress, intensifying censorship, escalating the use of torture, and ushering in the most repressive phase of Brazil’s dictatorship.
Given its central and vital role in challenging the dictatorship for its first four years, the student movement was an obvious target of this new political silencing. Indeed, as if AI-5 had not made the situation clear, in February 1969, the government also issued Decree-Law 477, which specifically focused on students by prohibiting political expressions or organization on campuses, with the threat of stripping students of funding, expulsion, and even arrest. The fact that many of the prohibitions and punishments outlined in Decree-Law 477 were also in AI-5 made clear just how determined to abolish all student mobilization the military was.
However, the regime’s power was not absolute, and already in 1969, students were finding new ways to organize at the local level as the regime went after UNE. Comba Porto was one of these figures, joining her campuses University Committee in the hopes that she could convince students to join the causes of the Leninist Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). She continued to work in new organizations and agitated to challenge the regime, including its educational policies. In one instance she attended a conference at the Ministry of Education where she challenged the regime’s educational policies and their failings to the Minister of Education. Speaking before high-ranking officials, she pointed to the failings in the educational system and talking about the opportunities and future she hoped awaited her daughter.
While Comba Porto and other students found ways to mobilize, the fact remained that the political and social atmosphere was greatly limited to all students, as the regime placed plainclothes police officers in classrooms and had them regularly report on student activities and pamphlets distributed on campuses. Further compounding the problem was the fact that, by this time, Brazil’s student movement itself had increasingly fragmented, as some activists from the late-1960s joined guerrilla movements in the cities or countryside, others went into exile, and still others split over what type of revolution should remove the dictatorship.
Yet even this fragmentation did not lead to an end of mobilization. By the mid-1970s, students shifted from party-based alliances that drew on shared ideologies, and instead moved to professionally-based alliances. Comba Porto’s experiences were again instructive of these new forms of mobilization. Upon finishing her degree at UEG, she enrolled in the National Law School at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). While there, she participated in an official Week of Juridical Debates; though ostensibly about legal issues in Brazil, the conference doubled as a means for students from other law schools from throughout the country to gather, discuss the issues each faced on their campuses, and work together to reconstitute a new, more national student voice. The regime’s officials were aware of this threat, but they could not stop it; although the rector (whom the military dictatorship had directly appointed) called her to his office and condemned the conference, even threatening her, she continued to organize and mobilize at similar types of events, and she never was expelled.
Comba Porto’s activism was part of a broader nascent trend in student mobilizations. Whereas student leadership had by and large been dominated by men in the 1960s, both in Brazil and in much of the rest of the world, by the 1970s, women were not only taking a more prominent role in mobilizing, but also beginning to fight for the issues that affected women directly. Challenging the male-dominated hierarchy was a part of those issues. And it was not an imaginary struggle; though she had been a regular participant and activist in a number of student organizations on campuses, she had never reached a position of leadership in any of these organizations, reflecting the ongoing trouble women activists had in gaining the respect and support for official leadership positions.
As she finished her schooling, Comba Porto took her experiences as an activist and as a woman to her professional life. By the mid-1970s, she was working on cases of political prisoners. Even while working to defend prisoners (including many who were her former colleagues in the PCB), she also began to work in feminist causes, participating in the Seminar on the Brazilian Woman, where she met other politically engaged women and feminists. Coming into contact with a community that was limited in the student movement but with which she strongly identified, she herself became increasingly tied to fighting for women’s juridical and social rights in Brazil as well.
Although the dictatorship ended in 1985, Comba Porto, like many activists of the 1960s and 1970s, remained active in politics in the new democratic regime. In spite of this new context, however, she continued to run into obstacles as a woman politician, losing in her campaign to be mayor of Rio de Janeiro in 1982 and in her run for a seat in the Federal Chamber of Deputies in 1986, revealing in part the ways women still had trouble gaining access to positions of political leadership. Yet Comba Porto was not without her own triumphs, as she found other ways to shape Brazilian politics. As Brazil prepared to write a new constitution (to replace the military constitution of 1967), Comba Porto was a key figure in the constitutional hearings, adding an important voice to the debates and playing a key role in shaping the language and laws of the 1988 constitution as they pertained to women, including the fact that “men and women have equal rights,” that the government ensure equal protection for women in employment, and that the rights and opportunities of mothers and pregnant women be upheld. In the 1990s, Comba Porto became a judge, working in the Regional Labor Court in Rio de Janeiro. And though no longer involved heavily in party politics, she continues to provide a strong voice for women’s causes, even periodically writing on feminist issues facing Brazil in the 21st century (as well as writing on opera). Comba Porto’s path provides not only another way in which women were involved in student activism during the dictatorship, but insight into the ways in which politics and feminism merged for many students shut out of leadership in the 1970s, feminist struggles that Comba Porto, like many other women, continued to fight for in the post-dictatorship era and indeed continue to fight for even today.
Early Thoughts on Paraguay’s Elections
Yesterday, Paraguay held its first presidential elections since the ouster of democratically elected Fernando Lugo last year, and as expected, Horacio Cartes won with over a million votes (45.8%), defeating runner-up Liberal Party candidate Efrain Alegre, who finished with over 800,000 votes for 37% percent of the vote. Mario Ferreiro of the Avanza Pais coalition finished with just 5.9% of the vote (around 140,000 votes), while Anibal Enrique Carrillo of the Frente Guasú, the party formed out of Fernando Lugo’s old coalition, received 3.3% of the vote (nearly 80,000 votes). Nearly 3% of the ballots were turned in blank, while another 2.5% were null ballots, be it through mistaken voting or as a sign of protest against the options. That Ferreiro finished a distant third is unsurprising, but it should be remembered that he and Carrillo both still had support; indeed, the New York Times‘ Simon Romero tweeted a photo of a campaign poster yesterday that called both Cartes and Alegre “golpistas,” or coup-mongers, a reminder of the ongoing anger at the removal of Lugo last June. Such resentment over his removal, and the support Ferreiro and Carrillo received, reveals that some Paraguayans have not given up on the message of social reform and a more equal society.
Though Cartes was expected to win, the election is not without its own allegations of corruption; although over 300 international observers monitored the elections, some reports said people were selling their votes for as little as 12.50 dollars (though in other areas it was apparently going for 25 dollars), a reminder not just of political chicanery but of the very real economic inequalities and troubles that lead people to sell votes just to find some extra income. To what degree such practices took place is unclear; what is clear is that, barring any massive scandals, institutional coups, or medical emergencies, Cartes is set to be President for the next five years.
However, the prospects for Paraguayan citizens going forward are bleak. As an individual, Cartes, who had not even voted in an election prior to 2009, represents the wealthy, landed elite of Paraguay, and as a member of the Colorado Party, he represents a return to the conservative and corrupt practices that defined Paraguayan politics for the latter half of the twentieth century during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (with whom the Colorado Party was a willing accomplice) and into the twenty-first century. Though Cartes insists he will change Paraguay’s path, such a claim seems unlikely, as he has been repeatedly connected to smuggling and fraud as well as having ties to organized crime. (And it’s not like the Liberal Party that ultimately abandoned Lugo last year would have marked a significant alternative in this regard, given its recent scandal involving land and the use of government money for political alliances). Given Cartes’ victory and his background and the Liberal Party’s status as runner-up, it seems unlikely that Paraguay will see a sudden shift towards transparency or more egalitarian politics in the executive or the legislative branches.
The problems are not limited to political corruption, either. The victory of Cartes, a landed and wealthy oligarch, means Paraguay is unlikely to see any substantial socioeconomic reforms. Indeed, the outcome of yesterday’s election suggests that inequalities and unequal development will most likely continue to plague a country where, according to a CEPAL study, 56% of the population lived below the poverty line as late as 2009 and where less than two percent of the population controls over 77% of the land. And it is not as though Cartes is exactly open-minded on other social and cultural issues; the now current president-elect publicly compared homosexuals to monkeys and said he would “shoot [himself] in the testicles” if he had a gay son who wanted to marry another man.
There are other very real issues also confronting Paraguay, beyond economic inequalities and social bigotry. Perhaps most visibly, there’s the issue of Paraguay’s poorly-monitored border with Brazil, where the drug trade is highly active; indeed, in addition to being the world’s second-largest marijuana producer, Paraguay’s border is also a key region for the transportation of cocaine and other drugs to Brazil and on to Europe. And regardless of what one thinks regarding the debate of the legality/illegality of marijuana, the production and transportation in Paraguay’s border region is a major social and environmental issue. The production of marijuana transforms and shapes the environment of the Paraguayan forests and lands. And the power of organized crime shapes society at the local level in this borderland, complicating the state’s role in the region even while providing a means to rapid (if illegal) acquisition of wealth for those impoverished Paraguayans looking to improve their standards of living. Thus, the drug trade and drug production constitute their own very real social issues, and what, if anything, Cartes does about these issues will be worth watching.
Beyond the domestic outcome, the completion of an election may help Paraguay diplomatically. Greg Weeks argues that Honduras may be a model for reacceptance that could apply to Paraguay. Of course, Honduras was a regional pariah after the 2009 coup of Manuel Zelaya; yet once the country held elections to elect a new president, other countries in the region eventually renewed diplomatic and economic relations with it. That could be good news for Paraguay, a pariah as well since last year, most notably through its suspension from Mercosur. However, the issue of Cartes’ alleged ties to possible drug lords could complicate matters as Paraguay seeks re-integration into regional trade networks. Certainly, neighboring countries have yet to directly indicate whether they are willing to once again accept Paraguay, and Cartes’ social stances and dubious background could be a hindrance. Nonetheless, based on recent historical events in Honduras (and at least one cryptic tweet from Argentine president Cristina Kirchner), it seems more likely that the region will eventually move on and Paraguay will become reincorporated more directly. And even if South America is slow to respond, Paraguay can count on one country for aid: the US. Paraguay is the only country in Latin America to see an increase in bilateral aid from the US even while the US slashes aid to other countries in the region.
That said, what happens to Paraguay internationally is a geopolitical question with no clear answer yet. From a domestic standpoint, however, it is hard to see how the election of Cartes will lead to a marked improvement in the daily lived experiences of most Paraguayans socially, economically, or politically.
Why Chilean Students Protest
Certainly, the demand for educational reforms in Chile is a major cause of student mobilizations over the last two-plus years. But reform is rarely enough in and of itself to sustain a long-term movement; there have to be other systemic and political issues that revitalize the movement. In Chile, the structural problems with the educational bureaucratic apparatus has played an important, if overlooked, part of that revitalizing force. Howso? Well, last night, Chile’s Senate voted to impeach the Minister of Education,[update: less-detailed English version here] Harald Beyer, finding him guilty for failing to act against profiteering within universities, among other charges. The vote followed the Chamber of Deputies’ recent vote to impeach Beyer. Although President Sebastián Piñera’s government insisted Beyer would remain in his post “until the end,” the end is now apparently nigh, as the impeachment means Beyer is banned from holding public office for 5 years. Additionally, whoever replaces Beyer will become the fourth Education Minister in just two years in Chile, as his previous two predecessors had resigned in the face of student protests demanding free higher education.
Given the apparent government corruption in the Ministry of Education, this type of turnover is exactly the kind of issue that can reignite student movements and give them strength both in terms of internal organization and in terms of creating broader social support for them and/or opposition to the government. Indeed, the fallout of Beyer’s policies and his lack of oversight were significant issues in recent protests that saw over 100,000 students march.
The turnover and malfeasance of the ministers of education under Piñera certainly reflect poorly on his administration, and there seems to be little doubt that, when he leaves office next year, education will be one of the key defining issues and failures of his government. Indeed, it is of little surprise that presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet has already made educational reforms a key part of her platform as she seeks the presidency for a second time. That she has done so, and that so much of Piñera’s government has been defied by his intransigence or inability to address educational reform, provides a powerful reminder of the political and social power of student movements and of the educational issues they embrace in the twenty-first century.
Early Thoughts on Venezuela’s Election
As many probably know by now, presidential elections took place in Venezuela yesterday, as Venezuelans went to select either Nicolás Maduro or Henrique Capriles as the next president; Maduro was Chávez’s latest vice president, while Capriles ran against Chávez last fall. While many predicted a comfortable win for Maduro early in the brief campaign, Capriles ultimately picked up significant ground, and Maduro ended up winning the vote, 50.66%-49.07%, a margin of of about 235,000 votes. Unsurprisingly, Capriles refuses to acknowledge defeat until a full recount is completed, a not-unreasonable demand for such a close election.
Last night, Capriles’ supporters took to Twitter to repeatedly proclaim how “the people” suffered with this election (there were too many to link; just look at the tweets under the hashtag “CaprilesganoTibisaymintiu” or, literally, “Capriles won, Tibisay [the head of the National Electoral Commission] lied”). Framed in terms of betrayal, deceit, or just depression or tragedy, the motif was that the election of Maduro ran counter to everything that “the people” wanted or that “the people” deserved. Suffice to say, such rhetoric is a bit out of touch with reality, since a majority of “the people” voted for Maduro; yes, it was a close majority, but it was still a majority. Yet this rhetoric is not just a case of refusing to acknowledge the actual data; I think it is reflective of a broader worldview. Capriles’ supporters are by and large from the middle and upper classes; when they refer to “the people,” they are referring to themselves. Such claims of ignoring “the people” in turn is a telling sign, demonstrating that, even after nearly 14 years of social reforms designed to address inequalities under Chávez, there is still the mindset that poor Venezuelans, who are a significant portion of the Venezuelan population, are not “the people.” That such a mindset, which was characteristic of politics and society for much of Venezuela’s post-independence history, is still visible for all to see may have had some small part in “the people” ultimately turning to Maduro in spite of very real questions on economics, crime, and energy policy, among other things. For, if nothing else, Maduro made clear that he would continue to address “the people” whom Chávez had incorporated and aided after generations of being disregarded for elite interests; Capriles failed to make the case that he would represent their interests, and in defeat, his supporters’ divisive language and political framing revealed the ways some sectors and political groups refuse to acknowledge the role the poor and marginalized play in twenty-first century politics.
The outcome also speaks as closely to how much of the movement was bound in the figure of Chavez. Without him in the election, the outcome was far closer, and I think that speaks to just how personalist and non-institutional his program, rhetoric, and vision for Venezuela were. At the risk of returning to the same well too many times, I’ve repeatedly commented that, regardless of what one thinks of Chávez’s reforms and his vision for Venezuela, one of his biggest failures was to move beyond personalist politics and to institutionalize those reforms and visions. This closeness of this election seems to further reinforce the perils of that type of personalist politics.
At the same time, I’ve also suggested that Chávez’s death means that any efforts to make the reforms more long-lasting will fall to his successor(s) and to the Venezuelan people who support it. Maduro’s victory means that they will at least get a chance to continue to shape Venezuela in the post-Chávez context. What they do with that opportunity, or what they are able to do in the current social, political, and economic context, remains to be seen.
And to be clear, the challenges facing Maduro are significant. A narrative has already emerged that he will pay the political price for Chávez’s shortcomings in areas like monetary policy, energy policy, and crime, and he very well may. But politics and history are both funny things, and Maduro may prove to be a capable leader in his own right, putting his own stamp on years of Chávez’s reforms. Could his term end before his six years are up, as unrest or opposition mount or problems worsen? Sure. But could he also conceivably be quite politically able – we have not really had a chance to see yet, given the short nature of the his time as acting president in unusual circumstances and the unique conditions of a sudden and brief presidential campaign. And even if he should fail, that does not mean the opposition that Capriles represented will fill the void; with Chávez gone, there will be others who disagree with Maduro’s vision of Chavismo who might try to challenge him and arrive in the presidency themselves. After all, as with any political movement, Chavismo is far from unified, and where it goes in its the wake of its namesake’s death can now become a matter of political dispute.
Going forward, one thing is certain – things will continue to be interesting and worth watching.
Get to Know a Brazilian – Maria Augusta Carneiro Ribeiro
While Vera Sílvia Magalhães gained distinction for her role in planning one of the boldest acts against Brazil’s military dictatorship, Maria Augusta Carneiro Ribeiro was not only attached to that event in her own way; she was an important figure in the fight against Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s and a woman who fought for human rights and social justice long after the regime left power in 1985.
Maria Augusta “Guta” Carneiro Ribeiro, who in her own way came to be associated with one of the boldest moves against Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Although technically born in Minas Gerais to a middle-class family in 1947, Maria Augusta Carneiro Ribeiro (often referred to publicly by her nickname, “Guta”) spent most of her youth in the northeastern state of Bahia. From a young age, she followed in her parents’ and grandparents’ footsteps by taking an interest in questions of social justice. At the same time, she also enjoyed the material benefits that came with a middle-class upbringing, attending a private Catholic school in Rio de Janeiro after her parents relocated there in the 1950s. Thus, as she herself put it, her political activism and her Catholic upbringing were closely tied, and she joined the Juventude Estudantil Católica (Catholic Student Youth; JEC) when she was 15. Given her political activism, when the military took power in a coup in 1964, her parents opted to send her to spend a year studying abroad in the United States as an exchange student. While in the US, she witnessed firsthand the growing student protests against the Vietnam War in Berkeley, a political activism that made a strong impression upon her. However, her time away from Brazil also led her to detach from her Catholicism, and upon her return to Brazil, she looked for more radical options to fight for social causes and against the military dictatorship. At that moment, there was a generational divide among leftists: the Leninist Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist Party; PCB) had rejected the armed path to revolution, much to the consternation of younger generations who looked to individuals like Che Guevara as role models for revolution. As a result, a series of small cells advocating a more violent path to communism, referred to collectively as the Dissidencias (Dissidences; DI), emerged, and Guta joined the Dissidencia in Rio de Janeiro (DI-GB).
Throughout 1967, Guta began to distinguish herself as a speaker at rallies and protests, and became an important part of the student movement as a leader, albeit in a “secondary” position, a status reserved for all too many women. Indeed, as was the case in places like Mexico, Chile, and elsewhere, men typically occupied the highest positions in student organizations, with women intentionally or unintentionally denied access to the highest positions in the student movements in spite of their key contributions and participation. Nonetheless, Guta was a figure important enough to attend the clandestine meeting of the National Students Union in Ibiúna, São Paulo, in October 1968. The meeting was poorly planned, with around 900 students gathering on a rural ranch. With so many students gathering in such a small place, the police acted, arresting all those present at the Congress, including top-ranking leaders like José Dirceu, Vladimir Palmeira, and Luís Travassos; though they would remain in prison until September 1969, hundreds of others were released. Guta was one of them.
Upon her release, she continued to organize resistance to the dictatorship. Indeed, her passion for resistance and her abilities made her one of the first women of the DI to work in the armed struggle. Although she’d been released in late-1968, the military ultimately ended up issuing a preventive-arrest order with her name on it, and in order to defend herself, she received arms training. She also entered into clandestinity, moving about regularly in an attempt to avoid arrest. Unfortunately for her, her luck ran out on May 1, 1969, when police spotted her with two other women handing out pamphlets against the dictatorship on International Workers’ Day. With the police closing in, a brief firefight broke out, and while a few escaped, Guta was not one of them.
Security forces ultimately relocated her from Rio to a prison in São Paulo, where she was the only woman in the entire prison. As a result, she was kept in isolation near the common criminals, separated from other male political prisoners. In the increasingly repressive context of 1969, she suffered torture regularly, including one instance that left two of her teeth broken. The treatment she received as a woman angered the common prisoners who witnessed police taking her to and from torture sessions, and they often berated the military, calling them cowards for regularly beating and torturing an unarmed woman. In spite of these protestations, the rough treatment continued, and she remained imprisoned for over three months.
In early September of 1969, her fate changed. When Vera Sílvia Magalhães and several other members of the DI-GB, now renamed the MR-8, kidnapped US Ambassador Charles Elbrick, they put together a list of 15 political prisoners whom they demanded the dictatorship release. The list included a variety of figures from different backgrounds: in addition to student leaders like Dirceu, Palmeira, and Travassos, who’d been imprisoned since October 1968; labor activist José Ibrahim; journalist and activist Flávio Tavares; and PCB member Gregório Bezerra, who had been imprisoned since the beginning of the coup in 1964. Guta was also on the list, due to her involvement in DI-GB; indeed, her inclusion gave her the distinction of being the only woman on the list of political prisoners to be released.
Although she was included on the list, Guta herself was unaware of what was going on; due to her isolation in prison, she, unlike her male colleagues, did not have access to a radio, television, or newspaper. All she knew was that the activity and police presence in the prison had suddenly increased, and one officer told her it was because of something involving her. The officers ordered her to take a shower, and they then gave her the only woman’s clothing they had available – a mini-skirt and a blouse. According to Guta, several officers took advantage of the outfit, slipping their hands up her skirt while she was being transported. Nonetheless, uncertain of her fate, there was little she could say or do at the moment. The military ultimately put her on a flight from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, along with some of the other 15 who were also detained in São Paulo. Upon arriving at the Galeão airport in Rio de Janeiro, the thirteen prisoners (two others, Bezerra and Mario Zanconato, were in prisons in the Northeast) were lined up for a photo. Some of the prisoners thought it was for “posterity,” while others, looking around at all the activists who were present, were certain the regime was documenting their impending murders.
The photo of 13 of the 15 prisoners released in exchange for US Ambassador Charles Elbrick. Maria Augusta Carneiro Ribeiro, the only woman, is third from right in the back row.
The photo was indeed taken for posterity; the thirteen were among the fifteen who were to be exchanged in return for the release of Elbrick. They boarded the plane in handcuffs and sat with a soldier between each of them on the type of long benches designed for parachutists [the plane "Hercules 56," belonged to the military]. After stopping in Bahia and Belém to pick up Bezerra and Zanconato, the plane headed off to Mexico, sending the 15 into exile.
Even on the plane, however, the prisoners were uncertain of their fate, and the repressive tone of military rule even extended to the skies. The prisoners were forbidden from communicating; even the most basic conversations were prohibited. When one of the other prisoners noticed that Guta was particularly cold, given the altitude and her short skirt, he offered her his jacket to cover her legs, but the soldiers refused to even allow this innocuous gesture of kindness. In spite of no means to escape and no access to any sort of weaponry, the prisoners were kept in handcuffs for the entire flight. This caused problems when the prisoners were given bathroom breaks; while the men could urinate with their hands still cuffed, the logistics were different for Guta. Ushered to the toilet, she raised her handcuffed hands and commented that “I am different, I can’t just go like this!”, leading to a bit of confusion and embarrassment among the soldiers before one removed her handcuffs briefly, allowing her to urinate before again having to put on the cuffs. In one last, if increasingly-futile, reminder of the regime’s power, as the prisoners were nearing Mexico, a voice suddenly boomed over the PA, alarming all; it was September 7th, Brazil’s independence day, and the pilot used the opportunity to provide one last ultra-nationalist, pro-military message to the political prisoners.
The arrival in Mexico was an emotional one. On the one hand, the prisoners had arrived safely, but they were now in exile, shut off from their families and many of their colleagues, far from the fight they wanted to fight. Additionally, they’d arrived in a country that, only 11 months earlier, had committed its own massacre of students. Nonetheless, given that most had been in prison only 48 hours earlier and were even considering their possible impending deaths as the military lined them up for a photograph, there was definitely a sense of relief as well. And the arrival was not without its comedic moments, thanks to a linguistic misunderstanding. A Mexican official boarded the plane and ordered the military to remove the “esposas,” which in Spanish means both “handcuffs” and “wives,” but only means “wives” in Portuguese (“algemas” is “handcuffs” in Portuguese). Upon hearing that the esposas were to be taken, the Brazilian prisoners looked around in confusion, commenting that nobody had brought their wife with them. The misunderstanding provided a moment of levity after what had been a stressful journey indeed.
The released political prisoners disembarking in Mexico. Maria Augusta Carneiro Ribeiro is halfway down the stairs.
In Mexico, the exiles stayed together in a hotel, debating their future. They were uncertain about staying in Mexico. Ultimately, they ended up accepting an invitation from none other than Fidel Castro, and went to Cuba to continue to receive military training so that they might return to fight in Brazil. However, in the training, Guta severely injured her back. While some of her colleagues went back to Brazil clandestinely, she ended up relocating to Chile, where the military overthrew democratically-elected president Salvador Allende and ushered in its own military dictatorship under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Ultimately, Guta ended up in Sweden, where she earned a degree in Pedagogy.
With the 1979 amnesty for political prisoners (and for those who committed torture or state-sponsored murder), Guta returned to Brazil. Continuing her political activity, she became part of the group that founded the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party; PT), with labor leader Luís Inácio Lula da Silva and other politically-progressive individuals from both the labor movement and from the middle class. As a human rights activist during her time in exile (and as a victim of torture herself), Guta also worked with the Grupo Tortura Nunca Mais (Torture Never Again Group). She also worked in the government, working in a variety of posts in the government, including for Petrobrás. She participated in the documentary Hercules 56 (and its accompanying book), providing her own recollections of and reflections on her life and her role in one of the more dramatic moments of Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Sadly, Guta died from injuries she sustained in a car accident in 2009, passing away at the age of 62. In spite of her untimely death, she left a powerful historical record behind, both through her activism and through interviews and recorded memories that reveal some of the ways that women were at the heart of political and social change in Brazil in the latter half of the 20th century, even while traditional narratives often overlook their contributions. Though she rarely emphasized her status as a woman radical in a world all too regularly dominated by men, it was an important part both of who she was and of her significance to the student movement. She was more than just the only woman among those first 15 political prisoners released; she was somebody who fought against the military regime even in the context of repression and torture, and at risk to her own health and the lives of her loved ones. Through her life and her actions, Guta showed that, in spite of the gendered politics of the time, women were at the heart of the struggle against Brazil’s military dictatorship and made important contributions to social justice and political change in Brazil.
Maria Augusta “Guta” Carneiro Ribeiro, 1947-2009.
This is part of a series. Other posts have looked at conservative novelist Rachel de Queiroz, singer Gal Costa, and Princess Isabel.
Around Latin America
-Marking the first major protest of the year, over 100,000 Chilean students took to the streets to continue to push for educational reform, an issue that has garnered much support and been a consistent problem for conservative president Sebastian Pinera. (And for those wondering, this is what (part of) over 100,000 people in the streets looks like.)
-With the recent conviction of some of his former top aides for corruption, Brazilian federal prosecutors have opened an investigation into former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva to examine what, if any, role in or knowledge of payoffs Lula might have had during his first term.
-Uruguay became the third country in the Americas to legalize gay marriage nationwide (joining Canada and Argentina) after the Chamber of Deputies approved the Senate’s changes to the bill (the Chamber of Deputies originally passed an earlier draft of the bill last December). Meanwhile, in Chile, Congress has begun debating the legal recognition of same-sex couples; though the recognition would fall short of allowing gay marriage, it would grant gay couples the same rights as married couples.
-Although the frontrunner in Paraguay’s upcoming elections, conservative candidate Horacio Cartes apparently has quite the history of shady dealings and possible corrupt practices, including international smuggling, practices that, if true, could further strain Paraguay’s relations with its neighbors, relations that were already damaged when Congress rapidly removed former president Fernando Lugo through a dubious “impeachment.”
-A study finds that an overwhelming amount of the money donated to aid Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake ultimately ended up in the hands of US companies, with only one percent aiding Haitian companies themselves.
-Speaking of Haitians, they are among the thousands of immigrants who have recently entered into Brazil, leaving the small state of Acre to ask for federal aid in supporting the influx. I don’t quite agree with Boz that their desire to move Brazil automatically means that the economy there is doing well, but it at least suggests that people in other countries perceive the Brazilian economy to be preferable to their own.
-In spite of his family’s claims late last year, Alberto Fujimori does not actually have cancer, which was the reason his family initially called for his release from prison, where he is currently serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations during his 1990-2000 presidency. Although the former president is not actually ailing, that has not stopped Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani from calling for a pardon for Fujimori.
-As a hunger strike among prisoners at US facilities in Guantanamo continues, the US has begun force-feeding some of the striking prisoners.
-In the wake of the rape of a tourist from the US, Rio de Janeiro has banned the use of vans for public transit (rather than the larger buses) in the southern part of the city. Of course, that the ban is in effect only in the wealthier southern zone where tourism dominates provides yet another reminder of the social stratification evident throughout Rio, including in public transportation options.
-Hundreds of thousands of Colombians, including President Juan Manuel Santos, marched in support of ongoing peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC.
-Are Brazil and Russia close to a missile deal?
-Although scholarship and human rights activism have already torn much “the veil” off Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime, the recent exhumation of Nobel-laureate Pablo Neruda could further shed light on the poet’s death and end years of speculation over whether he really died of cancer, as had long been maintained, or if the regime had him killed, a theory that has been bandied about as well.
-Outrage continues over the appointment of evangelical politician Marco Feliciano as the head of the Brazilian Congress’s Human Rights Committee in spite of a history of public homophobic and racist statements. As a result, in a blow against transparency or accountability in government, the Committee recently decided to close all hearings to outsiders in hopes of preventing protests from erupting in committee hearings.
-Speaking of human rights in Brazil, police are finally facing trial for their role in the executions of prisoners during the Carandiru massacre of 1992. The massacre, which occurred 21 years ago this October, left 102 prisoners dead from gunshots after police entered the prison to break up gang fighting between prisoners.
-A Guatemalan court upheld the not-guilty verdict of former president Alfonso Portillo on charges of theft of state funds. However, his legal problems are far from over, as the ruling now opens the path for his extradition to the United States, where he faces indictment for embezzlement and money laundering.
-A Chilean court has suspended development on the Pascua Lama mine, originally set to be one of the world’s largest gold mines, ruling that the pollution and environmental destruction already caused by the Canadian mining company Barrick violates the original terms of the agreement. The shutdown marks a victory for indigenous groups, who had argued that the mine threatened their daily lives and resources, and is part of broader challenges to Barrick’s environmental toll and presence throughout Latin America.
-Finally, scientists have recently encountered a new species of porcupine in Brazil, but the future of the species is already uncertain, as the tree-dwelling Coendou speratus lives in an endangered forest.
Get to Know a Brazilian – Vera Sílvia Magalhães
While recent posts in this series focused on the presidents of Brazil’s military dictatorship, no country’s history, society, or politics is defined merely by its (male) political leaders. During the dictatorship, millions of Brazilians resisted the military’s authority (even while millions more supported it), and support and/or opposition from various social groups ebbed and flowed throughout twenty-one years of military rule. While there is no shortage of materials on resistance to the dictatorship, especially in the 1960s, such work tends to focus on the men (often university students) who challenged the regime (and who later went on to play roles in the post-dictatorship state), even while women played key roles in the student movements that challenged military rule in a number of ways. Thus, this week we begin looking at the lives of these women, often ignored in the narrative of resistance to the dictatorship , by focusing on one of the most important yet most overlooked figures of student politics and resistance in the 1960s: Vera Sílvia Magalhães.
Vera Sílvia Magalhães in 2001. [Photo available at Folha de São Paulo.]
Although president Humberto Castelo Branco’s government had made early attempts to crack down on the student movements in Brazil, they were not as thorough or persistent as efforts to persecute labor activists, high-ranking politicians, or members of Brazil’s Leninist Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist Party; PCB). Thus, less than two years after the coup, university students had become one of the main groups still openly challenging the military dictatorship, criticizing it both along ideological lines while also making more quotidian demands that reflected their experiences as middle-class university students. While some students participated in protests through the “semi-clandestine” National Students Union (UNE), by 1967, other students were becoming more radical. Discontent with the failures of the PCB to adequately address the “Brazilian reality” and frustrated by the fact that, far from ending the dictatorship, street protests only seemed to lead to intensifying police violence under president Artur Costa e Silva, some leftist students looked for more radical solutions to transform Brazilian politics and society. Yet the older members of the PCB, Brazil’s first communist party, refused to endorse the armed struggle as a path towards social change and the end of the dictatorship. As a result, university students turned to alternate offshoot groups. Drawing on the model of the Cuban revolution and abandoning the “Old left” of Leninism for Maoist and/or “Dissident” versions of communism, a small number of urban youth began to see the luta armada, or armed struggle, as the only path to bring down the dictatorship.
Vera Magalhães was one such student. Amidst the regime’s increasing repression and its efforts to silence critics (even moderate ones), in 1968 Magalhães, now 20 and enrolled in university, joined the clandestine Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (Revolutionary Movement of October 8), or MR-8, named after the day CIA-supported Bolivian troops captured Ché Guevara in 1967 [they executed him one day later]. Another group had been operating with the name MR-8, but the regime had captured almost all of its members, trumpeting the regime’s triumph to the public. In an attempt to discredit the regime, Magalhães and other members of the MR-8 began launching increasingly high-profile actions under the MR-8 moniker to indicate that opposition did not end with the arrest of a handful of individuals. Throughout 1968 and 1969,these armed groups mobilized in high-profile actions, even while the student movement faced increasing repression. They attacked banks, where they “expropriated” money from foreign capital and from the bourgeoisie, abandoning the student movement for armed struggle and bank robberies that helped fund the organization and marked an ideological attack on capital both foreign and domestic. In these expropriations, Magalhães, with her blonde wig and her two .45-caliber pistols, captured the attention of the media, which named her “Blonde ’90.”
In this context, Magalhães came to play a vital role in one of the boldest moves against the dictatorship. As the military used the new repressive Institutional Act Number 5 and Decree-Law 477 increase arrests and the use of torture against prisoners even while censoring the media, Magalhães and the MR-8 decided to act more boldly. She and a few of her colleagues came up with a plot to kidnap Charles Burke Elbrick, the US Ambassador to Brazil. No ambassador had ever been kidnapped before, and so the move was as innovative as it was daring. Magalhães spent time watching Elbrick’s route from his home to the US embassy in Botafogo, and even flirted with the chief of security in order to get him to reveal information about Elbrick’s routine. With the information she had gathered and the plans she had helped create, the MR-8 moved, and on September 4, 1969, they kidnapped Elbrick, the first time in world history that an ambassador had been kidnapped. MR-8 pledged Elbrick’s safe release in return for the release of 15 political prisoners and the reading on television of a declaration that expressed the MR-8′s visions and would break through the censorship the military had imposed; if the military refused to meet their conditions, they promised to kill the ambassador. The conditions put thus put Elbrick’s fate as much in the hands of the military as in the hands of his captors.
Charles Burke Elbrick, the US Ambassador to Brazil from July 1969 to May 1970.
Although they did not realize it, Magalhães and her colleagues had perfectly, albeit accidentally, timed the kidnapping. At the end of August, president Costa e Silva had a massive stroke that had left the president incapacitated; not wanting to make clear that the country was presently effectively leaderless, the military had not announced his condition to the country. The regime thought it could safely pretend everything was fine until it found a way to replace the now-semi-paralyzed president. Unfortunately for military brass, the kidnapping of Elbrick had left them both unprepared and unable to quickly respond. Adding to the complications was the fact that the US, a major economic and political supporter of the dictatorship, was more than a little interested in seeing its ambassador safely released no matter the cost. In this context, the military split; some insisted that the government had to meet their demands so as to not lose the US’s support; others insisted meeting the demands would be a sign of military weakness, and that it was better to let Elbrick die.
A headline from the Jornal do Brasil during the kidnapping of US Ambassador Charles Elbrick. The headline reads, “The Government today settles its position regarding the kidnapping,” thus revealing the uncertainty about the military’s path. Courtesy the Jornal do Brasil Blog.
Ultimately, those in favor of meeting the demands prevailed, but barely. The government read the MR-8′s statement, which proclaimed that Brazil was living in a military dictatorship and that the fight of the people would continue, on television. The regime also released fifteen political prisoners that the MR-8 had provided them; the list included student leaders like José Dirceu and Vladimir Palmeira; members of urban guerrilla groups like Maria Augusta Carneiro Ribeiro and Ricardo Vilas; journalist Flávio Tavares; labor activists Agonalto Pacheco and José Ibrahim; and older leftists Rolando Frati and Gregório Bezerra (who had been arrested immediately after the 1964 coup and who had also spent 10 years in prison for his communist activism during the government of Getúlio Vargas). It loaded them on an airplane and sent them to Mexico. Immediately after the plane, named “Hercules 56″ (the title of an excellent documentary on the kidnapping), took off, paratroopers arrived at Rio de Janeiro’s Galeão airport to try to stop them. Nonetheless, they were late, and the prisoners safely arrived in Mexico before heading to Cuba, where they met with Fidel Castro. After receiving training in Cuba, some clandestinely returned to Brazil, while others went into exile. [Of those who returned to Brazil, the military captured and killed two, gunning down both ex-sergeant Onofre Pinto and militant João Leonardo da Silva Rocha in 1974.] As for Elbrick, MR-8 stayed true to their word; with the release of the 15 political prisoners and the reading of the declaration, on September 8 Elbrick’s captors dropped him off at Maracanã stadium just as a soccer game was ending, and MR-8′s members disappearing into the crowd.
Thirteen of the Political Prisoners released after the kidnapping of Elbrick. Front row (L-R): João Leonardo da Silva Rocha; Agonalto Pacheco; Vladimir Palmeira; Ivens Marchetti; and Flávio Tavares. Back row (L-R): Luís Travassos; José Dirceu; José Ibrahim; Onofre Pinto; Ricardo Vilas; Maria Augusta Carneiro Ribeiro; Ricardo Zarattini; and Rolando Frati.
Magalhães and the others who had planned the kidnapping managed to disappear into the crowd in 1969, but they could not escape the regime’s security apparatus. In March 1970, the military arrested Magalhães while she was handing out political pamphlets; in the arrest, she was hit in the head by gunfire. Although wounded, the regime showed her little tolerance; angry at the MR-8′s ability to challenge the regime and in a period of intense repression, the security forces tortured the wounded Magalhães. She sustained three months of beatings, electrical shocks, and psychological torture; the physical abuse was so severe that she was unable to stand on her own without the support of somebody else.
A recently-uncovered photo showing the effects of torture in Brazil. Vera Sílvia Magalhães standing only with the aid of two people after multiple torture sessions in 1970.
In spite of the physical and psychological abuse, she never revealed names. Nor could her legacy be undone; that July, members of the Ação Libertadora Nacional (National Liberating Action; ALN) and Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (Popular Revolutionary Vanguard; VPR) followed MR-8′s model, kidnapping German ambassador Ehrenfried von Holleben and demanded the release of more political prisoners. Ultimately, in July of 1970, the regime released forty more prisoners, including Magalhães; however, the physical effects of torture on her were clear. In a photo of the prisoners, she was seated in a chair, still unable to stand on her own.
The forty political prisoners released in 1970. Vera Magalhães is seated on the far right. Fernando Gabeira (in glasses), a member of the group who kidnapped Elbrick, is squatting next to her in the photo.
After her release, Magalhães went into exile, first in Algeria and then in Chile, where many Brazilian exiles remained until the military coup of 1973 ushered in a right-wing dictatorship there as well. From there, she went to Europe with her husband (and comrade in MR-8), Fernando Gabeira (they eventually divorced). She ultimately settled in Paris, studying sociology at the Sorbonne under Brazilian professor Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had also gone into self-imposed exile. When João Figueiredo issued a general amnesty in 1979, Magalhães joined thousands of other exiles in returning to Brazil.
Although she returned to Brazil safely, Vera Magalhães was never able to shake the long-term effects of the horrible abuses and torture she suffered at the hands of the military regime. She worked as an urban planner in the state government of Rio de Janeiro for years, but ultimately retired early at the age of 54, unable to work any longer due to her health. Throughout the rest of her life, she suffered from periodic psychotic episodes, kidney problems (from the beatings), and troubles with her legs, even while the medicine she had to take caused dental problems. Though hesitant to use her long-term suffering for financial gain, in 2002, she became the first woman to receive financial reparations from the state for her suffering at the hands of the military (previously, such reparations had usually only gone to families of those who had died at the hands of the military during the dictatorship). While the financial aid helped her with her medical problems, it could not cure her of them, and in December 2007, she died of a heart attack at the age of 59.
Although often overlooked in general narratives of student mobilization and opposition to the military regime, there is no doubt that Vera Magalhães played a key role in challenging the dictatorship. Although her politics and her fight for social justice led her to suffer severely at the hands of the military, she was proud of her ability to maintain her “human sense, ethical and political.”
Vera Sílvia Magalhães during her time in prison in 1970.
Other posts in this series have looked at author Clarice Lispector, tropicalista Torquato Neto, and architect Oscar Niemeyer.
How Not to Deal with Criticism
A couple of weeks ago, there was controversy and anger when Marco Feliciano, an evangelical congressman who had publicly made homophobic and racist comments, became the head of the Congress’s Human Rights Commission. After a few weeks of criticisms, Feliciano finally addressed the criticisms. His response?
He proclaimed he’s the victim of a “Gayzista [as in Gay & Nazi] dictatorship.“
It would appear Feliciano understands neither the concept of human rights, nor why people are critical of his appointment to the post in Congress.
Get to Know a Brazilian – Tancredo Neves
Having recently wrapped up a look at the five presidents during Brazil’s military dictatorship, this week focuses on Tancredo Neves, the first civilian elected to the presidency after the military dictatorship.
Tancredo Neves
Tancredo de Almeida Neves was born on 4 March 1910 in the city of São João del Rei in the interior state of Minas Gerais, two and a half hours from the state capital of Belo Horizonte and four hours from Rio de Janeiro. After finishing his schooling, he attended the law school at what is today the Federal University of Minas Gerais, completing his degree in 1932. While in school, he supported the Liberal Alliance, the coalition of forces that helped to bring Getúlio Vargas to power in 1930. Neves was a lifelong politician, first being elected to the municipal council of São João del Rei in 1935. He ultimately became president of the municipal council shortly before Vargas ushered in the Estado Novo in 1937, which closed all municipal chambers throughout the country. Out of office, Neves practiced law, working for the railroad workers’ union in his hometown, while also operating his own textile business.
With the return to democracy after the end of the first Vargas government in 1945, Neves again returned to politics. He joined the Partido Social Democrático, one of two political parties Vargas created in the 1940s, and in 1947, won election as a congressman in Minas Gerais’s state legislature, where he served until 1950, when he won election to the Brazilian legislature as a representative from Minas. He ascent and ability, combined with the fact he was from one of Brazil’s most powerful states, led Vargas to name Neves his Minister of Justice and of Internal Affairs, posts he held until Vargas’s suicide in 1954. Once again jobless after another Vargas action, Neves returned to electoral politics, winning election and serving again as a federal representative from 1954-1955. He spent the latter half of the 1950s in a number of business-related posts in both the state government of Minas Gerais and in the federal government.
A young Tancredo Neves with Getúlio Vargas in the 1950s.
It was in 1961 when Neves became nationally known. In August of 1961, president Jânio Quadros resigned only seven months after his inauguration. The resignation threw the country into turmoil. The military fiercely opposed the legal succession of vice president João Goulart, fearing his progressive stances and his status as Vargas’s Minister of Labor from 1953-54 made him a threat to democracy in Brazil. Complicating matters, Goulart himself was out of the country when Quadros resigned, touring China on an official trip (a trip that the military viewed as proof of Goulart’s alleged communist sympathies). While some military leaders tried to stop Goulart from fulfilling the constitution and assuming the presidency, students and leftist politicians, including Leonel Brizola, Goulart’s brother-in-law and a governor, mobilized in favor of Goulart. Facing more opposition than it had originally expected, the military ultimately retreated somewhat, allowing Goulart to become president with one caveat: Brazil would become a parliamentary presidency, and Goulart would have to have a prime minister who created the cabinet and who could serve as a check on the president’s power. In that way, Goulart became president, albeit with powers greatly limited.
With the agreement in place, Goulart selected Neves as his Prime Minister; Congress overwhelmingly approved Neves’ selection, and he became the first vice president in the brief parliamentary system, a position he served until 1962. As Prime Minister, his cabinet saw the passage of a number of key reforms, including the Lei de Diretrizes e Bases, an educational reform law first proposed in 1948 that, among other things, made elementary school mandatory for all Brazilians, pledged 12% of the national budget to education, required elementary school teachers to have a high school diploma and secondary school teachers to have a college degree, and created a national academic calendar, alongside other administrative reforms. His cabinet also attempted to address socioeconomic inequalities in the countryside by moving towards a possible agrarian reform. However, in the increasingly-polarized context of Cold War politics in Brazil in the early-1960s, farmers and peasant organizations began radicalizing and demanding more rapid and sweeping reforms, even while conservative elites increasingly distanced themselves from the government. Facing growing criticisms from both the left and the right, the entire cabinet, including Neves, resigned in June 1962; the timing was not accidental, as it allowed the now-ex cabinet members to run in congressional elections in October 1962, something Neves took advantage of, easily winning election to Congress yet again and taking his seat in 1963.
Neves with João Goulart during the compromise parliamentary presidency (1961-1962).
Although Neves continued to support Goulart’s presidency, his support was not enough; increasing inflation and opposition ultimately set the stage for a military coup that overthrew Goulart on April 1, 1964. While many politicians supported what they at the time believed would be the military’s brief intervention, which they hoped would bring stabilization, Neves was not among them. When Congress indirectly selected Humberto Castelo Branco as the first military president, Neves was the only member of his party not to vote in favor of Castelo Branco. The vote established Neves as one of the leading critics of the regime from within the government, a position he would maintain throughout the dictatorship. When the military abolished all political parties and created two new parties, the “opposition” MDB and the pro-military ARENA [sardonically referred to as "the party of yes" and "the party of yes,sir!" for some years], Neves joined the MDB, becoming one of its leaders. While the military ruled with authoritarian powers, Brazil’s dictatorship tried to maintain legitimacy through the facade of democracy, and so limited elections, including congressional elections, took place throughout the dictatorship (though generals like Costa e Silva and Geisel did not hesitate to close Congress when legislators prove unwilling to rubber-stamp regime decrees). Thus, Neves was re-elected regularly, serving in the Chamber of Deputies continuously from 1963 to 1979 and becoming one of the elder statesmen of the opposition, which grew increasingly strong in the latter half of the 1970s.
In 1979, Neves was inaugurated as Senator after winning in the 1978 elections. Shortly after Neves’s inauguration, the new (and final) military president, João Figueiredo abolished the old two-party system, allowing opponents to create their own parties in the hopes that the MDB would fragment while ARENA could remain strong. Neves formed the Partido Popular, or Popular Party; in spite of its name, it was one of the more conservative new parties, bringing together conservatives from the ex-MDB and moderates from the ex-ARENA. Given this elite composition, the PP did not necessarily appeal to a large number of Brazilians, and in the face of difficult electoral rules, the PP opted to merge with the PMDB [the MDB's new guise] in the early-1980s. In spite of his party’s failure, Neves remained a key figure in national politics, becoming the vice-president of the PMDB, even while winning the governorship of Minas Gerais for the party.
It was in this context that Neves came to play a key role in national politics one last time. In 1983, legislator Dante de Oliveira submitted a bill that would have made the presidential elections scheduled for 1986 a direct election, rather than Congress indirectly selecting the next president, as was planned. The bill rapidly gained popular support throughout the country, and the opposition united under the banner of Diretas Já, or “Direct Elections now!” movement. Political figures from a variety of backgrounds, including Ulysses Guimarães, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and former-union leader and founder of the PT, Lula da Silva, joined hundreds of thousands throughout the country at rallies.
Neves (left) with Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (center, with beard) and Ulysses Guimarães (right, in yellow shirt) during a Diretas Já (“Direct Elections Now!”) rally.
Ultimately, the bill failed to garner the 2/3 majority it needed. However, Diretas Já had brought together the opposition and shown Congress the power of the people in the context of a dictatorship. In selecting a candidate to run against Paulo Maluf, the pro-military Social Democratic Party (PDS), the PMDB and others selected Neves. The selection was not universally lauded; Lula and the PT were critical of the move, arguing Neves was not radical enough to meet the demands of the people. However, it was this very position as a moderate that made Neves appealing to many; his deep political history, his ability to reach out to conservatives and the military, and his grandfatherly appearance (he was 74 by this point) made the opposition believe they had a candidate that the military could accept. In order to cement support, he reached out to a former member of ARENA and the PDS, José Sarney, to run as his vice president. Sarney accepted, and in January 1985, Brazil’s Congress elected Neves as the next president of Brazil; it appeared Brazil had its first non-military president since 1964.
Neves addressing Congress shortly after winning the indirect presidential election in January 1985.
Unfortunately, it did not take Brazil’s ecstasy to turn into tragedy. Neves was set to take office on March 15, 1985. The day before he was set to reach the peak of his political career, Neves fell ill, and went to the hospital with abdominal pain. He was unable to attend his inauguration on the 15th. The political path for Brazil was uncertain; Figueiredo was definitely leaving office, but who would succeed him was unclear. Constitutionally, the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Ulysses Guimarães, was supposed to serve as interim president; however, Guimarães had been a very vocal and ardent critic of the military since the early-1970s, and feared that, if he were to take office, the military would block him and reassert control. Ultimately, José Sarney, who had been a member of the pro-military ARENA and PDS until the last minute, was inaugurated as vice-president and would act as president until Neves could take office.
Neves with his wife and doctors during his illness, which prevented him from his officially-scheduled inauguration on March 15, 1985.
But he was never able to take office. Neves underwent surgery, but faced complications in the wake of the surgery. He picked up an infection from the original hospital, and his situation worsened, leading to his transferral to a hospital in São Paulo. He underwent another six surgeries over the following three weeks, but he never fully recovered, dying on April 21, 1985.
Much of the country was grief-stricken. in just four months, they’d gone from elation over finally triumphing over the military dictatorship to losing the man Congress had elected on their behalf. Sarney became president, but that offered little comfort to many, given that he’d not been nominated as president and that he’d served in the pro-military party for so many years. Some even alleged that the military had poisoned or murdered Neves in order to prevent his inauguration, unable to completely let go of power after 21 years of rule. His funeral was broadcast on national television, and throughout the country, memorials, plaques, and other markers went up to commemorate the man who would have been president.
Although he never served, his impact on politics was profound. In many ways, Neves was perhaps the politician most able, through both his skill and his background, to navigate the difficult transition to democracy between 1983 and 1985, when the military’s departure was much-desired but far from assured. His articulation and his ability to reach out to a number of groups, from elder conservatives to university students, from peasants to conservative senators, helped the success of Diretas Já and helped make possible the election (albeit indirectly) of the opposition candidate in January 1985. Although he never served, his Tancredo Neves’ political legacies are far-reaching, and not just for the fact that he became the first civilian elected to the presidency since 1960; his grandson, Aécio Neves, is currently a candidate for president for the PSDB, aspiring to the office his grandfather won, but never served in.
Tancredo Neves during his governorship, with his grandson, Aécio Neves, who, as a candidate for president next year, is hoping to fill the office his grandfather won but never served in.
This is part of a series. Other entries have included author Clarice Lispector, composer/diplomat/poet Vinícius de Moraes, and tropicalista band Os Mutantes.
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