Brazilian Elections
Keith, Sherry
On October 15, 1978, Gen. Joao Baptista Figueiredo was "elected" to succeed Ernesto Geisel, as President of Brazil. Figueiredo's "victory" was not a surprise, even after intense lobbying on...
...While the MDB is very strong in the major urban areas in the south (Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte) ARENA has gerrymandered control over many rural areas and some of the northeast...
...News of disgruntled junior officers within the army and air force spread...
...Euler Bentes Monteiro...
...A much clearer delineation of political differences within the military emerged as the presidential succession drew nearer...
...Three factions became identifiable: 1) the ultra-right nationalists who favor the strengthening of national capital and restriction of foreign economic interests under a tight, military leadership ruling in the name of national security...
...This movement is gaining force in working class neighborhoods as well as among middle class residents of Sao Paulo, who have found their standard of living rapidly eroded by inflation...
...Whether this demise would be due to growing civilian pressures, or due to a coup from within the military cannot be predicted...
...The attempts to reconstruct a national student organization were underway in spite of po49update * update * update * update lice repression, and student congresses were held in the face of governmental prohibitions The labor movement, which had been strictly controlled by the government, began to show signs of revitalization...
...1978 have been mounting intensely in the world's fourth largest country since early 1977...
...Figueiredo is considered to be a hard liner on matters of national security and not thought to be inclined toward any further democratization of the military regime...
...Hugo Abreu, a progressive nationalist senior military officer, predicted the Figueiredo government would not last two years before falling...
...This was the beginning of the Geisel government's legitimacy crisis...
...One was the movement for political amnesty calling for release of all political prisoners and amnesty for political exiles living abroad...
...He is reported to have said that he would close the Congress if the MDB were to emerge victorious in the November 15 congressional elections...
...All of these growing political forces and pressures added weight to the question of the 1979 presidential succession...
...tical change in Brazil at this time is unclear...
...The Gomes affair provoked a torrent of criticism in the press as well as within the caucuses of important industrial leaders and from university students...
...It is too soon to tell whether Figuelredo will last, or even whether he will resort to an intensive campaign to close the doors of democracy which had begun to open at the end of the Geisel government...
...On the surface, it appeared that the military was more prepared to look for political solutions to dissent than it had been since 1964...
...This faction, which would likely find widespread support among civilians, is still a relatively unknown force within the military...
...The slap in the face came when Geisel closed the Federal Congress in April and instituted constitutional changes making it more difficult for the MDB to function as an effective opposition...
...The succession was in many ways a sensitive thermometer to the flexibility and limits of the campaign for a return to civilian government...
...President Figueiredo may also have to contend soon with the formation of new political parties -the result of liberalizing reforms taking effect in January...
...By April 1977, it appeared that the military regime was tolerating an opening up of its authoritarian rule to allow political debate, criticism and even political organization in opposition to its own policies...
...The most important semblance of democracy, the two party system, contributed to this crisis as the opposition party, the MDB, began to take its political role more seriouslyseriously in the sense of entering into the political battlefield at the level of local and congressional elections to win, rather than merely exist pro forma...
...There was repression, but not on the scale experienced by Brazilian workers, intellectuals, labor and political leaders during the late sixties and early seventies...
...It is very likely that a workers' party, in the fashion of the old populist PTB (Partido Trabalhista Brasiliero) and a socialist party will be formed...
...However, their efforts were defeated, making it far more difficult for the party to make any gains in the congressional elections...
...Gomes, allied with segments of Brazilian capital who opposed further for- eign penetration of the economy, was pushed out of the government for deviating from Geisel's politically authoritarian and economically pro-international capital stance...
...Nonetheless, speculations about the Figueiredo government had begun to fly before the election results were known...
...picture of each political candi date on TV...
...The Brazilian political-economic model which has been the inspiration for other military dictatorships in Latin America, cannot easily co-exist with even bourgeois political freedoms...
...Nonetheless, the tone of political discontent and dissent had been set...
...The military will then have to deal with a much more complex political situation than the present two party arrangement...
...These included a number of wildcat strikes and mounting pressures by workers to reinstate their right to strike and demanding the inclusion of cost of living increases in the minimum wage regulated by government...
...While Geisel pretended to be moving toward the restoration of democracy and civilian rule at some uncertain point in the future, sectors of Brazilian society which had once supported the military takeover were becoming disaffected and impatient...
...Though the "election" of Geisel's hand-picked successor became a heated political process, it was really a proxy for the larger political issue which has been looming for some time : How can there be a return to bourgeois democracy after 14 years of authoritarian military rule...
...2) the faction identified with Geisel and Figueiredo, favoring authoritarian control of politics, but with a clear allegiance to the presence and expansion of foreign capital within the country as a strategy for development...
...This, of course, is not likely, due to the severe restrictions placed on campaigning by the Lei Falcon (Falcon Law) which prohibits anything more than showing a Reform-Brazil's new President speaking with a forked tongue...
...In 1977 the first fissures in the military-apparently unified since 1968-began to appear with the forced resignation from Geisel's cabinet of Sevro Gomes, civilian Minister of Trade and Commerce...
...and 3) the progressive nationalist wing of the military, drawn primarily from the junior officers...
...Beyond the MDB's growing political agitation, grass roots movements emerged...
...The MDB pushed a reform package in the Congress prior to the presidential election, hoping to eliminate some of the more restrictive political censorship, such as the Lei Falcon...
...Abreu's outspokenness during the presidential electoral campaign cost him 20 days imprisonment for circulating a letter among senior officers implicating Geisel and Figueiredo in government corruption, However, the direction of poli...
...Figueiredo's "victory" was not a surprise, even after intense lobbying on the part of the opposition Movimento Democratico Brasiliero (MDB) to swing the dissident members of the government's party, ARENA, to cast their votes for the MDB candidate, retired Gen...
...It remains to be seen what it will do when the dust from the change of presidents has settled...
...This will certainly bring more protest from these groups and it may precipitate a new wave of repression...
...During the next year and a half, political protests swept forward at a pace unequalled since 1968, when the ultra-right within the military purged its more progressive ranks and issued a series of institutional acts effectively eliminating all traditional bourgeois freedoms: press, speech, right to habeas corpus, etc...
...This group is social democratic in orientation and favors a return to direct political control by the Congress, as well as the expansion of internal consumer markets, and wants to subsidize workers' standard of living and open up the bargaining process over wages, especially for professional and technical employees...
...More recently, the government has been faced with a widespread popular movement against the skyrocketing cost of living - nearly 50 percent per year in the past two years...
...These pressures NovJ.Dec...
...Moreover, there were the first signs of division within the military itself...
...One can speculate, however, that if the government continues to favor the entry and expansion of foreign capital the conditions of the working and middle sectors will continue to deteriorate...
Vol. 12 • November 1978 • No. 6
