What was the 1964 coup in Brazil?

A country split in two

By March 1964 Brazil was deeply divided over President João Goulart, known as Jango, and his program of land and social reforms. On March 13 he signed reform decrees at a huge rally in Rio. On March 19, in São Paulo, the March of the Family with God for Freedom brought hundreds of thousands into the streets, many holding rosaries, asking for the country to be saved from communism. It was the height of the Cold War, five years after the Cuban Revolution.

Then the crisis reached the barracks. Some two thousand sailors rebelled at a union hall in Rio, and the government granted them an amnesty. To many officers, the chain of command was finished. On the night of March 30, Jango addressed a gathering of sergeants at Rio’s Automóvel Clube.

Three days

That same night, in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, a 63-year-old general named Olímpio Mourão Filho decided to wait no longer. On March 31 he set his troops on the road to Rio, with the backing of the state governor, Magalhães Pinto. Mourão was the officer who, in 1937, had forged the Cohen Plan, a fake communist plot used to justify Vargas’s Estado Novo dictatorship. In Rio, General Humberto Castelo Branco, who was coordinating the conspiracy, thought the move premature.

It did not matter. On April 1 hardly any troops came out for the government. The Second Army in São Paulo joined the uprising, and tanks took over central Rio. Jango flew to Brasília and that night on to Porto Alegre, unwilling to start a civil war. In the small hours of April 2, Senate president Auro de Moura Andrade declared the presidency vacant, as if Jango had left the country. He had not: a letter read out in that very session said he was in Porto Alegre. Amid protests, the speaker of the Chamber, Ranieri Mazzilli, was sworn in.

Not only the military

The coup had broad civilian backing. The governors of Minas Gerais, Guanabara and São Paulo supported it. The big newspapers had been calling for Jango to go, and the Correio da Manhã printed the word “Fora!”, meaning “Out!”. Business leaders, Catholic groups, women’s associations and opposition politicians stood on the same side, as did part of the Church. At sea, the United States had a naval task force with an aircraft carrier on its way, Operation Brother Sam, in case of resistance. There was none, and the ships turned back.

Why it happened

The two sides told it differently. For the coup’s supporters, Brazil had to be rescued from communism, corruption and inflation, and the victors named their movement the Revolution of 1964. For Jango’s supporters, the basic reforms promised a fairer country, and the coup came to stop them. Historians and Brazil’s National Truth Commission call it a coup because a constitutional president was removed by force, outside the rules of the 1946 Constitution.

On April 11, Congress elected Castelo Branco president with 361 votes, among them that of Senator Juscelino Kubitschek, whom the new regime would strip of his political rights two months later. What was promised as a short intervention became 21 years of military rule. Jango himself died in exile in 1976, as told in Who was João Goulart?.