What was the Diretas Já movement?

Two articles and a slogan

Since the 1964 coup, Brazil’s presidents had been chosen by indirect vote, and the winner was always a general. In 1983 Dante de Oliveira, a 31-year-old engineer in his first term as a congressman for Mato Grosso, proposed a constitutional amendment of just two articles. The first said what the whole country would soon be shouting.

The President and Vice-President of the Republic shall be elected together, from among Brazilians over thirty-five years of age in full possession of their political rights, by universal suffrage and direct and secret ballot, for a term of five years.

The slogan was shorter: diretas, short for direct elections, and já, now. The timing was right. In 1982 Brazilians had elected state governors by direct vote for the first time in years, and the opposition won São Paulo, Rio and Minas Gerais. The economy was sinking under foreign debt and unemployment, and in 1983 prices rose 164%.

From Curitiba to the Anhangabaú

The rallies started small. On January 12, 1984, some 50,000 people packed the Boca Maldita, a downtown meeting spot in Curitiba. On January 25, São Paulo’s birthday, the Praça da Sé filled up in the rain. On the stage stood rivals who rarely shared anything: Governor Franco Montoro of the PMDB, Lula of the Workers’ Party (PT) and Leonel Brizola of the PDT. Ulysses Guimarães, head of the PMDB, became the face of the rallies and earned the nickname Mr. Direct Elections.

Then the campaign turned into a party. The sports announcer Osmar Santos ran the rallies like a World Cup final, the singer Fafá de Belém sang the national anthem, and the footballer Sócrates climbed onto the stage. On April 10, about a million people packed the square in front of Rio’s Candelária church. On April 16, the organizers counted a million and a half in São Paulo’s Anhangabaú valley, many of them in yellow, the campaign’s color.

The regime pushes back

The government of General João Figueiredo worked against the amendment. On April 18 it decreed emergency measures in Brasília. General Newton Cruz paraded on horseback down the Esplanade with troops and armored cars, and when drivers honked for direct elections he lashed their cars with his whip. Radio and television could mention the amendment only with permission.

The vote of April 25, 1984

The session in the Chamber of Deputies opened at nine in the morning and ended close to two the next morning. The count: 298 for, 65 against, 3 abstentions. A constitutional amendment needed two thirds of the Chamber, 320 votes. It was 22 short and never reached the Senate.

The decisive bloc was the 113 deputies who simply stayed away, most of them from the government party, the PDS. An absence was not a vote against, but it took a vote out of the count without putting a name on the tally. The next morning the Folha de S.Paulo ran the headline “A nation frustrated!”

So the most common myth is wrong: Diretas Já did not win the vote. It won something else. The regime had lost the streets, and its own party began to split. Less than nine months later, the Electoral College chose an opposition civilian, Tancredo Neves. Brazilians did not vote for president again until 1989.