What was the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–1985)?

A short intervention that lasted 21 years

On March 31, 1964, General Olímpio Mourão Filho set his troops on the road from Juiz de Fora, in the state of Minas Gerais, toward Rio de Janeiro. The next day hardly any units came out to defend the government, and President João Goulart, known as Jango, fell without a fight. The victors called their movement the Revolution of 1964. Historians and Brazil’s National Truth Commission call it a coup, because a constitutional president was removed by force. The three days themselves are told in What was the 1964 coup in Brazil?.

On paper the takeover was temporary. The first Institutional Act, issued on April 9, 1964, scheduled a presidential election for October 1965 and was set to expire in January 1966. That vote never happened. In October 1965, after opposition candidates won the governorships of Guanabara and Minas Gerais, a second act abolished the political parties and made the choice of president indirect. Two parties were allowed from then on: Arena for the government and the MDB, an opposition the regime tolerated.

How the generals ruled

Brazil kept a Congress and held elections for some offices, but real power sat in the institutional acts, decrees the military placed above the constitution. They let the government revoke mandates and suspend a citizen’s political rights for ten years, with no appeal to a judge. The first list, published the day after the first act, had about a hundred names, Jango and former president Jânio Quadros among them.

Every president was a general picked inside the armed forces and then confirmed by an indirect vote; the five of them each left a different mark. The harshest decree came on December 13, 1968. Institutional Act Number 5, the AI-5, let the president close Congress, suspended habeas corpus for political crimes and, unlike the earlier acts, set no end date. Censors moved into newsrooms the next morning.

The Years of Lead

In 1969 the regime entered its harshest phase, later remembered in Brazil as the anos de chumbo, the Years of Lead. Groups of the armed left robbed banks to fund a guerrilla war and, in September 1969, kidnapped the US ambassador. The regime answered with army interrogation centers, the DOI-Codi, where prisoners were tortured to give up names. In 2014 the National Truth Commission confirmed 434 political dead and disappeared and found that repression had been decided at the top; its count and what it covers have their own page.

In those same years the economy grew more than 10% a year and the national team won the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. The government spoke of a Brazilian miracle. The showcase and the cellars existed side by side.

The slow way out

In 1974 General Ernesto Geisel promised an easing that would be “slow, gradual and safe”, at a pace he alone would set. The death of the journalist Vladimir Herzog in army custody in 1975 drew thousands to São Paulo’s cathedral. An amendment revoked the AI-5 in October 1978, and an amnesty law in August 1979 let the exiles come home.

The regime still had six years to run. In 1984 the Diretas Já campaign filled city squares with crowds demanding a direct vote for president, but the amendment fell 22 votes short in the Chamber of Deputies. On January 15, 1985, an electoral college chose a civilian, Tancredo Neves. He was rushed to the hospital on the eve of his inauguration, and on March 15, 1985, his running mate, José Sarney, took office in his place. That day closed 21 years of military rule, as told in How did Brazil’s military dictatorship end?.