When did Brazil let 16-year-olds vote?

What the Constitution says

Brazil has compulsory voting, and before 1988 the minimum age was 18. The Constitution promulgated on October 5, 1988, the “Citizen Constitution” written after 21 years of military rule, opened the ballot box to 16- and 17-year-olds, but as a right, not a duty.

Voter registration and voting are: […] compulsory for those over eighteen years of age; […] optional for: a) the illiterate; b) those over seventy years of age; c) those over sixteen and under eighteen years of age.

In practice, a teenager decides whether to register. Once registered, a 16- or 17-year-old may vote or stay home without penalty. The obligation starts at 18 and lifts again for those over 70. How the Constitution came to be written is in Why is Brazil’s 1988 Constitution called the Citizen Constitution?.

The first time: 1989

The rule met its first presidential election on November 15, 1989, exactly a century after Brazil became a republic and the first direct vote for president since 1960. Two groups stood in line who had never voted for president: teenagers of 16 and 17, and illiterate citizens. The election itself is told in When was Brazil’s first direct presidential election after the dictatorship?.

The longer wait of the illiterate

Illiterate Brazilians had waited far longer. Under the Empire, men who could not read could vote if they met the income requirement. The Saraiva Law of 1881 required new voters to read and write, and the first republican constitution, of 1891, shut the illiterate out entirely. Constitutional Amendment 25 of 1985 gave them the vote back, and the 1988 Constitution kept it, as optional, beside the new vote at 16.

The painted faces

Many of those first-time voters of 1989, aged 16 or 17, were back in the news three years later. In August and September 1992, students poured into the streets with painted faces, in marches called by the national student unions, UNE and UBES, to demand the impeachment of President Fernando Collor. On August 13 he had asked people, in a speech, to go out that Sunday in green and yellow. On the 16th, many wore black instead. The papers called the students caras-pintadas, the painted faces.

On September 29, 1992, the Chamber of Deputies voted 441 to 38 to open impeachment proceedings. At the end of December Collor resigned, and the Senate barred him from public office for eight years, by 76 votes to 2. In December 1994, the Supreme Federal Court acquitted him of the criminal charge of passive corruption for lack of evidence. The political trial and the criminal one ended differently.

The vice-president who took over the presidency that year is in Who was Itamar Franco?.