Who was João Goulart?

Getúlio’s heir

João Goulart was born in 1919 in São Borja, a ranching town in Rio Grande do Sul on the border with Argentina, also the hometown of Getúlio Vargas, the president who dominated Brazilian politics from 1930 to 1954. Jango entered politics through Vargas’s Brazilian Labor Party, the PTB, and served as his labor minister. In 1954, after Vargas took his own life, it was Jango who read the president’s farewell letter at the graveside.

He was then elected vice-president twice, in 1955 and 1960. Brazilians voted for president and vice-president separately in those years, so in 1960 the country chose Jânio Quadros for president and Jango, from the rival ticket, as his deputy.

The presidency he almost never got

On August 25, 1961, after less than seven months in office, Jânio resigned with a note of a few lines. Jango was on the other side of the world, leading an official mission to communist China, and heard the news in Singapore. In Brasília, the three military ministers vetoed his swearing-in: to them, Jango would open the door to communism.

In Porto Alegre, Governor Leonel Brizola, Jango’s brother-in-law, ringed his palace with sandbags and ran a radio network from its basement, the Rede da Legalidade (Legality Network), calling on the country to respect the constitution. The army in the south sided with him. With civil war in the air, Congress improvised a parliamentary system on September 2: Jango could take office, but a prime minister would govern. He was sworn in on September 7, 1961, and the prime minister was Tancredo Neves.

Jango spent a year and a half undoing that deal. In a referendum on January 6, 1963, more than 9 million voters chose to bring back the presidential system, against about 2 million, and he got his full powers back.

The basic reforms

He spent them on what he called the reformas de base, the basic reforms: land reform above all, plus changes to taxes, banks, cities and universities, and the vote for people who could not read. On March 13, 1964, before more than 100,000 people outside Rio’s Central do Brasil station, he signed two decrees. One expropriated land along the federal highways. The other took over the private oil refineries. Some heard hope. Others heard a threat, and six days later hundreds of thousands marched in São Paulo against him.

Overthrow and exile

Less than three weeks later he was gone. Troops left Minas Gerais on March 31, almost no one defended the government, and Jango flew to Porto Alegre rather than risk a civil war. In the small hours of April 2, Congress declared the presidency vacant while he was still in Brazil. The coup itself has its own page. Days later he crossed into Uruguay, and the new regime’s first list stripped him of his political rights.

He lived in exile in Uruguay and Argentina and died in Mercedes, Argentina, on December 6, 1976, the only Brazilian president to die in exile. He came home to São Borja in a coffin. In 2013 his remains were exhumed; the Federal Police found no poison but said they could not rule it out. That same year, Congress annulled the 1964 declaration that the presidency had been vacant.