Who were the presidents of Brazil’s military dictatorship?

How they were chosen

After the 1964 coup, no Brazilian voted for a president for 21 years. The name was settled inside the armed forces and then confirmed by an indirect vote, first in Congress and later in an electoral college. Every one of them was an army general. The regime they led is explained on its own page; here is who held the office.

The five, in order

1. Humberto Castelo Branco (1964–1967). From Ceará, he had been the operations officer of Brazil’s expeditionary force in Italy in 1944 and 1945. As army chief of staff he coordinated the plot against President João Goulart. Congress elected him on April 11, 1964, with 361 votes, one of them from Juscelino Kubitschek, whose political rights he stripped in June. He promised to leave in January 1966 but signed the AI-2, which abolished the parties and the direct presidential vote. He died in July 1967, months after stepping down, when an air force jet struck his plane near Fortaleza.
2. Artur da Costa e Silva (1967–1969). Castelo’s war minister and the hard-liners’ candidate, he took office in March 1967. On December 13, 1968, he decreed the AI-5, which let him close Congress and suspended habeas corpus for political crimes. In 1969 he fell ill. Instead of the civilian vice-president, Pedro Aleixo, the only man who had voted against the AI-5, a junta of the army, navy and air force ministers took over.
3. Emílio Garrastazu Médici (1969–1974). A gaúcho from Bagé and former head of the National Intelligence Service, the SNI, he was chosen by the military in October 1969. His years were the economic boom, with growth of 14% in 1973, and the 1970 World Cup title, and also the harshest repression, with censorship and the DOI-Codi. He is credited with the line “The economy is doing well, but the people are doing badly”.
4. Ernesto Geisel (1974–1979). The son of German immigrants, a Lutheran from Bento Gonçalves who had run Petrobras, he took office on March 15, 1974, promising an easing that would be “slow, gradual and safe”. He closed Congress for two weeks in 1977, yet he dismissed the commander of the Second Army after the metalworker Manoel Fiel Filho died in army custody in 1976, and he revoked the AI-5. A CIA memo of April 1974, released by the US government and brought to light in 2018, reports that he authorized the continued execution of opponents considered dangerous.
5. João Figueiredo (1979–1985). A former SNI chief picked by Geisel as his successor, he signed the Amnesty Law of August 28, 1979, and governed through the return of the exiles, the strikes in São Paulo’s industrial suburbs and the Diretas Já campaign. On March 15, 1985, he refused to hand the presidential sash to the incoming civilian vice-president, José Sarney, and left the palace by the back door.

Where you still see their names

The bridge across Guanabara Bay between Rio and Niterói, opened in 1974, is officially the Ponte Presidente Costa e Silva. São Paulo’s Rodovia Castelo Branco runs west from the state capital. The economic miracle of those years and how the regime ended have their own pages.