Why is Brazil’s 1988 Constitution called the Citizen Constitution?

Starting from a blank page

Brazil’s military regime ended in 1985, but the country was still living under the constitution the generals had left behind. The new civilian government had promised a Constituent Assembly, and in February 1987 it met in Brasília. On February 2, Ulysses Guimarães, a 70-year-old congressman from São Paulo and a veteran of the opposition to the dictatorship, took its chair.

The Assembly had 559 members, deputies and senators, most of them elected in November 1986. There was no preliminary draft. The text was built from scratch in 24 subcommittees, then went through eight committees and two rounds of voting in plenary. Ulysses chaired the Assembly, the Chamber of Deputies and the largest party, the PMDB, all at once.

The country walks in

What made this assembly different was who came through the door. Every day some 10,000 people walked into Congress: union members, business owners, maids, pensioners, Indigenous peoples. Citizens sent in 122 popular amendments, some with more than a million signatures. Lobbies came too: farmers, banks, construction firms, the military.

On September 4, 1987, Ailton Krenak, a leader of the Krenak people, went up to the rostrum in a white suit to speak against a draft that cut Indigenous rights. As he spoke, he painted his face black with genipap dye. The image went around the country. The final text, in article 231, would recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples to the lands they occupy.

The fight inside was hard. The committees, whose rapporteurs had been picked by the PMDB leader Mário Covas, passed a text conservatives found too advanced. In November 1987 those members formed a bloc, the Centrão, the “Big Center”, changed the rules and reopened the votes. From then on, every article was negotiated.

The name

On Wednesday, October 5, 1988, in a packed chamber, Ulysses held the book up to the cameras. It had 245 articles. In his speech he called it the “Citizen Constitution”. The name tied the two halves of the story together: a constitution made with the country inside the building, and one that wrote down what each Brazilian could claim. He also promised that public life “will also be overseen by the citizens. From the President of the Republic to the Mayor”.

What the citizen could claim

Health is the right of all and the duty of the State

• Health. That line of article 196 is the basis of the SUS, Brazil’s Unified Health System, which Law 8,080 of 1990 put into operation.
• Racism. It became a crime with no bail and no statute of limitations (article 5, item XLII).
• Speech. Censorship ended: intellectual, artistic and press expression became free of censorship or license (article 5, item IX).
• The vote. Optional at 16 and 17, and the direct vote became a clause no amendment may abolish (article 60).
• Indigenous lands. The right to the lands Indigenous peoples occupy (article 231).

The vote that lost by 22 votes in 1984 was now beyond the reach of any future majority. Who got to use it first is in When did Brazil let 16-year-olds vote?, and the campaign that started it all is in What was the Diretas Já movement?.