The short answer
To pull the state, roads and people into the center of the country and to put the government out of reach of warships’ guns. The idea went back to 1789 and was written into Brazil’s Constitutions of 1891 and 1946. President Juscelino Kubitschek carried it out: Rio de Janeiro stopped being the capital on April 21, 1960.
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A capital facing the sea
Until 1960, Brazil was governed from the shore. Rio de Janeiro, on Guanabara Bay, had been the capital since 1763: of the Portuguese colony, then of the Empire, and from 1889 of the Republic. Before Rio there was Salvador, whose story is in What was the first capital of Brazil?. For almost two centuries, the seat of power never left the coast.
Behind that coast lies an enormous country. Its geographic heart, the Central Plateau, was sertão, backlands of high savanna, with farms and a few small towns such as Planaltina, which had been there since the nineteenth century.
Two old arguments
From the late 1700s on, the people who wanted the capital moved kept giving two reasons. The first was to turn Brazil inward. A capital in the interior would carry the state, roads and settlers into the middle of the territory, instead of leaving everything strung along the Atlantic. The second was defense. A government on a bay sat within range of any enemy fleet’s guns. No warship could sail up to a plateau.
The conspirators of the Inconfidência Mineira, the failed plot of 1789 to free Minas Gerais from Portugal, planned to put the capital of their republic at São João del-Rei, far from the sea. The journalist Hipólito José da Costa, who published the Correio Braziliense in London, argued for an inland capital too. In 1823 José Bonifácio, the statesman of independence, proposed one to Brazil’s first Constituent Assembly. Brasília remembered Hipólito: a daily paper founded in the new city on the day it opened took the name Correio Braziliense.
From the Constitution to the building site
The Republic turned the idea into law. Its first Constitution set land aside for the future capital.
There shall belong to the Union, on the central plateau of the Republic, a zone of 14,400 square kilometers, to be demarcated in due course so that the future Federal Capital may be established there.
“In due course” took decades. The Cruls Mission, led by the Belgian-born astronomer Luiz Cruls, marked out the site between 1892 and 1894, and its report went into a drawer. The Constitution of 1946 ordered the move again, and again nothing got built. The man who finally did it was Juscelino Kubitschek, president from 1956, who called the new capital the “goal of goals” of his development plan, the one that would give meaning to all the others. His life is in Who was Juscelino Kubitschek?.
The day Rio stopped being the capital
A law passed in 1957 fixed the date, and Kubitschek refused to let it slip. On April 21, 1960, the three branches of government moved into the new city. The old Federal District, the city of Rio, became the state of Guanabara. Roads had already begun to reach out from the plateau: the Belém-Brasília highway, some 2,000 km (1,240 miles) of savanna and forest, opened in 1959, a year before the capital itself.
Why that particular day was chosen, and what the opening night looked like, is in When was Brasília founded?.
Sources
- Constitution of February 24, 1891, art. 3
- Constitution of September 18, 1946, Transitional Constitutional Provisions
- Law no. 3,273 of October 1, 1957 (date of the move)
- Câmara dos Deputados, Brasília: capital e mudança
- Juscelino Kubitschek, Por que construí Brasília (1975)