3 - Formative Democracies and the Military Interregnum, 1945–1985
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Summary
The forty year period from the overthrow of Vargas's authoritarian state until the return to democratic rule was one in which many of the issues that brought Vargas to power would still be debated and discussed if not totally resolved: how to industrialize a late developing country, how to incorporate the new urban labor force, and how to resolve the growing tensions as Brazil changed from a rural to an urban dominated society. Both populist post-Vargas democrats and post-Vargas military officers faced these same issues. In each case their proposed solution for these problems would differ. But adopting a repressive system or an open democratic one, there was a surprising similarity of all regimes on what they expected the economy and society to look like after their proposed solutions. Whether it was a top-down military attempt to educate and modernize the society at the cost of workers’ wages and rights, or whether it was a democratic regime that sought to provide a modern welfare state and a better distribution of income, all had to resolve the questions related to the transformation of Brazil from a predominately rural and highly stratified society to one that was primarily urban and industrialized.
One of the first issues facing the post–Estado Novo regimes was the innumerable economic and political consequences that World War II had for Brazil. War altered world commercial and financial flows. There was a strong demand for raw materials that aided Brazilian exports, but at the same time there was a lack of imports, principally fuel, manufactured products, and even raw materials and machines and equipment. As the maritime war intensified, there was a decline in international trade, which affected Brazilian exports despite high world demand. The scarcity of imported products, increased internal prices and stimulated local production of goods that substituted for the imports that were lacking. The traditional fall of export income in such a crisis of international trade was in this case replaced by an accumulation of reserves.
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- The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889 , pp. 143 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014