Introduction

On the 31st March 1964, General Olympio Mourão Filho led three regiments from the State of Minas Gerais into Rio de Janeiro to depose the constitutionally elected government of President João Goulart. The series of events that followed were hardly unprecedented. Goulart, like a number of the presidents who had preceded him, posed a threat to traditional land-owning elites, national capitalists and foreign economic interests. In this way, General Mourão Filho and his regiments were just one of a number of circles that had been hoping for a change in the political establishment since the 1940s. While Mourão Filho did not personally oversee Goulart’s forced removal from power, his actions opened the door to the various factions of military and civil society actors who eventually occupied key positions in the post-coup regime.

Political instability and trauma had been accumulating for some decades in Brazil. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, when the crash of world coffee prices led Brazil into an economic crisis, an alliance of liberal elites, fronted by Getúlio Vargas, came to power by way of an armed revolution. The revolution, which began in October 1930, consisted of worker strikes, civilian occupations and mounting military forces. Then-president Washington Luis resigned, and following a short military junta, Vargas assumed the presidency in November 1930. Vargas came to be known as the ‘Father of the Poor’, thanks to sweeping reforms that contributed to the country’s industrialisation, urban workers’ rights, suffrage and literacy levels, among other things. But he also placed constraints on political and union-based opposition groups and, just as the opposition feared, staged an autocoup1 in 1937 which began an eight-year dictatorship.

The complexities of what followed are well documented elsewhere, but what needs to be conveyed is the sense of chaos and exhaustion that was felt by Brazilians during these years. In 1945, after 15 years of populist and dictatorial rule, the military staged another coup, and Vargas was replaced with the Head of the Supreme Court Jose Linhares, who served as interim president for three months. Between 1946 and 1951, the Brazilian presidency was occupied by Marshal Eurico Gaspar Dutra. Vargas then returned to power until 1954; amid political and economic turmoil and the threat of military action, he committed suicide.