INTRODUCTION

The golpe militar (military coup) of 31 March–1 April 1964 which overthrew the legally constituted government of President João Goulart made use of a good deal of democratic rhetoric: one of the principal aims of what the instigators of the coup called the ‘Revolution’ of 1964, besides ending the ‘chaos, corruption and communism’ of the Goulart administration and restoring discipline and respect for hierarchy in the Armed Forces, was the elimination of the threat, as they saw it, that the Goulart administration posed to Brazilian democracy. The coup was, in this sense, a countercoup for democracy. In the aftermath of the coup, however, by means of a series of so-called Atos Institucionais (Institutional Acts), complementary acts, a new Constitution, a revised Constitution, constitutional amendments and various so-called pacotes (packages of arbitrary measures), the military regime established in April 1964, while never entirely destroying them, radically remodelled and severely undermined the democratic institutions, albeit limited and flawed, established in Brazil at the end of the Second World War.

For twenty-one years, until the transition to civilian rule (though not yet to a fully fledged democracy) in March 1985, Brazilians lived under authoritarian military rule. During this period a succession of five presidents, all of them senior (four-star) generals, were first selected by the military high command (after 1967 formally constituted as the Alto Comando das Forças Armadas) and then indirectly ‘elected’, at first by Congress, later by an Electoral College, a majority of whosemembers were guaranteed to support the military’s chosen candidate.

INTRODUCTION

15 March 1985 witnessed a peaceful transition to civilian rule in Brazil (though not yet to a fully-fledged democracy) after twenty-one years of military rule. A transição pactuada was effected, the result of negotiations between the political elite and the military high command to facilitate the seamless transfer of power – sem ruptura – from the last of five successive military presidents since 1964 to a moderate, conservative civilian president acceptable to the military. However, Tancredo Neves, the politician elected, albeit indirectly elected, president in 1985 never took office because of a serious illness on the eve of his inauguration (from which he never recovered). It was the Vice-President-Elect, José Sarney, who became the first civilian president of Brazil in more than two decades.

Under the Constitution of January 1967, incorporating the various amendments to the 1946 Constitution of the Liberal Republic introduced by the military regime following the 1964 coup, presidents were indirectly elected by Congress acting as an Electoral College, in which the progovernment party, the Aliança Renovadora Nacional (ARENA), had a built-in majority and could be relied upon to vote for the military’s chosen candidate. The so-called pacote of April 1977 (a ‘package’ of measures to change the electoral rules of the game in favour of the regime) introduced an important modification: the Electoral College that elected the president would also include delegates from the state legislatures, all but one of which were also controlled by ARENA.

INTRODUCTION

The democratisation of Brazil in 1945–1946 was part of a Latin America–wide, indeed worldwide, wave of democratisation at the end of the Second World War. In 1942, despite considerable sympathy for the Axis powers at the highest level, both political and military, Brazil had allied itself with the United States and Great Britain in the war against Germany, Italy and Japan, on the side therefore of democracy against fascism. In the final months of the War, Getúlio Vargas, who had been in power since the Revolution of October 1930, and the military leaders who had in November 1937 supported him in establishing the Estado Novo dictatorship (which was often mislabelled ‘fascist’) came under increasing international (as well as domestic) pressure at least to liberalise, if not democratise, Brazil’s political system. On 28 February 1945 Vargas announced that elections would be held by the end of the year. And a new Electoral Code (28 May) set a date – 2 December 1945 – for presidential and Congressional elections (with elections for state governor and state legislative assembly to follow in May 1946).

INTRODUCTION

The fifteen years between the Revolution of October–November 1930 that brought the First Republic (1889–1930) to an end and the military coup of October 1945 that ended the Estado Novo (1937–1945), a period dominated by Getúlio Vargas who was president throughout, were a watershed in the political, economic and social history of Brazil.

In his classic A Revolução de 1930: historiografia e história (São Paulo, 1970) Boris Fausto effectively demolished the view, prevalent in the 1960s, that the Revolution of 1930 represented the definitive end of the hegemony of the coffee-producing bourgeoisie of São Paulo and the rise to power of the industrial bourgeoisie and the urban middle classes. The conflict in 1930 was interregional, interoligarchical and, not least, intergenerational rather than intersectoral, much less interclass. The Revolution began on 3 October 1930 with an armed rebellion by dissident members of the political elite, especially in the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais but also in the Northeast, and disaffected army officers, unwilling to accept the victory of the ‘official’ candidate, Júlio Prestes, the representative of the landed oligarchy of São Paulo, in the presidential elections of March 1930. The rebellion triggered a golpe (military coup) on 24 October by senior army generals who removed President Washington Luís Pereira de Sousa from office. On 3 November the military transferred power to the defeated candidate in the March elections and leader of the rebellion, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Getúlio Vargas.

The Cambridge History of Latin America (CHLA), edited by Leslie Bethell, is an international, collaborative, multi-volume history of Latin America during the five centuries from the first contacts between Europeans and the native peoples of the Americas in the late 15th and early 16th centuries to the present day.

A Cultural History of Latin America brings together, in Part One, chapters from CHLA volume III Latin America: from Independence to c. 1870 (1985) and CHLA IV Latin America: c. 1870 to 1930 (1986) and, in Part Two, chapters from CHLA X Latin America since 1930: Ideas, Culture and Society (1995) to provide in a single volume a history of literature, music and the visual arts in Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries. This, it is hoped, will be useful for both teachers and students of Latin American history and culture.

There is a small degree of overlap between the second of the two chapters in Part One, a general survey of Latin American literature, music and the visual arts, which ends in 1930, an economic and political rather than a cultural watershed, and the separate chapters on narrative, poetry, music, architecture, and art in Part Two, all of which begin appropriately c. 1920.

A companion CHLA ‘student edition’ Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth Century Latin America (1996) includes an essay by Richard M. Morse, ‘The multiverse of Latin American identity, c. 1920–c. 1970’, of particular interest to readers of this Cultural History of Latin America.