Brazilian Military Government - Goulart and The Fall of The Second Republic

Goulart and The Fall of The Second Republic

After Juscelino Kubitschek, the right wing opposition elected Jânio Quadros, who based his electoral campaign on criticizing Kubitschek and government corruption. Quadros' campaign symbol was a broom, with which the president would "sweep the corruption."

In his brief tenure as president, Quadros made moves to resume relations with some communist countries.

In the last days of August 1961, Quadros resigned from the presidency, apparently with the intention of being reinstated by popular demand. The vice-president, João Goulart, member of PTB, at that time was outside the country in a mission visiting Communist China. Some military top brass tried to prevent the nomination of Goulart as a president, accusing him of being communist. The crisis was solved by the "parliamentarian solution." The parliamentary system was implemented to reduce Goulart's powers as president, placating the military.

João Goulart was forced to shift well to the left of his mentor Getúlio Vargas and was forced to mobilize the working class and even the peasantry amid falling urban bourgeois support. The core of Brazilian populism—economic nationalism—was no longer appealing to the middle classes. Attempts at mild structural reforms by Goulart ended by his toppling by the military.

This political crisis stemmed from the specific way in which the political tensions of Brazilian development had been controlled in the 1930s and 1940s under the Estado Novo. Vargas' dictatorship and the presidencies of his democratic successors marked different stages of the broader era of Brazilian populism (1930–1964), an era of economic nationalism, state-guided modernization, and import substitution trade policies. Vargas' policies were intended to foster an autonomous capitalist development in Brazil, by linking industrialization to nationalism, a formula based on a strategy of reconciling the conflicting interests of the middle class, foreign capital, the working class, and the landed oligarchy. The landed oligarchy was co-opted by the Vargas compromise with the standing agrarian structure.

Essentially, this was the epic of the rise and fall of Brazilian populism from 1930 to 1964: Brazil witnessed over the course of this time period the change from export-orientation of the Old Republic (1889–1930) to the import substitution of the populist era (1930–1964) and then to a moderate structuralism (1964–80). Each of these structural changes forced a realignment of class forces and opened up a period of political crisis. The 1964 coup also ended a cycle in Brazilian history that began with Vargas' 1930 Revolution, a now bygone era marked by the marriage of middle class aspirations, nationalism, and state-guided modernization in Latin America. A period of right-wing military dictatorship marked the transition between this era and the current period of democratization.