-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
James N Green, Bryan Pitts. Until the Storm Passes: Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil’s Military Dictatorship., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 783–784, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae085
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
As Brazil approaches the sixtieth anniversary of the March 31, 1964, coup d’état that overthrew the democratically constituted government of João Goulart and established twenty-one years of the rule by five four-star general-presidents, historians are still debating the nature of the regime and the role that different political actors played in its sustenance, decline, and final demise. Unlike during the eighteen-year reign of Augusto Pinochet in Chile or the eight years of the generals’ rule in Argentina, the Brazilian armed forces that seized power insisted on maintaining an appearance of political and institutional normalcy with a functioning Congress, regular legislative elections, and political parties that signaled to its civilian supporters and key international allies, such as the United States, that Brazil remained a functioning democracy.
Key to sustaining this illusion was the collaboration of politicians, and it is precisely this slice of Brazilian society that Bryan Pitts’s Until the Storm Passes examines with such precision and clarity. Rather than write a detailed, comprehensive history of the relationship between politicians and the generals that ruled over Brazil for twenty-one years, Pitts examines key moments during the dictatorship to show the tensions and conflicts between legal oppositional forces and the generals: the political censure of congressional representatives in 1968 for criticizing the regime; the enactment of Institutional Act No. 5, the most draconian decree to silence the opposition; the organization of a radical group of politicians (os autêncios) within the opposition Brazilian Democratic Movement; the strike wave of 1978 to 1980, led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; the mobilization for direct presidential elections in 1984; and the indirect election to the presidency of Tancredo Neves the following year.
