A young girl refuses to greet President João Figueiredo. Courtesy of Portal São Francisco.

When General João Figueiredo assumed the presidency in March 1979, the military regime still believed it could carefully control Brazil’s transition from dictatorship to democracy and, in the process, distribute political capital among the sectors of society that it deemed fit to govern. However, within a year, rapid inflation, massive public protests, and a wave of effective labor strikes disrupted the regime’s plans for a stage-managed liberalization.

As the generals lost control of the transition to democracy, military unity disintegrated and—despite his ties to both “Castelistas” and “hard-liners”—Figueiredo struggled to maintain discipline among warring factions within the armed forces. Faced with a power vacuum and inconvenienced by health problems, rather than drive the reform process, Figueiredo governed as a reactionary—stumbling from crisis to crisis in attempts to contain the impassioned civil opposition and to control undisciplined radicals in the military hierarchy.

Early Career and Governing Style

Figueiredo grew up in a military family, attended three levels of military schools, and managed to graduate at the top of his class in each institution. After working at the Higher War College and at the National Information Service with General Golbery and serving as the head of Médici’s presidential staff, Figueiredo held credibility with the Sorbonne Cohort and with hard-line nationalists in the armed forces. The new president attempted to maintain his integrity among the military’s rivaling factions by distributing influential political posts between moderates and radicals. Abandoning Geisel’s autocratic management style and returning to Médici’s strategy, Figueiredo empowered his cabinet to make important decisions.

Economics

Initially, Figueiredo retained Geisel’s finance minister, Henrique Simonsen, whose policies had maintained growth in the midst of a global recession. However, when Simonsen voiced his belief that Brazil would have to compromise growth in order to avoid rapid inflation, Figuieredo refused to accept the assessment. After all, the economy’s persistent expansion helped to insulate the military regime from the opposition’s dissent and to maintain control over the liberalization process. Rather than diminish economic growth and depreciate his administration’s political capital, Figueiredo encouraged Simonsen’s resignation and replaced him with the military regime’s most beloved and self-confident economic technocrat, Delfim Neto.

Convinced that his exceptional brilliance could surmount Brazil’s economic obstacles, Delfim Neto assured the public that growth could persist, enacted policies similar to the ones he pursued during Costa e Silva and Médici’s presidencies, and expected analogous results. However, his National Development Plan contained “virtually no numbers” and failed to acknowledge significant changes in the national and global economic context since the late 1960s. Whereas Costa e Silva’s predecessor, Castelo Branco, had prioritized controlling inflation, reducing the deficit, and attracting foreign aid, Figueiredo’s predecessor, Geisel, doubled the national debt and distorted the balance of payments. In addition, the “economic miracle” had depended upon a massive volume of private foreign investment, which doesn’t flow as freely during a global recession. Unfortunately, having engineered Brazil’s “economic miracle” amid plentiful warnings that his unorthodox policies would awaken inflation, Delfim Neto was deaf to criticism from fellow economists and blinded by praise and encouragement from Brazil’s business community. Soon his development plan failed, and in 1982 Brazil turned to the IMF to avoid a debt default.

The continuation of the Lula-led “new unionism” only added to the Figueiredo administration’s inability to avoid a recession and control the Brazilian economy’s inflationary spiral. Labor leaders organized large-scale strikes in 1979, 1980, and 1981, and on each occasion Figueiredo struggled to exercise authority. He arrested Lula under the auspices of the National Security Law and attempted to prohibit businesses from bargaining directly with labor. But, even with their charismatic leader imprisoned, workers continued to strike and business executives disregarded the military regime’s labor courts to negotiate settlements between labor and management. The Figueiredo administration’s lack of coordination with the business community, which had consistently collaborated with the dictatorship since the coup d’état, further exposed the military regime’s declining support.

Eventually, the economic fallout from Delfim Neto’s and Figueiredo’s policies greatly surpassed the financial crisis that preceded the 1964 coup d’état. A year into Figueiredo’s administration, in 1979, the inflation rate jumped to 77 percent, and by 1983 it reached 211 percent. Equally worrisome, in 1981 Brazil’s GDP shrank for the first time in the post-World War II era, and it retracted even further in 1982. Throughout the dictatorship the military referred to economic uncertainty to justify the coup d’état and took advantage of the “economic miracle” to excuse repression. Now the opposition could draw on the military regime’s managerial incompetence to demand a return to democracy.

Protecting the Armed Forces and Weakening the Opposition

As the inevitability of liberalization and the military regime’s unpopularity became increasingly evident, the Figueiredo administration worried that, in a democratic system, members of the armed forces might face trial for their role in the regime’s extensive and well-documented human rights violations. Representatives for the hard-line warned of the potential for Brazilian-style Nuremberg trials and, as a former leader of the SNI (Servico Nacional de Inteligencia), Fiueiredo recognized that he could soon transition from the presidency into a defendant. Rather than accept the repercussions of the regime’s crimes, Figueiredo manipulated a grassroots movement demanding amnesty for thousands of political prisoners and exiles to insulate himself and his colleagues from potential indictments. The 1979 Amnesty Law allowed political exiles to return to Brazil without fear of persecution and provided amnesty for political prisoners. But it also prohibited the courts from prosecuting members of the security apparatus involved in “connected crimes,” or, put less delicately, torture.

In the lead-up to unrestricted congressional and gubernatorial elections in 1982, the Figueiredo administration attempted to maintain the military’s political influence by discrediting and dividing the opposition. In 1965, Institutional Act No. 2 had forced the entire opposition into a single political party, MDB (Movimento Democratica Brasileira), with the expectation that the military regime’s diverse critics would struggle to elaborate a consistent party platform. However, by the end of the seventies, disparate factions in the MDB had managed to achieve a tenuous political consensus and united in opposition to military rule. Hoping to destroy the MDB’s unlikely coalition, in 1979, Figueiredo issued the “Party Reform Bill,” which demanded a subsequent party reorganization that split up the MDB and amplified regional, class, and ideological tensions within the opposition. In the immediate aftermath of the “Party Reform Bill,” the opposition fractured into five distinct parties while the military’s unpopular official party, ARENA, bonded together into a single organization and renamed itself the PDS. Further hindering the opposition, Figueiredo’s 1981 electoral reform law mandated that “each party field candidates for all offices being contested in a given municipality” and forced voters to choose a single party for the entire ballot. The new restrictions voided the potential for inter-party coalitions, further amplified rivalries among the opposition, and invalidated the ballots of any Brazilian who erringly voted for their preferred candidates rather than expressing allegiance to a single political party.

While Figueiredo attempted to diffuse the opposition’s momentum with subtle legislative modifications, radical officers expressed their discontent with liberalization by planting bombs in public spaces, blaming it on left-wing subversives, and hoping that the public’s response would empower the hard-line and derail democratic reform. When the public discovered that the security apparatus, not communists, were responsible for the acts of terrorism, unity in the armed forces diminished even further, and General Golbery, the military’s chief advocate for liberalization, resigned.

Despite Figueiredo’s manipulation of Brazil’s electoral structure and his attempt to divide the military regime’s opponents, in November 1982, when 45 million Brazilians cast ballots in Latin America’s largest ever election up to that point, 59 percent voted for opposition candidates. Nonetheless, the regime’s rebranded party, the PDS, kept a narrow majority in Congress and maintained the upper hand in the indirect elections that would determine Figueiredo’s successor. Frustrated by an inability to wrestle political power from the military in spite of their overwhelming public support, opposition leaders proposed a constitutional amendment to make the 1985 presidential election direct. Even though the amendment gained support throughout Brazil and inspired rallies of 500,000 in Rio and one million in São Paulo, it didn’t receive enough congressional votes to pass.

Managing the Presidential Succession

Because the military regime’s political party held a majority in the senate and had narrowly avoided a return to direct elections, Figueiredo was in a position to guide the succession process. Like every general-president since the coup d’état, he could decide upon a candidate with high-ranking military officials, propose the nominee to his congressional allies, and expect the election to occur without complications. But strangely, Figueiredo repeatedly delayed his endorsement, which damaged the PDS’ coveted harmony and encouraged presidential aspirants to conduct public campaigns that split the party into rivaling factions. Credible rumors that Figueiredo intended to extend his presidential term by two years only added to uncertainty among the military’s political allies. At the same time, opposition political parties took advantage of the disunity in the PDS to unite around an inspirational leader named Tancredo Neves and cultivate support from dissatisfied members of the military’s own party.

Partly because of Figueiredo’s lack of involvement, the military’s grasp on power receded so far that, for the first time in two decades, civilian politicians played the guiding role in determining the candidates and electing Brazil’s president. In the eventual indirect elections, members of the military’s party deserted the PDS, created the PFL (the Liberal Front Party), forged a coalition with centrists in the opposition, and elected Tancredo Neves with 480 of the 686 congressional votes. In return for abandoning the armed forces and helping to elect a member of the opposition, the military’s long-time conservative ally, José Sarney, received the vice-presidency.

Legacy

Despite Figueiredo’s inability to control the course of reform throughout his presidential term, decisions from his administration maintain a profound influence on Brazilian politics and society. The 1979 Party Reform Bill established Brazil’s contemporary multi-party structure in which electoral victories are dependent on inter-party coalitions. In addition, the 1979 Amnesty Law prohibiting human rights violators’ prosecution has contributed to a reluctance to confront the crimes that occurred during two decades of dictatorship. Outside of the legislative realm, the Figueiredo administration’s economic decisions plunged the nation into a deep recession that lasted into the early nineties and widened the enormous gap between rich and poor in Brazil.

To Figueiredo’s credit, his administration prevented radical officers from derailing democratic reform, accepted the opposition’s victory in indirect elections, and finally removed the military from the center of national politics. The fatal illness that forced Tancredo Neves into the hospital on the eve of his inauguration and prevented him from assuming the presidency is one of the sad and discomforting ironies of Brazil’s twentieth century political experience. In his place, José Sarney, a conservative politician who supported the military regime for the first 20 years of the 21-year dictatorship, became the first civilian president since 1964. Furious at Sarney’s integral role in splintering the PDS and weakening the military’s political base, Figueiredo refused to attend his inauguration ceremony.

Sources

• Thomas Skidmore. The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988).