RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Monday, March 29, Brazil’s Minister of Defense, General Fernando Azevedo e Silva, left the position he had held since the beginning of 2019. He was replaced by General Walter Braga Netto. The next day, the new holder of the portfolio released his first official statement: a text about March 31, the date that marks 57 years of the event that history calls a military coup.
Braga Netto says, in his note, that on that day, “the Armed Forces ended up assuming the responsibility to pacify the country” and that the Amnesty Law of 1979 “consolidated a broad pact of pacification based on the convergences of democracy”. In the end, the Minister of Defense says that “the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force are following the changes, aware of their constitutional mission to defend the Homeland and to guarantee the constitutional powers.”
The minister also announced the change of the Armed Forces commanders: Army, Navy, and Air Force. His predecessor Azevedo e Silva had spoken about the Armed Forces’ role as state institutions, and General Edson Pujol, commander of the Army, preached respect for the 1988 Constitution.
For historians heard by CNN Brasil, the speeches are striking and show that almost three decades after re-democratization, Brazilian political life continues to look with some goodwill at the period of dictatorship in times of need and does not exclude flirtation with the idea of military rule.
“The statements are eloquent and point to a position of the high ranking against the idea of a coup. But it is significant that Brazilian democracy still wants to discuss this possibility,” says historian and political scientist Heloisa M. Starling, professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).
The defense of a new military intervention or the relativization of the regime’s actions that lasted until 1985 have been frequent in street demonstrations and statements by President Jair Bolsonaro. But not only there.
In June 2020, a Datafolha survey showed that 22% of those interviewed defended the dictatorship’s return or did not care about the end of democracy. According to the poll, it was the highest number since the question began to be asked in 1989.
Amnesty and Salvationism
For historian Pedro Castelo Branco, a member of the Laboratory of Political Studies in Defense and Public Security, linked to the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and to the War College, the dictatorship is still an “open wound” in Brazilian history. Among the reasons for this, he cites the Amnesty Law, promulgated in 1979, which prevented the criminalization, among other groups, of civil servants, military personnel, and union activists for actions carried out during the regime.
“The law sought a compromise between the Armed Forces and civil society but did not resolve the issues that existed between the two sides. And it validated the idea that the dictatorship was a necessary response in a context marked by the Cold War, and not a regime of exception, of repression of rights, a perception that is still strong among the military,” explains Castelo Branco, who is a descendant of the first military president, Humberto Castelo Branco.
The idea is echoed by Marcos Napolitano, professor at the University of São Paulo (USP) and author of “História do Regime Militar Brasileiro” (Contexto Publishing House). “The [amnesty] law was one of the milestones of the regime’s transition. And this pact, although it avoided more serious political conflicts and instability in the barracks, did not allow Brazilian democracy to make an effective work of self-criticism and expiation of this authoritarian past in several levels”, he believes.
Heloísa Starling looks in another direction. For her, the idea of a “gradual, slow and safe” transition, as proposed by Ernesto Geisel’s government, was not a problem in itself, but what came after the end of the regime.
“It is a two-way issue, in which the role of civil society also needs to be thought about. There was a lack of a broad and democratic project for the insertion of the Armed Forces in the new regime, that is, to build with them a new institutional role,” he says.
And this absence of a clear role leads to other questions. In a moment of intense political cacophony and disbelief in institutions, the criminalization of politics becomes suddenly an idea. And then the question many ask themselves is: who is going to save us? “Because of this, there is a return to the old notion of military salvationism, with its agents as messianic figures,” Castelo Branco points out.
“I think we’ve experienced an explosive mixture in the post-1988 period: persistent social inequality, systemic corruption, high crime rates,” Napolitano says. There is an ingrained belief in part of the population that democracy is incapable of dealing with these problems, and that institutions only serve the economic elites.
This impression is for good reasons.
According to researchers Tomas Casas and Guido Cozzi from St. Gallen University in Switzerland, the Brazilian elite is among the world’s least value-generating to society.
In a ranking headed by Singapore, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Scandinavian countries, Brazil trails behind countries such as Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Russia, India, and Botswana.
All this converges into what historiography calls military salvationism, an old idea in republican life, shared by both military and civilian sectors. According to this belief, only the Armed Forces are free of corruption, guided by disinterested patriotism, and have the technical competence to deal with social and economic problems, without the limits and rituals of democracy.
Democratic culture
Starling, who is the coordinator of the collection Archives of Repression in Brazil (Arquivos da Repressão no Brasil), published by Companhia das Letras, also calls attention to another point that she considers important in the years that followed re-democratization. For her, there was a great concern with the consolidation and preservation of institutions, but without the creation of democratic culture among the population. “The institutions cannot defend themselves alone, and there was no concern with working on the democratic spirit of society so that it would act in its defense.”
This is directly linked to education, Napolitano argues. “The democratic transition was not followed by actively disseminating a critical memory of the authoritarian period and the institutional defense of democracy. A large part of society does not have access to historical knowledge and is at the mercy of information that arrives through social networks,” he explains.
João Roberto Martins Filho, professor at the Federal University of São Carlos and organizer of “The Military and the Brazilian Crisis” (Alameda Editorial), which gathers texts by researchers from the Brazilian Association of Defense Studies, among them a retired military, agrees.
“At the age when they are ready to learn the difference between democracy and dictatorship, young people do not. This and the disbelief in institutions lead to some discredit in the democratic regime. It’s something that doesn’t just happen in Brazil, as we saw in Donald Trump’s United States and in other countries. But the failures in education here make the problem even bigger,” Martins Filho says.
In this context, mistaken views about the military regime also ended up being perpetuated, leading to its relativization. This is what journalist and researcher Roberto Simon argues.
“There remains the idea that those were years of glory when there was growth and no corruption. But this is a falsification of historical truth. If in the first half of the regime Brazil grew, it is also true that the second half was a time of inflationary pressure, of impoverishment of the population, of increasing inequality. And that there were major cases of corruption, as in the construction of the Itaipu power plant,” he explains.
Former senior policy director of the Council of the Americas and master in public policy from Harvard University, Simon researched Brazilian support for the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile. The work resulted in the book “Brazil against Democracy” (Companhia das Letras), released in February. And it put him in contact with the difficulties faced by those who study the period.
“The big problem has to do with the archives. There is a lot to be done in order to make the archives really accessible. And there is also the problem of document destruction in Brazil,” he says.
Even so, he believes that we live in a time of advances in the study of the Brazilian dictatorship, with attention to different approaches. The problem, he says, is to make this knowledge reach the public. “Especially in a poorly educated country like ours, it is necessary to find ways to create bridges between this new knowledge that is being produced, education, and the political debate.”
In this sense, Castelo Branco believes in the need to rethink Armed Forces officers’ training in Brazil, which is fundamental for a new look regarding the dictatorship and for overcoming this chapter in history the military leadership keeps calling a revolution.
“It is complicated to speak of only one military wing. General Edson Pujol is different, he has different ideas from General Augusto Heleno, for example. The Brazilian Armed Forces have highly qualified cadres, who respect the Constitution and democracy. But there is a common formation that still treats the coup as a necessary movement and encourages the idea of revanchism,” affirms Castelo Branco.
With information from CNN Brasil