Military Dictatorship (1964–85)
New Professionalism and the Escola Superior de Guerra
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the success of revolutionary warfare techniques against conventional armies in China, Indochina, Algeria, and Cuba led the conventional armies in the developed and underdeveloped worlds to concentrate on finding military and political strategies to fight domestic revolutionary warfare. This led to an adoption of what Stepan called, in 1973, “New Professionalism.”
The New Professionalism was formulated and propagated in Brazil through the Escola Superior de Guerra, which had been established in 1949. By 1963 New Professionalism had come to dominate the school, when it declared its primary mission to be preparing “civilians and the military to perform executive and advisory functions (Decreto Lei No. 53,080 December 4, 1963).”
This new attitude towards professionalism did not arise out of nowhere. Though its domination of the ESG was completed by 1963, it had begun to penetrate the college much earlier than that — assisted by the United States and its policy of encouraging Latin American militaries to assume as their primary role in counter-guerrilla and counter-insurgency warfare programs, civic action and nation-building tasks.
By 1964, at the same time that the military elite were unsatisfied with the natural delay, transfers and accommodation, characteristics of the negotiation processes in democratic regimes and was also eager to impose their development project, saw a leftist revolution as a real possibility (through the paradigm of internal warfare doctrines of the new professionalism).
Events like the rising strike levels, the inflation rate, embraced demands by the Left for broaden political process, land reform and the growing claims of the enlisted men were seen as “evidence” that Brazil was facing the serious possibility of a leftist internal insurgency.
Knocking on the Barracks Door
From 1961 to 1964, Brazilian President João Goulart had been initiating economic and social reforms that were clearly failing to address the economic problems of the country; policies which satisfied neither Brazil’s elites nor its increasingly mobilized working classes.
The cost of living index, rather low in late 1950s began to rise sharply, and per capita GDP growth fell sharply, from 4.5% in 1957 to negative growth by 1963.
Goulart also began to take steps that alienated the Brazilian military and stoked their worst fears of revolutionary leftism.[citation needed] Goulart was a member of the wealthy agrarian elite of the country, was a Catholic, possessed huge amounts of land and supported the United States during the Cuban missiles crisis.
But he also tolerated communists within his government, pursued a neutralist foreign policy, passed a law limiting the amount of profits multinationals could transmit out of the country, a subsidiary of ITT was nationalized and showed favoritism towards military officers labelled “ultra-nationalist” (he claimed they were loyal to him), which worried the pro-American national military and the United States government, concerned that Goulart could be too leftist for their tastes.
Military Response
By early 1964 important sections of the military had developed a consensus that intervention in the political process was necessary. The development of this consensus was likely helped by important civilian politicians, such as José de Magalhães Pinto, governor of Minas Gerais, and the United States government.
Though many in the right of the political spectrum claim the coup was “revolutionary,” most historians agree that that is not so, since there was no real transition of power; military dictatorship was the fastest way to implement neoliberal economic policies in the country while suppressing growing popular discontent, and the coup was thus a way for Brazil’s already-ruling elite to secure its power.
At first, there was intense economic growth, due to neoliberal economic reforms, but in the later years of the dictatorship, the reforms had left the economy in shambles, with soaring inequality and national debt, and thousands of Brazilians were deported, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered.
Politically motivated deaths numbered in the hundreds, mostly related to the guerrilla-antiguerrilla warfare in the 1968–73 period; official censorship also led many artists into exile.