Brazil's military coup

On March 31, 1964, General Olimpio Mourao Filho marched troops from Minas Gerais toward Rio de Janeiro. Within a day the army, with the support of key state governors, had turned against President Joao Goulart, who fled to Uruguay. Congress declared the presidency vacant on April 2, and General Humberto Castelo Branco became president. The military ruled Brazil until 1985.¹²

Goulart, who had been Vargas's labor minister, came to power in 1961 after Janio Quadros resigned. Rising inflation, strikes, peasant mobilization, and his promises of land, tax and education reform alarmed landowners, business, the Church and the middle class. A speech on March 13, 1964, promising reforms and a mutiny of sailors days before the coup convinced many officers that he threatened discipline. The US government under Lyndon Johnson, worried about communism after Cuba, was ready to help the coup with a naval task force, though it was not needed.¹²

The regime issued Institutional Acts that purged the opposition and, with Institutional Act 5 in December 1968, closed Congress and suspended civil rights. Torture and disappearances were used against opponents. Meanwhile an economic boom, the 'Brazilian miracle', lifted growth to around 10 percent a year in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Slow liberalization began in the mid-1970s, with an amnesty in 1979 and the return of civilian rule in 1985. Brazil's National Truth Commission documented 434 deaths and disappearances in its 2014 report.²³⁴