Brazil
Page 64
By the end of the 1950s, the struggle of the rural workers had consolidated around the issue of agrarian reform. A number of workers’ organizations were founded, such as the Union of the Agricultural Workers of Brazil (Ultab). In 1955 the first Ligas Camponesas (Rural Workers’ Leagues) were re-established in the northeast.43 Between 1945 and 1947 rural workers’ associations had been founded by the Communist Party to address the demands of the rural workers. There was an attempt to unite rural workers’ associations with urban workers’ associations. The experiment was interrupted in 1947 under the growing repression of the Dutra regime. As mentioned above, at that time, the Communist Party was banned and communist federal deputies had their right to engage in politics revoked. In 1955, however, the establishment of the Society of Planters and Cattle Raisers of Pernambuco (SAPPP) gave new impetus to the movement. The society was established at the Galileia Plantation and Sugar Mill in Vitória de Santo Antão, the heart of Pernambuco’s sugar-producing region. The goal of the organization was to protect tenant farmers from being expelled from plantation lands. But it quickly grew and expanded into a far-reaching social movement – Ligas Camponesas – which between 1950 and 1960 brought the issue of agrarian reform into the centre of the national political debate.
By the beginning of the 1960s, the Ligas Camponesas were fighting for both civil and social rights. Their principal strategy was through legal action: by representing the rural workers in court, the leagues’ lawyers transformed a social conflict into a legal one, and their clients into citizens. This strategy began in 1955 under the direction of the then state deputy Francisco Julião, who had considerable success and became the leagues’ most important leader.44 In 1959, after the expropriation of the Galileia plantation where the Society of Planters and Cattle Raisers of Pernambuco had been founded, the leagues began to spread throughout the northeastern states, and then to the rest of the country. In 1961 they adopted a radical proposal for agrarian reform – ‘Legally or by force, with flowers or with blood’, according to the announcement made by the six hundred or so delegates who attended the First National Congress of Agricultural Workers in Belo Horizonte. The members of the movement began invading and occupying farms. A dissident group within the movement established guerrilla training camps. The most well known among these camps was located in Dianópolis, in Goiás, which was shut down by the army in 1962.45 But most of those involved were less radical. They attempted to find political means for the leagues to represent rural workers with the same efficacy that the trade unions represented their city counterparts.
Rural Brazil had become a space of inexorable political dispute, involving the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. The communists systematically sent militants into the interior to help establish rural unions. The Church was divided on the issue: part of the clergy wanted to promote Christian doctrine and neutralize the influence of left-wing groups in the interior; others were interested in strengthening the ties between the Church and the workers. In an unprecedented move for the Church, the latter group used an educational radio programme to initiate the process of rural unionization – Movimento de Educação de Base (MEB – Movement for Basic Education). The programme taught rural workers to read and write so that they could acquire greater control over their own affairs. It was a part of the Radiophonic Schools system and used a series of textbooks inspired by the literacy method developed by Paulo Freire.46 The programme was a success. By 1963 the Movement for Basic Education was transmitting in fourteen Brazilian states.47
Members of the rural workers’ movements demanded land and rights. Yet the Kubitschek government still viewed the interior of Brazil as conservative and backward. The administration did not formulate a solution for the question of agrarian reform. The only alternative the government considered was to relocate people from rural areas into the cities. The inequalities were enormous and difficult to address. As early as 1956, President Kubitschek decided that the construction of a new capital for Brazil would be the crowning success of the Targets Plan. Brasília was to be a planned city that would represent Brazilian nationalism, the transition from the traditional to the modern. The new capital was meant to integrate the interior of the country to the urban centres, and Brazil into the international community. Brasília became a symbol of the Kubitschek government and the Targets Plan with which people could identify.48 Brazilians were fascinated by the idea of building a city of the future, based on new architectural and urban concepts, erected on Brazil’s central plateau in a vast, empty region of the country – the population density of the area was less than one person per square kilometre. The idea of transferring the capital of the country to the interior was by no means new: it had first been discussed in the nineteenth century and was foreseen in both the 1934 and 1946 constitutions. But, before Juscelino Kubitschek, no one had been prepared to take it seriously: apart from the astronomic cost, the transfer of the capital was not a political priority; it had not even been an issue in the election campaign.
As soon as the members of the National Democratic Union (UDN) discovered President Kubitschek was planning to build Brasília in a semi-arid region, easily accessible only by air, they acted at once. After all, the region contained nothing but stunted vegetation, red clay and a few jaguars, so they voted in favour of the law authorizing the transfer of the capital and sat back delightedly to await the disaster. But once again, the National Democratic Union got it wrong. Juscelino Kubitschek had Brasília built in three years. He hired Oscar Niemeyer as architect and Lúcio Costa for the urban planning. The record time of construction was due to the president having slashed the red tape by setting up NOVACAP – the Urbanization Company for the New Capital of Brazil – one of the most powerful nuclei of his ‘parallel administration’. Furthermore, he appointed a man he trusted implicitly to be the director of the new urbanization company, the engineer Israel Pinheiro, from Minas Gerais. President Kubitschek expedited a law through Congress that allowed him to build the new capital without legal challenges. And he would hear nothing about the cost. The opposition played its usual role of seizing their weapons, taking aim, and hoping to hit something. The National Democratic Union were implacable: not a day went by when they did not express their horror at the waste of public money in a country with so many other priorities, the monumental nature of the project, the extremely suspicious urgency and the inevitable outcome – President Kubitschek’s failure to complete the project during his administration. As the construction speeded up and Brasília became a reality, the opposition began to protest that it was too far away, the region was hostile, the land porous, the artificial lake would not fill up, and the telephones would never work.
President Kubitschek always maintained that the decision to build Brasília had come out of nowhere, that it was the outcome of a vision he had incorporated into his government programme. But it is improbable that the idea developed as he claimed it did: Brasília served too many useful purposes. It was the bridge between the old and the new Brazil, it made the Targets Plan comprehensible to the people, gave the president unprecedented bargaining power with groups of adversaries who wanted to participate in such a highly lucrative business, and deflected society’s attention away from the problems of inflation and agrarian reform. Brasília simultaneously became a national monument and a national symbol, not to mention that it transformed Juscelino Kubitschek into one of the most exceptional leaders in the history of Brazil. Furthermore, while he was mayor of Belo Horizonte, Juscelino Kubitschek had revealed his vocation for construction and willingness to invest in daring, futuristic urban projects. When he built the lakeside residential district of Pampulha, that was where it all began.49 Brasília became the government’s absolute priority. President Kubitschek knew he had to finish the work, as no other administration would ever commit the country’s resources to it. The construction project appeared to be the height of insanity. At least that was the opinion of the journalist Otto Lara Resende,50 who wrote: ‘Brasília was the
product of a rare conjunction of four types of madness: Juscelino’s, Israel’s, Niemeyer’s and Lúcio Costa’s.’51
What the four men produced was so extraordinary it seemed as if Mr Lara Resende were right. The city appeared out of nowhere, had a strange kind of beauty, and was unlike anything Brazilians had seen before. The outline of the Pilot Plan invokes two images, superimposed: a cross that founds a new Brazil and a plane that lands on the Central Plateau, bringing the country into the future ‘as if it were en route to an impossible utopia’, in Lúcio Costa’s famous words.52 The city is divided by two axes that cross at right angles – the Monumental Axis and the Highway Axis – which separate the residential area and its facilities from the area occupied by government buildings. The ministries are purposefully identical, bordering the Monumental Axis and accentuating the grandeur of the Praça dos Três Poderes,53 the palaces built of reinforced concrete, which nevertheless appear to float above the ground. The first residents joked that the human body of Brasília was composed of three parts – the head, the torso and wheels! The new capital does not have streets, squares, pavement or even pedestrians. Its construction is also emblematic of the ambivalence of the Targets Plan. It has never been known how much it cost to build Brasília. Nor is it known how many workers died in the haste to get it built; whether it is true that their bodies were buried by excavators alongside the buildings; whether corporal punishment was actually inflicted on the workers, and if they really protested for better working and living conditions. All that is known is that the thousands of workers, most of whom came from the northeast, Goiás and the north of Minas Gerais – the candangos – only lived in Brasília for as long as it remained a building site. Once the new capital was ready and the government had been established, they had two options: either they were sent back to their state of origin, or they went to live in segregated camping sites, similar to favelas, in the outskirts. These campsites were the origin of the ‘satellite towns’, which have grown steadily ever since. Ten years after Brasília was built, 100,000 migrants were already living in favelas around the city.54
Brasília expelled the poor to the outskirts and segregated civil servants, bureaucrats and members of Congress in virtually identical residential units – the superquadras (superblocks). The city is based on hierarchical and segmented principles of social organization, which accentuate the overpowering presence of the state as an employer. Juscelino Kubitschek, who was aware of everything in politics, must have realized that the transference of the capital would bring serious drawbacks – one of which was the isolation of the centre of power, which distanced the government both from increasing social unrest and from direct contact with the people. After more than fifty years, Brasília is the modern city that has integrated the interior of Brazil with the rest of the country, just as Juscelino Kubitschek promised. It has kept its ambivalent atmosphere – the palaces remain impeccably conserved, as President Kubitschek and Oscar Niemeyer planned, ‘suspended, weightless and white, in the unending nights of the Planalto’; and it remains a centre of power that is more aseptic, isolated and arrogant.
THE SOWER OF THE WIND
The new federal capital was inaugurated on 21 April 1960. Nine months later, President Kubitschek handed over the office of president to his elected successor, Jânio Quadros. He could have had no idea that the next time a civilian president, elected by popular vote, would pass the presidential sash on to another elected civilian would be in 2003. Juscelino Kubitschek travelled to Europe on holiday confident that he would be re-elected to office in 1965 (the 1946 Constitution did not permit re-election for consecutive terms). His electoral campaign began there and then, as he made his farewells. The city was adorned in banners and posters with the slogan ‘JK-65’ and at the airport a multitude waited to bid him a temporary farewell. President Kubitschek had spent the last year of his mandate with one eye on the urgency of finishing Brasília, and the other on creating favourable conditions for his return to power. He even constructed a strategy to ensure that his party lost the election.55 The country was in a critical situation, the government had no control over its expenses, and his successor would have to adopt rigorous austerity measures. The problem as far as President Kubitschek was concerned, was how to transfer this burden to the opposition. He wanted to make sure that the National Democratic Union (UDN) would win the elections and spend the next four years implementing unpopular measures to combat inflation. Thus the way would be prepared for him to return in 1965 with a new programme for economic growth.
President Kubitschek was manoeuvring in his own interests, and not without a touch of omnipotence. It was unlikely that the National Democratic Union would support a candidate appointed by him. Nevertheless, there was a chance that the manoeuvre could work. After all, the president was a master of conspiracy and behind-the-scenes politics and he had ended his mandate at the height of his popularity – his strategy could produce a broad centre-right coalition, which would offset the growing strength of the left-wing parties, above all the Brazilian Labour Party. To further facilitate the situation, the Social Democratic Party had no one who was suitable to succeed him. The only thing that President Kubitcheck was not prepared to consider was any interference from the Paulistas. São Paulo had been the greatest beneficiary of his government: industrial growth was concentrated in the state, easy credit was made available to its entrepreneurs, and the dizzy rate of its expansion indicated that the city was well on the way to becoming the most important state capital in the country. But on the national political scene São Paulo was not in a position to make alliances: neither the Social Democratic Party, nor the National Democratic Union, nor the Brazilian Labour Party were strong in the state, where political power was still disputed between the smaller political parties at the service of regional leaders, as exemplified by Ademar de Barros’s Social Progress Party (PSP).
In May 1959 a group of these small parties made an alliance with the National Democratic Union to support the candidacy of Jânio Quadros for the presidency. This was a candidate over whom President Kubitschek had no control and who thus neutralized his strategy.56 Since his first mandate as city councillor in 1948, Jânio Quadros had risen through the ranks at incredible speed, having been successively elected as state deputy, mayor and then governor – winning three elections in five years, all in São Paulo. He had a reputation as an honest and competent administrator, and although he had no ties to Getúlio Vargas’s political legacy he was not considered anti-getulista. The tone of his campaign was music to the ears of the National Democratic Union. He attacked corruption, inflation, the high cost of living, and the waste of public money on monumental constructions in Brasília, while promising economic growth and austerity in government spending. Jânio Quadros never offered any convincing explanation for how his government would achieve better results than President Kubitschek’s, nor how he would tackle the fundamental problems of Brazilian development. His message was anti-political. He presented himself as a candidate who was above political parties, showing complete disdain for traditional politicians and their way of doing politics. He only insisted on one thing: that the people give him their trust and believed personally in him. And he repeated that he was the only independent candidate, the only one who was dedicated to political activity out of civic vocation and the love of public service – and was thus the only one capable of pointing the country in a new direction.
Carlos Lacerda was one of the first to realize that, with or without the National Democratic Union, Jânio Quadros’s candidacy was irresistible, and that the party must endorse him. Jânio Quadros was inspiring hope and receiving support from all the social classes – especially from middle-class voters, who, tormented by the effects of inflation, considered the candidate an energetic administrator, well equipped to manage a turbulent, expanding economy. Jânio Quadros was a very unusual candidate, and the speed at which his popularity grew should have set off an alarm. In short, a door had been left open and a clever int
ruder had slipped in. His rapidly rising popularity was a sign of society’s discontent with the high cost of living and falling wages, and of the increasing power of the electorate to express its anxieties. It also revealed disenchantment with the main political parties, which seemed unable to adapt to and absorb new popular demands.
But the candidate’s appeal was not limited to his words. Jânio Quadros had enormous talent for the theatrical.57 At political rallies he would simulate fainting from hunger, have injections to recover his strength, and wear an old suit whose shoulders were strategically sprinkled with powder – supposedly dandruff. His tie was always crooked and he would sit down on the pavement to eat a mortadella sandwich and a banana – he wanted to be seen as one of the people, a man who understood the suffering of the working poor. He would walk onto the stage gesticulating wildly – skinny, indignant, scruffily dressed – waving a broom (the symbol of his campaign) and, assuming a grave tone of voice, promise to sweep away the corruption that permeated the government. He used pretentious language, full of old-fashioned expressions, emphasizing every syllable of the words, leaving the crowd astonished by his grandiloquent professorial tone – even though at times they understood nothing at all. But Jânio Quadros’s timing was perfect, and he knew just when to say what they all wanted to hear. He attended rallies everywhere – in the streets, factories, favelas and in the outskirts of the cities, attracting thousands of supporters with brooms in their hands, hypnotized by the rhetoric of the campaign.
It is hard to know whether, at any point, Juscelino Kubitschek was sympathetic towards Jânio Quadros’s campaign. It could not have been easy to know how to respond to such a messianic, histrionic and irascible candidate. The Social Democratic Party eventually decided to support the presidential candidate put forth by the nationalist groups in Congress, Henrique Teixeira Lott, who by then had been promoted to marshal. This was perhaps a strategy to consolidate their support within the armed forces.58 Then the party renewed their alliance with the Brazilian Labour Party by choosing João Goulart to complete the ticket as vice-president. Marshal Lott had great political prestige, was respected within the armed forces, and was generally admired as a legalist and democrat. But as a candidate he inspired no enthusiasm. As soon as it became evident to the Social Democratic Party that their candidate was a lost cause, they abandoned him to his own resources and, along with the Brazilian Labour Party – and with the support of Jânio Quadros himself – campaigned for the ‘Jan-Jan’ team: Jânio Quadros for president and, for vice-president, Jango (João Goulart).