Brazil
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Ulysses Guimarães was reconciled to the situation, claiming that Tancredo Neves championed indirect elections precisely so he could overturn that system once he got into power.74 To a certain extent, he was right, but he still could not persuade the Workers’ Party to collaborate with what it considered a conservative transition, nor to participate in the electoral college. But Tancredo Neves was successful in putting an end to the cycle of military governments. On 15 January 1985 he was elected – along with his vice-president Senator Sarney – as president of Brazil. The result was a triumph: 480 votes for Tancredo Neves as against 180 for Paulo Maluf. The president-elect had three months before taking office to consolidate his victory, set up a new government, and turn the rhetoric into reality. The transition plan for the ‘New Republic’, as it was called, was ambiguous. It was politically conservative and based on compromise, but nevertheless it was an extraordinary change. The way was now open for the reconstruction of democracy and the establishment of economic and institutional stability.
On the eve of his investiture, Tancredo Neves was rushed to hospital for an emergency operation. He was seventy-five years old, and had known he was ill. He had hidden the fact from even his closest advisors, convinced that he would be able to take office and afterwards seek medical help. He was fearful that the generals would find a way to prevent him from taking office for health reasons. For important public figures, illness was a taboo, and the military could allege that medical treatment – however long it took – would incapacitate him from running the country. Everything went wrong. The hospital where the operation took place, the Hospital de Base in Brasília, was badly equipped to prevent sepsis. The doctors were negligent, the infection spread, and the patient’s condition became increasingly serious. Tancredo Neves would never take office. He was transferred to the Instituto do Coração in São Paulo, where he underwent seven more operations. His death was announced on 21 April 1985.75
While Mr Neves was undergoing his first operation the whole country experienced a state of shock. Meanwhile the Brazilian Democratic Movement acted quickly to guarantee the transfer of the post of president. The constitution determined that if the president was unable to take office, he would be replaced by the vice-president. The next in the line of succession was the president of the Chamber of Deputies, who in this case was Ulysses Guimarães. It was the only time General Figueiredo and the ‘authentic group’ from the Brazilian Democratic Movement came to an agreement: if Tancredo Neves did not take office, his legal successor would be Ulysses Guimarães. But Mr Guimarães refused. He said that the doctors’ prognosis was that Tancredo Neves would be able to take office in forty-eight hours, as his personal secretary Aécio Neves76 had announced on television. He insisted that José Sarney take office and temporally be in charge of the government.77 Everyone was convinced.
There is no way of knowing what a government led by Tancredo Neves would have been like. With his death, the New Republic began as a tremendous disappointment and offered very little that was new. José Sarney had supported the dictatorship in 1964. In 1965 he had been elected governor of Maranhão by direct vote, and in 1970 he had successfully stood as senator for the National Renewal Alliance. He had changed horses at the very last moment. Mr Sarney had an extraordinary capacity for adapting to the ideology of the government of the moment, just as long as he could maintain his position – that is, in power. In Maranhão he was all powerful – and that would remain the case until 2014. Like many other Brazilian politicians he was an incarnation of a new type of coronelismo, which continued many of the practices characteristic of the First Republic. These included a disregard for the rules of democracy, a strong sense of being above the law, an incapacity to distinguish between what is public and what is private property, and the use of power to obtain jobs, contracts, subsidies and other favours for family and friends.78
Life for the opposition was not easy during President Sarney’s government. Ministers were appointed and then summarily dismissed as he manoeuvred to maintain political support for his government from whoever was prepared to offer it. Tancredo Neves’s plans for the transition did not enter the political equation. Conflicts between the Palácio do Planalto (the Executive offices) and the National Congress became frequent as soon as the Constituent Assembly began its work.79 While Ulysses Guimarães, as president of the Assembly, was trying to mediate between the commitment of the Brazilian Democratic Movement to the re-democratization process, the socialist platform of the Workers’ Party, and the manoeuvring of the conservative groups to protect their own interests, President Sarney concentrated on stitching up a political agreement that allowed him to extend his term of office to five years. Not only that, he abandoned all that still remained of the programme that had been projected for the New Republic.
The Constituent Assembly was inaugurated on 1 February 1987, and the constitution was promulgated the following year, on 5 October 1988. The overriding purpose of the new constitution was to guarantee the end of the dictatorship and to establish democracy. Two main concerns are reflected therein: to create democratic institutions solid enough to survive political crises, and to ensure that the rights and freedoms of the Brazilian people would be respected. It was baptized the ‘Citizens’ Constitution’. It is by far the longest of all the Brazilian constitutions, with 250 clauses and an additional 98 contingency provisions, and is in effect to this day.80 The text was the collaborative work of a remarkable group of congressmen: Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Florestan Fernandes, José Serra, Lula, Mário Covas and Plínio de Arruda Sampaio, and it was the outcome of the most democratic constitutional debate in the history of Brazil.
For a year and eight months Congress became the centre of public life. Many Brazilians engaged in the constitutional debate through the associations, popular committees, activists’ assemblies and trade union groups. Several forms of manifestation emerged. The most innovative, the ‘popular amendments’ accommodated a wide gamut of themes, and were a sort of instrument of participatory democracy. When all was said and done, the people had sent a total of 122 popular amendments to the Constituent Assembly, with more than 12 million signatures.
Like Brazil, and like democracy itself, the 1988 Constitution is imperfect. Its composition involved contradictory movements and formidable clashes between unequal political forces. Furthermore, several times it missed the point. The agrarian structure remained intact, as did the freedom of the armed forces to decide on all internal matters. The forty-hour week was rejected and illiterate people were prevented from running for office, although they could vote. Out of a concern to regulate the minutest details of the electoral system and of social life in general – unsurprising considering the historical context – parts of the text were obsolete by the time they took effect. Nevertheless, the 1988 Constitution is a fine example of a nation making use of its history to build a future, based on a solid commitment to democracy. It was signed by all the political parties, including the Workers’ Party. The constitution is modern in its approach to rights, attentive to political minorities, advanced in environmental questions, committed to establishing legal constitutional instruments for popular and direct participation, determined to limit the power of the state over the citizen and to demand public policies directed at solving the gravest problems faced by the people. When Ulysses Guimarães presented the final text, he told the Jornal do Brasil it should be passed by Congress with ‘[…] hatred for the dictatorship. Hatred and disgust.’81 The 1988 Constitution provided the foundations for a period of consistent, long-lasting freedoms and solid democratic institutions. Since then, all the presidents of Brazil have been elected through the ballot box, none of their mandates have been interrupted, and none of the election results have been contested.
But everything has its price. The Constituent Assembly marathon to write the constitution ended up creating divisions in the Brazilian Democratic Movement. The party divided into two major groups, the Progressives and the Democratic Centre. The
latter, popularly known as the Centrão (the big centre), was a conservative agglomeration that was not in fact restricted to members of the party. The former Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), which had fought against the dictatorship, fell apart. Half of the party joined the Centrão, which became hostage to the bargaining power that President Sarney knew how to wield so well. It was the beginning of the formation of a conservative Brazilian Democratic Movement party that was no longer a true opposition party. It transformed into a front to support the government in Congress, no matter which party that government belonged to.82 The split in the Brazilian Democratic Movement was inevitable. Finally in June 1988, in Brasília, a group of left-wing PMDB dissidents formed a new party: the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB).
As is the case with almost all political parties in Brazil, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party was created by professional politicians. The party was initially represented in Congress by eight senators and forty federal deputies from seventeen states.83 Their symbol was the toucan, a Brazilian bird with a yellow chest, an allusion to the colour of the campaign for direct elections. The party attracted both Social Democrats and progressive liberals. Their programme was to consolidate democracy in Brazilian; uphold a parliamentary system; reform the state for efficiency, transparency and accessibility; privatize some of the state-owned companies; gradually relax the impediments to foreign capital and investment in technology towards the development of key economic sectors, especially microelectronics. Despite the name, it was not a Social Democratic party in the European sense, because the party did not have close ties to the trade unions and workers’ movements. The strongest electoral base of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party was in São Paulo, the home state of the party’s most important leaders: Franco Montoro, José Serra, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Mário Covas. With these strong founders, the party was immediately popular among the urban middle classes and the number of votes it attracted grew rapidly.
Even so, no one could have imagined that six years later one of the party’s most outstanding politicians – sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso – would be elected president of Brazil for two terms. Fernando Henrique was born in Rio de Janeiro but lived and worked in São Paulo where he was a professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), until he was forced to retire under the AI-5 and went into exile in Chile. He went on to teach in Europe and in the United States. When he returned to Brazil in 1969 he formed a group with twenty-seven other intellectuals, and together they created the Brazilian Analysis and Planning Centre (Cebrap) – a highly prestigious research institute for the study of political, social and economic issues in the country.84 Fernando Henrique Cardoso had been involved in politics all his life, but had only considered running for office in 1983, against the advice of his wife, Ruth Cardoso – an anthropologist with independent and strong opinions – who thought her husband would be more influential as an independent intellectual. Maybe she was wrong. Once elected as senator for the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, Fernando Henrique Cardoso soon gained enough support to be nominated for the presidency – and with him, the generation that had fought against the dictatorship finally obtained control of the Executive.
Meanwhile, Ulysses Guimarães was preparing for the promulgation of the constitution, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party was taking shape, and the Sarney government was going from bad to worse. There was high inflation, a decline in the government’s popularity, and an increasing number of denunciations for corruption. The government had begun to lose credibility after the failure of its first plan to stabilize the economy – the Plano Cruzado. In 1986, President Sarney was faced with the following circumstances: he had been elected by no one, the government had begun the year with an inflation rate of 16 per cent, and he was under increasing attack from Senator Fernando Henrique Cardoso for his government’s failed economic policies. In short, the president urgently needed a plan that was simple and would produce quick results to control inflation.
The Plano Cruzado was his magic wand.85 Under the plan, the old currency, the cruzeiro, was replaced with a new one, the cruzado, after removing three zeros – so that one cruzado was worth a thousand of the old cruzeiros. The plan addressed unemployment by increasing the minimum wage by 15 per cent, granting a pay rise of 8 per cent to all government employees, creating a ‘trigger’ whereby wages would be adjusted according to inflation every time it reached 20 per cent, and providing for unemployment insurance. But the plan’s trump card was freezing the prices of all goods, tariffs and services. Inflation plummeted, people’s purchasing power increased, and President Sarney revelled in his success. With a table of the frozen prices, which applied all over the country, and armed with a calculator, Brazilians could programme their spending, remodel their homes, consume more and travel abroad – the future looked good. And people participated enthusiastically in the maintenance of the plan. They would check prices at supermarkets to make sure they had not gone up – and if they had, they would denounce the market in question. They were ‘Sarney’s inspectors’.
But there were troubles on the horizon. The price freeze could only be maintained for so long before it needed adjustments, which would be unpopular – allowing price increases, cutting costs and reducing consumption. But President Sarney was so pleased with the popularity and political benefits the plan was bringing him, he refused to make any changes and maintained the price freeze until the November 1986 gubernatorial elections. The results were extraordinary. On the one hand, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party won a landslide victory, electing all but one of the state governors – the exception was Sergipe – and winning a large majority in Congress. On the other hand, the Plano Cruzado began to fall to pieces. Products disappeared from the shelves and the Federal Police made themselves ridiculous by undertaking the Operação Boi Gordo – the Fat Bull Operation – to confiscate cattle kept on farms, and taking the beef and the milk in order to guarantee supply. To top it off, a strategy was developed, called agio, the illegal overpricing that Brazilian people were subjected to for everyday items.
On 21 November, less than a week after the election victory of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, President Sarney, forced to recognize the economy was in trouble, launched the Plano Cruzado II. The new plan made adjustments that should have been introduced when the first version of the plan had been implemented. Public service tariffs were increased and price hikes were authorized, with the result that the inflation rate exploded. When President Sarney summoned a group of businessmen to a meeting at the Finance Ministry, in order to announce the end of the price freeze, it was obvious to the people that he had delayed the announcement of the second plan until after the elections. He was accused of electoral fraud and his government’s credibility was destroyed.
The voters had showed their frustration in the presidential elections of 1989, the first direct elections for president since 1961. They had been disillusioned, first by the defeat of the Dante de Oliveira Amendment, and then by the unexpected death of Tancredo Neves. This time the disillusion was to be even greater. With hyperinflation imminent, many people no longer believed the problem could be solved through conventional measures. The country needed a saviour. And that saviour appeared in the form of candidate Fernando Collor, the governor of Alagoas. He was forty years old, and had an arrogant, alert and fixated gaze. He set out to win the elections by aggressively attacking President Sarney and leading a moral crusade against cronyism and the practice in the Legislature and the Judiciary of the so-called maharajas, who increased their own salaries through bureaucratic manoeuvres.86 Fernando Collor insisted on the urgency of changing Brazil. Some voters liked it when he attacked President Sarney’s plan. Mr Collor would say his plan was to modernize Brazil, put an end to corruption, and make sure government employees did a full day’s work. With five months to go before the election, Fernando Collor’s popularity was sufficient to ensure him a place in the run-off.
There were over twe
nty candidates for president. Ulysses Guimarães paid a heavy price for having supported José Sarney: he had the highest level of rejection, right after Paulo Maluf. The Brazilian Social Democratic Party withdrew their support from Mr Guimarães, alleging he was too old to run for president. And since Ulysses Guimarães could not be the anti-Collor candidate, that role fell to Leonel Brizola and Lula. Lula received 500,000 more votes than Mr Brizola, a defeat that the gaucho found hard to swallow. When Lula approached him for his support in the run-off, Leonel Brizola suggested that, since the result had been a tie, they should both renounce in favour of Mário Covas, the candidate of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, who had come fourth. ‘It wasn’t a tie, Brizola! I got 500,000 more votes than you,’87 Lula retorted furiously.
Right up until his death, in 2004, Leonel Brizola clashed numerous times with Lula. They were suspicious of each other, competed and occasionally exchanged blows. Perhaps they were fighting due to the qualities that each perceived in the other. But in the end, Mr Brizola accepted his loss. He supported Lula in the run-off and ensured that his votes would transfer to the Workers’ Party candidate – not an easy thing to do in politics. The run-off began with Mr Collor at an advantage, but by the end of the campaign the two candidates were neck and neck. Polls showed that Lula had 46 per cent of the vote, against 47 per cent for Collor. The election was only decided in the final week, by which time it had polarized the country. Fernando Collor had money and the backing of the media. The only newspaper that commented how, as governor of Alagoas, Ferando Collor had never practised what he had preached was the Folha de S. Paulo. The rest of the press was unanimous in backing Mr Collor, above all the media controlled by Roberto Marinho, the owner of the Globo media empire. For Mr Marinho, the idea of Leonel Brizola or Lula in the presidency was anathema. With the support of Globo media, President Sarney was no longer the target – the focus was on attacking the Workers’ Party. The middle class, which already felt robbed every day by galloping inflation, was terrified when Fernando Collor played on their fears of communism by suggesting that Lula would expropriate their houses and confiscate their savings accounts.