By JOÃO QUARTIM DE MORAES*
The process that led from the military dictatorship to the current hegemony of liberal thought in politics and culture
Understanding the present as history means understanding it as an extension of the past. In the series of articles that we are beginning, we will develop a concrete analysis of the main episodes that marked the course of the improperly called “democratic transition”, that is, the process that led from the military dictatorship to the current hegemony of liberal thought in politics and culture.
Despite the persistent struggles, many of them grandiose, some heroic, waged by popular resistance to the dictatorial regime implemented by the reactionary coup of 1964, it was the ideas and, above all, the interests of the liberal right that prevailed in the reformulation of Brazilian political institutions announced by General Ernesto Geisel when he assumed the mandate of president of the military dictatorship on March 15, 1974.
Every strategic plan is characterized by its objectives and the means to be employed to achieve them. Drawn up by Ernesto Geisel and his political advisor, General Golbery do Couto e Silva, the institutional “normalization” project aimed to promote the liberal reconversion of the regime through a “gradual and controlled” political “easing”. It was, therefore, a policy of opening up, not a political opening, which would only take shape, in fits and starts, in the following decade.
At that time, almost nothing was known about the vast military operation that the Army, with the support of the Air Force, had launched in 1972 to annihilate the guerrilla movement of the Communist Party of Brazil in the Araguaia region, the most consistent revolutionary challenge that the military dictatorship had faced. Rigid censorship of the media isolated the region from the fighting from the rest of the country. Overwhelming numerical superiority and superiority in military equipment, bombings with napalm, torture and summary execution of prisoners, ensured the success of the siege and annihilation operations carried out by the Army, which continued until 1974.
The credibility of the opening announced by Ernesto Geisel upon taking office required keeping information about what was happening in the conflict-ridden region completely closed. The gag worked, but the détente announced by official rhetoric did not last long. The legislative elections scheduled for November 15, 1974, were shaping up to be difficult for the regime. The MDB, a tolerated opposition party, had acquired a certain credibility as a vehicle for expressing the aspirations for freedom that were widespread throughout the country, but its success exceeded even its most optimistic expectations.
In the Senate, where the vote can take on a more plebiscitary character, he elected his candidate in 16 states, out of a total of 22. In the Federal Chamber, he went from 87 to 160 deputies, out of a total of 364. In the more urbanized states, the victory of the opposition was particularly expressive due to the contrast with the results of 1970. In the state of São Paulo, notably, the MDB went from 902 votes in 713 to 1970 in 3, while ARENA fell from 413 to 478.
By emphasizing that the pace of political “detente” should be “gradual and controlled,” Ernesto Geisel was thinking about controlling the democratic opposition. Even after being soundly defeated at the polls, he did not lose his way. It was clear to him that despite the political cost, electoral defeat had a legitimizing effect on the regime, as it had guaranteed the opposition a minimum of freedom of assembly and expression.
He knew, however, that his project was far from being accepted by all officers in the armed forces. The MDB's electoral advance in November 1974 frightened many of them and exacerbated the bad instincts of the henchmen and henchmen who were part of what the sycophantic journalism called the "security community."
It was no secret that there were PCB militants and sympathizers active in the MDB. Having condemned the armed actions of the clandestine resistance as “misguided,” they strictly adhered to nonviolent methods of political struggle. This did not spare them the wrath of the torturers. As the armed struggle movements were annihilated one after the other, the sniffers of the political repression services focused on tracking down the communists who had “infiltrated” the MDB.
Soon after Ernesto Geisel took office, and well before the legislative elections, a police-military offensive was launched to arrest, torture and assassinate the best-known leaders of the PCB, a party that, it is worth emphasizing, had refrained from resorting to armed struggle against the dictatorial regime. Many of these heinous crimes were committed before the dictatorship was defeated in November 1974, which would prove, if necessary, that the new extermination operation had been initiated independently of electoral considerations.
Four top generals in the Army stood out in promoting this new escalation of state terrorism: the commanders of the II (SP) and III Army (RGS), respectively Ednardo D'Avila Melo and Oscar Luiz da Silva; the Chief of the Army General Staff, Fritz Manso; and the Minister of the Army, Silvio Frota. The targeted assassinations carried out by this bloodthirsty quartet continued. Brazil had been known, at least since the beginning of the decade, as a country where political prisoners were systematically tortured. But under the shadow of Institutional Act No. 5, of December 13, 1968, censorship blocked any and all references to the atrocities in the basements of the DOI-CODI and other “houses of death.”
Until, on October 25, 1975, Vladimir Herzog, director of journalism at TV Culture, summoned by the DOI-CODI of São Paulo to explain his possible links with the PCB, was subjected to an “interrogation” with beatings of thick wooden sticks and electric shocks that only ended with his death. But this time the murder was not limited to the crime scene. The summoning of Vladimir Herzog by the military, as well as that of his work colleagues, was public and notorious. It was not possible to make him “disappear”, as was the custom of the torturers and murderers of the repressive apparatus set up by the dictatorship.
On October 31, 1975, a silent “ecumenical act” called by Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns at the Sé Cathedral, which was attended by Protestant and Jewish religious leaders, brought together around 8.000 participants, who were not intimidated by the ostentatious presence of Army troops occupying the main access routes to the city center and by hundreds of police officers stationed in the Sé square. The moral and political impact of this ecumenical demonstration was profound and lasting.
On the same day, regime spokespeople issued a statement about the “regrettable episode,” warning that they would not allow it to be used to disturb order, calling for “disarming spirits” and promising to “prevent new incidents of this nature from occurring.” This phraseology combined hypocritical condolences, explicit threats, and a message to the bloodthirsty quartet whose most plausible interpretation was to avoid torture and murders likely to cause public scandal.
What mattered — above all — to Ernesto Geisel was the preservation of his authority in the supreme command of the Armed Forces and political power and in the control of the “special services” of state terrorism, throughout the turbulence and contradictions of “normalization”.
*João Quartim de Moraes He is a retired full professor at the Department of Philosophy at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of The military left in Brazil (Popular Expression) [https://amzn.to/3snSrKg].
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