By JOÃO QUARTIM DE MORAES*
Ernesto Geisel was the only one, among the five general-dictators, who committed himself to promoting a self-centered industrial development plan and who dared to say no to American hegemonism.
On August 31, 1969, less than nine months after having signed, on December 13, 1968, the nefarious Institutional Act No. 5, which attributed discretionary powers of life and death to the top of the regime, General Costa e Silva, president of the military dictatorship, suffered a stroke that removed him from office.
Vice President Pedro Aleixo was a political leader of the traditional right who had stood out in the coup offensive that overthrew João Goulart on April 1, 1964. However, the ministers of the Army (Lyra Tavares), the Air Force (Souza e Melo) and the Navy (Rademaker) informed Pedro Aleixo that he would not assume the presidency, because he had opposed AI-5. He had opposed it, but not very much, so much so that he remained vice president.
The real reason was the raw, naked fact that sovereign power was a monopoly of the military leadership. To admit that the presidency of the dictatorship was occupied by a civilian politician would be to break this monopoly. Those who thought they could improve their political vocabulary by introducing the fad “civil-military dictatorship” to clarify that the capitalists actively supported the dictatorship, only displayed their own confusion between the body that exercised state power (the leadership of the military bureaucracy) and the ruling class, whose general class interests this leadership served.
After slamming the door of the presidency in Pedro Aleixo's face, blatantly ignoring the 1967 Constitution (a constitutional monstrosity that the regime itself had granted, trying to legally stabilize a right-wing liberalism under military supervision), the trio of ultra-reactionary generals published yet another Institutional Act on August 31, no. 12, granting full powers to a government Junta formed by themselves.
A few days later (September 4), a commando from two organizations of the armed struggle movement (ALN and MR-8) kidnapped the United States ambassador, Charles Burke Elbricht, in Rio de Janeiro, demanding that fifteen political prisoners be freed in order to free him, as well as that a manifesto denouncing the regime and presenting a summary of the underground resistance platform be published in full on national television. The Junta, which had not yet managed to obtain the support of the mass of officers for the new coup made official in Act 12, was prepared to do everything to save the ambassador of the Empire.
He gave in to the demands of the revolutionaries, who in turn released Burke Elbricht. However, a group of extremist officers, under the orders of Colonel Dikson, who commanded a paratrooper brigade, tried to prevent the 15 freed prisoners from being sent to Mexico. The attempt failed, but the mutineers occupied a radio station from where they issued a proclamation “to the people and the military” calling on them to protest against what the French press described as an “unprecedented humiliation” by the regime (cf. Le Figaro from 6-7 September and Le Monde of September 8, 1969).
The American press, however, treated the matter with understandable discretion. Colonel Dikson's extremists were quickly arrested, but the mutiny showed how serious the tensions in the Army were.
In this critical situation, the Junta rushed to transfer the leadership of the dictatorship to a new general-president. It adopted the same principle to select him that had been used to prevent Pedro Aleixo from taking office, but this time explicitly assumed: the sovereign power to make final decisions belonged to the top brass of the Armed Forces. The selection process was carried out through a “sui generis” in two stages, which deserves to be included in the records of the militarist usurpation of popular sovereignty.
The first stage involved deciding who would have the right to vote and be voted for: all generals in the Armed Forces or only those with four stars. Authorizing the candidacy of generals with less than four stars would bring about a problem of hierarchy: it would be difficult, in the logic of the uniformed bureaucracy, to accept the possibility of a brigadier or division general becoming supreme commander.
But the most articulate political movement, with a great deal of influence over young officers, was that of the nationalists linked to Major General (three stars) Albuquerque Lima. It was said that at least part of this movement sympathized with the progressive and reformist military regime established in Peru on October 3, 1968, by a military “pronouncement” commanded by General Velasco Alvarado, who nationalized the oil, which until then had been shamelessly plundered by a branch of the Esso trust, and promoted a real agrarian reform, distributing lands belonging to large landowners to peasants.
Costa e Silva's Minister of the Interior, Albuquerque Lima, had resigned in protest against the cuts in funds earmarked for aid to the Northeast. He accepted Act 5 on the grounds that it could serve as an instrument for social reforms. Removing him from the race would have exacerbated tensions to a point that the Junta considered dangerous. It seemed the best option to let him run. He showed his strength by winning by a landslide in the Navy (59 votes against just 7 for Garrastazu Medici).
In the Air Force, the votes were split equally between Garrastazu Medici, Albuquerque Lima and Orlando Geisel. Admirals and brigadiers voted in a joint meeting at the headquarters of their respective ministries, leaving the result indisputable. In the Army, the process was turbulent. Voters were dispersed throughout the country. In some places, mid-ranking officers actively participated in the discussions, while in others they had neither a vote nor a voice.
Garrastazu Medici was considered the winner, but Albuquerque Lima protested, accusing Lyra Tavares of having manipulated the vote. To resolve the impasse, the Junta called for a “second round” of elections, restricted to members of the military High Command. Garrastazu Medici emerged victorious.
There is a certain consensus in studies on the Brazilian military dictatorship regarding the agreement between the generals who supported the appointment of Garrastazu Medici and the group known as the Castelistas, who intended to resume the project of the first dictator, Castelo Branco (1964-1967), of moving towards political “normalization.” The brothers Orlando and Ernesto Geisel, leaders of the “Castelistas,” supported Garrastazu Medici in exchange for the commitment that one of them would succeed him in 1974. The commitment was guaranteed by the appointment of Orlando Geisel to the Ministry of the Army.
The mainstream newspapers, which are the newspapers of the ruling class, warmly welcomed the new head of the regime. The Newspapers in Brazil highlighted the optimistic outlook announced by Garrastazu Medici when he declared that he hoped to “reestablish democracy by the end of my term.” This was an empty phrase, because during his term he was the patron of torture and so-called selective assassinations, giving carte blanche to the “tigers” of the State’s repressive machine to annihilate the clandestine resistance and terrorize the opposition. In 1974, when his term ended, the urban armed resistance had been completely exterminated and the rural guerrilla movement of Araguaia was living its last moments.
As head of the Army Ministry, Orlando Geisel did what was necessary to ensure that the presidential sash was passed on to his brother Ernesto in March 1974. To prevent the nationalist current, which continued to exert influence over the officers, from disturbing the summit agreement with Medici, he prevented Albuquerque Lima from receiving the fourth star, forcing him to retire as a major general. On March 15, 1974, his brother Ernesto Geisel assumed command of the dictatorship.
He was the only one of the five general-dictators who committed himself to promoting a self-centered industrial development plan and who dared to say no to American hegemony. The contradictions and paradoxes of his policy led a journalist with a knack for dialectical formulas to describe him as “the closed lord of openness.”
*João Quartim de Moraes He is a retired full professor at the Department of Philosophy at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of Lenin: An Introduction (Boitempo) [https://amzn.to/4fErZPX]
To read the first article in this series, click https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/ernesto-geisel-o-controle-da-oposicao-democratica/
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