By JOÃO QUARTIM DE MORAES*
Ernesto Geisel did not lose track of his institutional project: using Act 5 to revoke Act 5
The year 1974 began with the international capitalist economy suffering the impact of the “oil shock,” one of the clearest and most important examples of the dialectical interconnection of economics and politics in our time. In October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched an offensive against the colonial state of Israel. The United States immediately organized an airlift to transport weapons and military equipment that allowed its protégés in Tel Aviv to rebalance the balance of forces on the battlefield and counterattack.
Outraged by the blatant US intervention, the Arab oil-exporting states, led by Saudi Arabia, decided to raise prices and reduce production by 5% per month until the Palestinian territories occupied by the colonialists were evacuated. They also decreed a total embargo on oil exports to the United States and its main European lackey, the Netherlands. The average price per barrel went from $3 to $18 in a few weeks, tending to stabilize at $11,65 at the end of the year.
When General Ernesto Geisel began his government, the prices of Brazilian oil imports were rising dramatically (three to four times higher than in 1973), exacerbating the strong inflationary pressures that had been manifesting during Delfim Neto's cruel economic "miracle." The petite bourgeoisie lost the euphoria of previous years, from the football patriotism of the 1970 World Cup to the illusory financial "entrepreneurship" expressed in the slogan: "don't buy Brahma, buy Brahma shares!" etc.
Along with gasoline prices, the prices of basic consumer goods kept rising, and with them came disillusionment and discontent. Nevertheless, the success of Arab exporters in their confrontation with Zionist colonialism and their protectors at the Pentagon and Wall Street certainly influenced the adoption of Brazil's new foreign policy. The "third world" had shown its strength: it was worth freeing itself from subservience to the United States. This was Geisel's guideline, despite internal difficulties.
Demonstrating a vision of international relations that broke with the subordinate alignment of his predecessors in the US camp, he took a series of convergent initiatives that confirmed that they were not isolated decisions, but rather a coherent stance of independent foreign policy. He reestablished diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, which had been severed by the 1964 coup plotters; he recognized the independence of the African peoples fighting against Portuguese colonialism; and he broke the military agreement with the United States.
On the domestic front, however, unlike Garrastazu Médici, who upon taking office in 1969 expressed the expectation of “reestablishing democracy”, but gave carte blanche to agents of state terrorism to exterminate armed resistance, Ernesto Geisel refrained from making inconsequential promises, considering that the revocation of Act 5 presupposed the annihilation of those who opposed the regime with weapons in hand.
In a long series of autobiographical interviews conducted by two CPDOC researchers (between July 1993 and March 1994), he commented on the question “whether the Médici government was a prospect for normalization” (sic). Within the limits of formal politeness, after saying that he was “a good man,” Ernesto Geisel added: “He was friendly, everyone liked him. He had the skills for the job. It is true that he was not a man of great brilliance, nor was he a man who worked hard… He stuck to the main lines. And he was passionate about soccer.”
Translated into cruder language: Garrastazu Médici was a mediocre civil servant in uniform, with no ideas of his own, lazy, mainly interested in soccer, leaving economic policy decisions to Delfim Neto. Regarding the interviewers’ allusion to Médici’s “perspective of normalization” (whose government made the large-scale systematic torture of political prisoners the norm), Ernesto Geisel was evasive: “In that situation, in that emergency, it was the best choice. Who could it have been if it weren’t for Médici?” (Ernesto Geisel, Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, p. 214). Translated again: in September-October, during the chaotic crisis of the regime, Médici was the least bad of the four-star generals available to take over as head of the dictatorial Executive.
Regarding his own appointment in 1974 to preside over the dictatorship, Ernesto Geisel stuck to protocolary generalities, insisting that he had not worked to be a candidate. He complained, however, about the “discontented” and “slanderers” who spread the word that he was the strongest candidate because he had eight stars, four from him and four from his brother Orlando (p. 259).
There were other assumptions, besides the annihilation of the armed struggle, which he did not make explicit. The main one was that he did not intend to renounce the exceptional powers with which he was invested before consolidating his authority. The prospect of an electoral victory of the legal opposition in the legislative elections of November 1974 reinforced this decision.
In the previous elections, in 1970, at the height of the dictatorship’s terror, but also of euphoric fascist-like nationalism (“Brazil, love it or leave it”) and annual growth rates of over 10%, a large part of the opposition had advocated a blank vote. The victory of the regime’s candidates, united in ARENA (National Renewal Alliance), over the MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement, the party of the “consented opposition”) was overwhelming: they obtained two-thirds of the Federal Chamber and 59 of the 66 seats in the Senate. But the legitimizing effect of the regime was almost zero. Inside and outside Brazil, it was clear that this was an electoral farce and that the dictatorship was in fact a “single-party regime.”
Given this pejorative image, Ernesto Geisel considerably relaxed censorship and police control in the 1974 electoral process. From his point of view, it was a risk worth taking in order to lend credibility to the regime's “opening” project. The political cost, for him, was high. In the elections of November 15, in which the vote for senator assumed a clearly plebiscitary nature, the MDB elected 16 senators, out of the 22 seats up for grabs, and 161 deputies, 44% of the total of 364 seats up for grabs in the Federal Chamber. In São Paulo, in the race for the Senate, Orestes Quércia, from the MDB, defeated former governor Carvalho Pinto, from ARENA, by 4,3 million votes to 1,5 million.
Ernesto Geisel reacted skillfully to the resounding defeat, declaring in his end-of-year message: “Resentments – and there is no reason to harbor them – do not hold me back, nor do I feel simple embarrassment – which would even be understandable – in recording that the MDB has achieved substantial progress in the authenticity of its growing political expression.” He acknowledged the results, but obviously would not say what initiatives he would take to counterbalance the electoral advance of the opposition.
Historical objectivity, in any case, requires us to recognize that through the alternations of opening and closing, in fits and starts as was once said, he did not lose track of his institutional project: using Act 5 to revoke Act 5.
*João Quartim de Moraes He is a retired full professor of the Philosophy Department at Unicamp. Author of, among other books, Lenin: an introduction (Boitempo) [https://amzn.to/4fErZPX].
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