João Goulart

João Belchior Marques Goulart (1918 - 1976) was the last Labour Party President of Brazil. He had been twice before the Republic’s Vice-President and Labour Minister.

During the two years he governed Brazil (07/09/61 - 31/03/64) he retook Getúlio Vargas’s old goals of workers protection and a genuine nationally geared development. In order to do that he sent to the National Congress the bill authorizing structural reforms, the famous Basic Reforms - agrarian, educational, fiscal, administrative, financial and urban - without which, he considered, Brazil wouldn’t be able to break the barriers of backwardness and misery.

His nationalist stand crashed with the interests of very powerful groups that , for sometime, had conspired to disband the Vargas Era. Although he was pressed by those sectors that dominated the press and practically the whole midia, Jango, as he was popularly called, took measures of such an importance that they still remain in Brazilian society. One of them was the 13th wage, old labour demand.

Another one was the concession of special retirement according to the job’s nature.Goulart also determined the regulation of the Rural Worker Statute and of The National Telecommunications Law, which gave birth to Embratel and made autonomous the telecommunications’system that was under foreign monopoly before.

He redirected the industrialization process - distorted by the governments that came after GetúlioVargas to benefit big capital - with the aim to carry out balanced and autonomous development for Brazilian capitalism.

He, according to such belief, surely forbade the enrolment of foreign financial aid in capital goods imports by making the national industry able to manufacture them. He also created Eletrobrás and changed the legislation of the Electrification Fund, so assuring the expansion of electrical energy national production capacity, in the hands of the multinationals’s low effort before. Goulart also inaugurated three big energy factories (Usiminas, Cosipa and Ferro e Aço de Vitória) and authorized Petrobrás to get into the national market of distribution of oil by-products, which was restricted to foreign enterprises.

He made sure, however, that the state company would have the monopoly of supply to the government’s bodies. Finally he determined the sale - all over Brazil and with long-term financing- of the Social Security’s estates, benefiting about one thousand families, and started the construction of Social Security’s regional hospitals.

Such policies, together with the regulation of foreign enterprises’s profit remmitance abroad, which had considerably disrupted our economy, and his stress on the protection of wage earners, insulted directly the big enterpreneurs, bankers, military sectors, press, publicity agencies and oligarchies. Such groups that had got used to have huge profits at the expenses of workers’s miserable wages and our economy’s dependency, got organized - with the support of American agencies headed by the terrible CIA - to wreck the Government and finally overthrow it on March 31st, 1964.

They persecuted Goulart since he had been Labour Minister and later on twice Republic’s Vice-President.In order to achieve his aims, João Goulart faced all sort of adversities. The violent and determined campaign to make him unstable prevented the President to carry out many of his plans, such as the Basic Reforms. Jango, however, found strength to design an external policy according to the Brazilian interests. He faced American pressure to isolate Cuba but defended that sister nation-state’s right to self-determination.

His purpose was to create conditions for Brazil to expand and diversify her external trade. Under this principle he established trade relations with the Soviet Union, started negotiations with Popular China and turned to Latin American countries.

PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM

Jango took power as a consequence of a popular rebellion - the Legality Campaign - led by Leonel Brizola, Rio Grande do Sul’s governor then, who stood up against the military veto on Jango’s inauguration in the Republic’s Presidency. He was the vice-president, post for which he had been elected autonomously as a PTB candidate, in the same election which Jânio Quadros (UDN’s candidate, ultra-conservative party) won the presidency. Jânio, however, suddenly resigned on the seventh month of his government.

He was inaugurated under the parliamentary system, conceived by the politcal rulers in Brasília to undermine his presidential powers. Brizola’s rebellion had been already victorious and Jango could have been inaugurated in his full presidential powers. But he wanted to negotiate because he believed that, by accepting the elites’s demands, he could reach a steady government. It was his mistake. Manipulated in power by the parliamentary system’s decision-making machine, due to the share of his presidential functions with a Prime Minister, and suffering from the elites’s restless undermining activities, he had to concentrate on the struggle for the restoration of the Presidential System until his victory in the Public Referendum held on January 1st, 1963. As full President he could have carried out the structural reforms the country needed, already on the first day. Nevertheless, he only got to them after the Public Referendum that rejected the parliamentary system, when people gave a sound no to that exotic regime in the proportion of nine to one. At that time the conspiracy had got too far off. As Darcy Ribeiro, Jango’s Head of Civil Cabinet said: “One set for the disruption of the Constitutional Brazilian Government through a coup d’etat plotted in the American Embassy, which gathered the whole midia for a systematic campaign to get public opinion against the President, dangerously defined as communist. Such campaign was followed by big pseudo-religious mass demonstrations in defence of democracy and freedom. Both had deep repercussion on the middle-classes, always sensitive to manipulation, but did not affect the popular support for the reforming government.” On March 31st, 1964, “the coup succeeded as a whole, and can be proclaimed the greatest victory of the West against communism, greater than Cuba’s nuclear disarmament, greater than the crisis of the Berlin Wall”, proudly said the American Ambassador Lincoln Gordon 5.

On that night Jango, already without conditions to govern Brasilia, left for Porto Alegre, where Brizola, with the help of the III Army’s commander, General Ladário Telles, tried an armed reaction, but was dismissed by Goulart. The two would leave for exile - the former in Uruguay and the latter in Argentina - because they would be both killed if they remained in Brazil. Jango would never return because he died in Argentina on December 6th, 1976 during the wave of authotitarian regimes in Latin America (that year the militaries had overthrown President Isabelita Perón and established another fierce dictatorship). He died at the age of 58, officially of a heart attack. Neuza, Jango’s sister and Brizola’s wife, never accepted the body’s autopsy to be unauthorized. Jango was buried in a nearly hidden ceremony, in São Borja (RS), his and Getúlio’s homeland.

General Ernesto Geisel, Brazil’s President at the time, authorized the body’s transfer. There was an order, however, for the coffin to remain closed. There was censorship. The television network was only allowed to give the news of the burial late at night. Nevertheless, over thirty thousand people went to São Borja to say goodbye to the last labourist and popular Brazilian President”.