Brazil: Goodbye to Jango

If ever there was a popular revolution, it was the one that last week toppled Brazilian President João (“Jango”) Goulart. In São Paulo, samba dancers whirled through the streets, singing, shouting and kicking. In Rio, some 300,000 cariocas pranced and danced along the Avenida Presidente Vargas beneath a storm of confetti, tootling carnival horns, waving handkerchiefs, clapping every back within reach. At a Copacabana restaurant, three tired, rain-drenched college boys tramped in off the street, plopped down at a table and lovingly draped a damp green, blue and yellow Brazilian flag over the fourth chair. “We are wet and dirty but not ashamed,” said one dramatically. “The Communists threatened our right to carry this beautiful flag. Now we are fighting for our liberty.” The man at the piano struck up the national anthem; all joined in.

President Johnson was almost as enthusiastic, and forthwith sent his “warmest good wishes” to the new President, Paschoal Ranieri Mazzilli. In Peru, Lima’s La Prensa called the revolution a “healthy action”; in Argentina, former President Pedro Aramburu said that “democracy has won out.” But despite all the enthusiasm, getting rid of Goulart was only a first and far-from-conclusive step. He had mismanaged Brazil so badly that his downfall became inevitable, but the fruits of that mismanagement remain for his successors to cope with.

Post-Mortem. Brazil has been on the road to trouble for years. Under the spend-build, spend-build administration of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61), the country lavished millions on massive public works projects, including the construction of the nation’s $600 million capital of Brasília. Erratic Jânio Quadros, who took office in 1961, slapped on rigid austerity measures. But he stuck around only seven months before resigning in a fit of pique, and then Goulart—his Vice President—moved into the palace.

A wealthy rancher from Rio Grande do Sul state, Goulart learned his politics at the knee of a ranching neighbor, oldtime Brazilian Strongman Getúlio Vargas, became Labor Minister when Vargas swept back into the presidency in 1950. Jango immediately began buying labor’s votes with promises of pay boosts, was finally pressured out of the ministry by the military when he tried to double Brazil’s minimum wage. With Vargas’ suicide in 1954, Goulart inherited the leadership of the Brazilian Labor Party, became Vice President under Kubitschek, then under Quadros, thanks to a system that permits the election of a President from one party, a Veep from another.

As President, Goulart continued wooing labor at all costs. When he needed money, he just printed it—and Jango needed plenty, as the economy began flying apart. During his 31 months in office, the country’s cost of living soared 300%.

The value of the cruzeiro dropped 83%. The country ran up a staggering $3.7 billion foreign debt, with almost no hope of repaying it. Foreign investors kept their capital safely at home, or sent it anywhere but to Brazil.

As ruin approached, Goulart turned desperately to the far left for political support, threatened to rewrite the constitution, which prevents a President from succeeding himself, and entrench himself in power. A left-run nation of permanent chaos loomed as an all too real prospect. And Brazil, of course, is no island; the largest and most important nation in Latin America, it could conceivably drag the rest of the continent down with it.

This prospect finally alarmed not only Brazil’s conservatives but middlereaders and liberals as well. Even the radical groups Jango had tried to organize—unions, peasants, noncommissioned officers—in the end did not follow him. It was practically everybody against Jango and his ambitions, his ineptness, his phony reforms. At a party meeting in Rio, even the Communists turned on him. “As far as we are concerned,” said one Communist leader, “Jango is dead. He was a stupid man.”

Slow Groundwork. Spontaneous it seemed, but last week’s revolt was actually hatched in October. At first, only half a dozen colonels were involved, and their plan was purely defensive; only if Goulart actually tried to seize dictatorial powers would they act. But as Goulart turned farther and farther left, as more and more of the demagogue came out in him, as fiscal madness multiplied, his opponents at last decided that they must act before he did, not after.

General Artur da Costa e Silva, 61, the army’s senior ranking officer and one of Brazil’s ablest tacticians, began organizing and planning. The plan was twofold. First, troops at Juiz de Fora, in Minas Gerais state, would rise up in rebellion. Then would follow a pause until Goulart’s loyal forces were fully committed to crushing the trouble in Minas Gerais. Then a main force would march on Rio, and other commands would join the revolt. Costa e Silva’s emissaries began crisscrossing the country, discreetly lining up support. “In the final days before the revolt,” said Goulart’s rebelling air force chief of staff, “we knew that if pilots in Rio were ordered to fly against us, they would refuse to go up.”

Civilian political backing was hardly a problem. São Paulo’s militantly anti-Communist Governor Adhemar de Barros had been plotting his own revolt for three months, and was in secret contact with the governors of several other Brazilian states. Carlos Lacerda, governor of pivotal Guanabara state, which consists mostly of the city of Rio de Janeiro, was Tango’s declared enemy and would surely go along.

Planned Pause. A fortnight ago, the plot came to a boil when pro-Goulart navy and marine enlisted men rebelled against their officers and staged a sit-in strike in a Rio union hall, demanding passage of Goulart’s broad and sweeping social and economic “reforms” (TIME, April 3). Far from cracking down on the mutineers for insubordination, Goulart’s leftist Navy Minister gave them all weekend passes and full pardons. Newspapers, middle-road and right-wing politicians sensed that Goulart was bent on the swift formation of a socialist regime, and began a clamor of public protest.

Up to then, ex-President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61) had never publicly criticized Goulart. But now his patience had run out. He warned angrily: “Goulart has gone too far.” Instead of falling back, Goulart last week went before a meeting of military police noncoms to accuse the army and navy brass of “carrying out intrigues” against him, and to label the opposition “a minority of privileged ones who live with eyes turned toward the past.” So worked up was Goulart that his worried aides summoned his private physician, and the doctor stayed by his side through the rest of his speech, lest he overdo it.

The morning after Goulart’s speech, the troops rose in Minas Gerais; a force of 10,000 soldiers marched off toward Rio. Then came the pause planned by the plotters, and with it a gap in the news that set all of Brazil speculating: had the revolt failed? Was it all a false alarm? The next morning, Goulart responded by ordering the 1st Infantry

Division, supposedly loyal to him, to put down the Minas Gerais revolt.

Once Goulart’s troops were committed and on the road, however, all doubt ended. Suddenly, 14 Brazilian states stood in open rebellion; two of the country’s four armies had risen, and the other two were wavering. When Goulart’s 1st Infantry Division met the Minas Gerais troops, it promptly switched sides. The outlawed Communist-controlled General Labor Command tried to stage a general strike in Goulart’s favor, with only spotty success. Goulart’s leftist, Yankee-hating brother-in-law, Congressman Leonel Brizola, tried to mobilize peasant and Gaucho guerrillas he had armed, but they just stayed home.

Back to Brasília. The turning point came as rebel troops, led by anti-Jango General Amaury Kruel, flew from São Paulo over the defense lines Goulart had set up outside Rio and took over the city behind them. Within the city, Goulart’s archenemy, Carlos Lacerda, had manned the governor’s palace with 500 state troopers and barricaded it with 20 city garbage trucks still bearing an anti-litter slogan: “HELP US. WE ARE CLEANING UP THE CITY.” When the tide turned against Jango, Lacerda went on television to proclaim emotionally, “God has taken pity on the people. God is good.”

Jango fled, ironically enough, to the nation’s capital—the remote, grandiose inland city of Brasília. But even Brasília threatened to become too hotly rebellious for comfort. Still spouting defiance, Jango flew south to still loyal Pôrto Alegre, homeground of his firebrand brother-in-law and capital of his home state of Rio Grande do Sul. From there, Goulart hoped to lead a “counterattack of the legalist forces.” Vowed Jango: “I will not resign. I will not put a bullet through my chest. I will resist.”

Within four hours after Jango left Brasília, the Senate president gaveled a special joint session of Congress to order and announced that Goulart “had abandoned the site of the republic” and “left the presidency vacant.” Mazzilli, president of the Chamber of Deputies and next in line of succession, thereupon became chief of state automatically—even though it took Goulart one more day to accept the inevitable and follow his lovely wife, Maria Tereza, and his two children to exile in Uruguay. Only a few scattered shots were ever fired in his defense. Those who saw him just before his plane took off from the airport said he was a beaten man, verging on tears.

Within 30 days, Congress must elect a “permanent temporary” President to fill out the rest of Goulart’s term, which runs until January 1966. No real presidential candidate will want to jeopardize his chances in next year’s elections by becoming an interim President legally forbidden to succeed himself. At week’s end seven of Brazil’s key states had already endorsed General Humberto Castelo Branco for the temporary job. One of the key plotters and Goulart’s army chief of staff, General Branco handled many of the top contacts before the revolt. Behind the scenes, real power will be held by the civilian leaders of the revolt—the governors of several states, including Carlos Lacerda. Other potentially powerful men, such as ex-President Kubitschek, wait in the wings.

A Start. In the first flush of revolutionary fervor, Brazil’s right and center went after the left. Crowds burned out the headquarters of the left-dominated National Students Union. The left-leaning governor of Pernambuco was packed off to exile on a lonely island in the Atlantic, along with a passel of Communists and other assorted leftist?.

Brother-in-law Brizola was last seen gunning up the highway out of Porto Alegre in a borrowed green Volkswagen. Moscow recalled its ambassador; the Cuban ambassador braced for a diplomatic break any moment. The U.S. promised sympathy and aid.

But Brazil itself still has an uphill fight ahead. It will have to re-create a business climate that will appeal anew to foreign investors long ago disenchanted. It must assure the U.S. that solid economic aid will not just be fed, greenback by greenback, onto a fire of inflation. It must inspire a sense of national responsibility among its people. That means that labor must forgo any more of those massive 75% and 100% raises long demanded—and won—under Jango. The government will have to slow down the money presses and cut back overloaded federal payrolls. Manufacturers will have to hold the line on prices. But at least by dumping Goulart, Brazil has made a start along the road to confidence in itself. Over one 24-hour period during the revolution, Rio’s black-market exchange rate for cruzeiros dropped from 2,200 to the dollar to 1,300.