The Military and the Threat to Democracy in Brazil by Sidney Chalhoub - 01/04/22

There are deep historical reasons not to underestimate the threat that the administration of Jair Bolsonaro poses to Brazilian democracy. The Bolsonarista coup-mongering agenda, with the support of the armed forces, is coherent from a historical perspective. Perhaps the only novelty lies in the fact that the concept of “armed forces” now also includes broad sectors of the states’ military police and the urban militias.

Brazilian politics has not always operated under the barrel of a gun. Independence-era politicians, marked by the memory of the Napoleonic wars and distrustful of the authoritarian tendencies of Dom Pedro I, thought that powerful professional armies were a dangerous resource in the hands of absolutist monarchs and potential tyrants. During much of the nineteenth century, Brazil faced international conflicts and internal rebellions with an army made up of recruits captured by lasso, “free” men barred from the right to citizenship due to poverty itself (the 1824 Constitution established a minimum income for exercising political rights). The situation changed after the Paraguayan War (1864-70) when the army showed itself to be utterly unprepared for prolonged combat in an immense area in the interior of the country. In 1868, Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, the head of the war effort best remembered as the Duke of Caxias, felt that the cabinet of progressive liberals was not supportive enough of the troops. He pushed for the cabinet’s dismissal and the rise of the conservatives, a harbinger of more than a century of military interventionism in Brazilian politics. In the years that followed, the army became professionalized and politicized, inspired by pseudo-scientific ideas and increasingly convinced of the need of its own political action in a country racked by monarchic crisis and divided by enduring elite resistance to the abolition of slavery.

From then on, the military, courted by civilian sectors, became a constant source of political instability through a succession of coups, coup attempts, dictatorships, and threats. The armed forces sometimes served as an armed support to those who sought power undemocratically. A military coup overthrew the monarchy in November 1889, followed by years of dictatorship and civil wars. In these days of pandemic and government irresponsibility regarding the vaccination of the population, we sometimes remember that there was a revolt against smallpox vaccination in Rio de Janeiro in 1904, but we forget that amid the political turmoil of those days there was an attempted military coup against President Rodrigues Alves. An incomplete account of this period reveals several instances of military interventionism, including the tenente (lieutenants') uprisings of the 1920s, the rise of Getúlio Vargas to power in 1930 (despite having been defeated in the presidential election), the military support for the Estado Novo (1937-45). The “manifesto of the colonels” against Vargas, who had been democratically elected in 1950, was an important event leading to his suicide in August, 1954. In 1955, there was an attempted coup to prevent the inauguration of Juscelino Kubitchek. Six years later, having been essentially vetoed by the military, João Goulart only managed to assume the presidency after the resignation of Jânio Quadros when he agreed to accept a parliamentary system intended to limit his powers. On April 1, 1964, João Goulart was deposed, the country plunged into more than two decades of civil-military dictatorship.

History is heavy, and we carry it on our shoulders, whether we like it or not. Democracy does not have a deep hold among Brazilian elites. We have experienced one sole authentically democratic period in our republican history, lasting from the 1988 Constitution to the 2016 parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff. The military were in their barracks and did not seem interested in political life—as the Constitution dictates and as the generation of Independence-era politicians wanted—, nor did there seem to be any relevant political groups willing to compromise democracy. The 2016 impeachment crisis disorganized the country's institutions, revealing their fragility when there is no solid tradition of respect for democratic rules. Bolsonaro's bet on an armed coup is a real danger. Failing to take this threat seriously, failing to strengthen institutions to face it, failing to alert the international community to the gravity of the situation, could well be fatal.

Sidney Chalhoub is David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Affiliated with the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

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