Costa e Silva | Brazil: Five Centuries of Change (2024)

Presidential photo of Costa e Silva. Official Brazilian government photo.

In contrast to Castelo Branco, who was known for his reserved manner, the second general-president, Artur da Costa e Silva, was extroverted and blunt. He was, as Thomas Skidmore described, a man “more at home at the racetracks than studying tomes of military strategy” and more closely associated with hard-line nationalists in the armed forces than with the intellectual “Sorbonne group.”

His inaugural address promised to “humanize the revolution.” However, the resurgence of a diverse civil resistance and a revitalized congressional opposition destabilized the general’s two-year presidency and, by the end of 1968, persuaded him to abandon the plan to restore democracy. Instead of liberalizing it, Costa e Silva closed Congress, governed by decree, and discouraged civil disobedience by detaining and torturing dissidents.

Though Costa e Silva’s presidential term was supposed to last from March 1967 until March 1971, it was cut short by his near-fatal stroke in September 1969.

Like his predecessor, Costa e Silva led a highly distinguished military career before becoming president. He graduated with top marks from military college, participated in a six-month program at Fort Knox in the United States, and served as commander of the Fourth Army in Northeastern Brazil between 1961–1962.

After the coup d’état in 1964, which he helped to plan, Costa e Silva served as Castelo Branco’s war minister. However, his inclusion in Castelo Branco’s cabinet should not be seen as a symbol of fraternal affection between the two men. In fact, the two general-presidents were political rivals, and Costa e Silva’s appointment as war minister was offered as a concession to hard-liners in the military.

Despite disputes with Castelo Branco, between the coup d’état and his inauguration in March 1967 Costa e Silva was one of the regime’s most vocal public champions. For his prominent views and distinguished reputation, the general developed a consensus within the military hierarchy that he should become the regime’s second president. Even though an indirect congressional vote circumvented Brazilian civilians’ participation in the electoral process, in the lead-up to the November “election,” Costa e Silva departed on a nationwide campaign to promote his political agenda, present himself as the nation’s soon-to-be president, and maintain the allusion of representative democracy in Brazil. In addition, after the “election” he departed on a lengthy international tour, which stopped exclusively in nations associated with the Western bloc. As a result he was a well-known figure, in Brazil and abroad, prior to assuming the presidency.

Economics

Hoping to distance himself from the unpopularity of Castelo Branco’s austerity measures, Costa e Silva promised to lessen the government’s emphasis on controlling inflation and to prioritize growth. After appointing the up-and-coming São Paulo economist Delfim Neto as finance minister, the administration loosened the credit restrictions that made it so difficult for Brazilian nationals to conduct business under Castelo Branco. Further endearing themselves to the national and international business elite, Costa e Silva and Delfim Neto also renewed Castelo Branco’s public and private sector wage controls, which facilitated the continuation of low operating costs and high profit margins for enterprises in Brazil. Over the course of the presidential term, inflation continued to decrease, although less rapidly, and economic growth accelerated by an astonishing 11 percent in 1968.

The new administration placed very little effort into appeasing urban and rural laborers. Even with a stable and expanding economy, workers’ wages remained stagnant and actually diminished when considered alongside the inflation rate. In response to their deteriorating living standards, in 1968, workers in Minas Gerais surpassed the regime’s corporatist labor structure to carry out a wildcat strike that drew attention to declining real wages and demanded higher salaries. Although Costa e Silva granted minor concessions to the striking workers, he took precautions to prepare for any further surprises from organized labor. In future disputes, his administration revealed a willingness to violently suppress workers’ discontent in order to ensure continued productivity.

Increasing Authoritarianism

When the 1967 Constitution institutionalized the executive’s dominance over the legislative and the judiciary, it appeared that the generals had all the power they needed to dictate government policy. However, within a year of Costa e Silva’s inauguration, renewed opposition from student groups, sectors of the Catholic Church, organized labor, and the national congress empowered extremists in the military to demand more methods to punish civilian dissidents and circumvent congressional opponents. Toward the end of 1968, a year when protests reverberated across the globe, the military found its opportunity to clamp down. Congress refused to revoke a member of the opposition’s legislative immunity after he insulted members of the armed forces and, in response, on December 13, 1968, Costa e Silva announced Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5).

AI-5 permitted the military to close Congress, let the president rule by decree, allowed the military to suspend any citizen’s political rights for 10 years, and gave the military the power to dismiss public employees at all government levels, ranging from municipal bureaucrats to judges and university professors. In addition it suspended habeas corpus, permitted trials before military tribunals, and reinstated the death penalty. In the coming months, an additional volley of military decrees further curtailed democratic principles in Brazil. Among other restrictions, the unilateral declarations canceled all scheduled elections and implemented strict censorship over influential cultural mediums ranging from journalism to theater and popular music.

The authoritarian crackdown succeeded in preventing public demonstrations and silenced the congressional opposition, but it also greatly diminished the military regime’s credibility.

Foreign Policy

After Castelo Branco’s intimate relationship with U.S. officials and his vocal support for U.S. policy goals in Latin America, Costa e Silva pursued a more nuanced bond with the United States. Depending on the topic of discussion and the composition of his audience, Costa e Silva praised or criticized the United States and at times managed to subtly merge his diverging narratives about Brazil’s main trading partner and largest aid donor.

On the one hand, to maintain friendly relations between the two countries, the second general-president continued to express admiration for the United States’s successes, communicated Brazil’s ongoing identification with the Western bloc in the Cold War, and made a state visit to the Lyndon Johnson White House.

However, in the aftermath of Castelo Branco’s unpopular austerity measures, because many Brazilians disdained the I.M.F and multi-national corporations, especially those from the United States, Costa e Silva did not want to seem like a Washington crony. To placate military and civilian nationalists in Brazil, Costa e Silva felt obliged to condemn U.S. businesses’ penetration of the Brazilian economy in the three years since the coup d’état and to criticize the United States’s contribution to the maintenance of unequal regional power dynamics. The new U.S. ambassador to Brazil, John W. Tuthill, also enjoyed less access to the Brazilian government and diminished influence over policy. In response, Tuthill drastically reduced the size of his embassy staff to help Costa e Silva counter the perception that the military regime followed Washington’s orders and was an instrument of United States imperialism.

Despite occasional anti-imperialist rhetoric from Costa e Silva and Tuthill’s low-profile conduct, neither Brazil nor the United States undertook serious reforms to alter the “special relationship.” Although President Johnson briefly suspended aid to Brazil after Institutional Act No. 5 closed Brazil’s Congress in December 1968, President Nixon swiftly renewed U.S. loans upon his inauguration in January 1969. In the end, the cooling in Brazil-U.S. relations that occurred during Costa e Silva’s presidency was predominantly superficial. Washington still provided the military government with substantial foreign aid, and U.S. businesses continued to navigate Brazilian industry without interference.

Legacy

Costa e Silva’s association with Institutional Act No. 5 and his administration’s violent suppression of opposition protests have ensured that he is afforded less sympathy than Castelo Branco. Although there is debate among scholars about whether radical sectors of the military forced the general-president into issuing AI-5, in the end, as president, Costa e Silva approved the act and publicly attested to its legitimacy and its necessity.

Whereas the U.S. government and press hesitated to categorize the military-led regime as a dictatorship during Castelo Branco’s presidency, by the time Costa e Silva was replaced as president, a wide range of U.S. government officials questioned the morality of supporting the Brazilian regime, and influential sectors of the U.S. media singled out Brazil as an authoritarian government. Clearly Costa e Silva had failed in his efforts to “humanize” the military regime.

It is possible that Costa e Silva would have used the last two years of his mandate to place an expiration date on AI-5 and promote gradual liberalization, but on August 29, 1969, the stress of the presidency caught up with the general, and he suffered a debilitating stroke. Just like Castelo Branco, Costa e Silva passed away soon after leaving the presidency, making it impossible for him to justify his administration’s repressive actions or to clarify the dynamics of tensions within the military hierarchy that influenced his decisions.

Sources:

  • Moreira Alves, Maria Helena. State and Opposition in Military Brazil.Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1985.
  • Skidmore, Thomas. The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil.New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Costa e Silva | Brazil: Five Centuries of Change (2024)

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