In the early 1960s, the traditional political elite was anchored in and dominated the state. It commanded the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of federal, state, and local governments, ...as well as the state militias. In 1964 when it perceived a threat to its hegemony, it conspired with military and other civilian elites to overthrow the constitutional regime and safeguard oligarchical privilege. While politicians in the UDN, the party of the “outs,” hoped to gain more from the military coup than did their rivals in the PSD, the traditional political elite as a whole fully expected to share power with the military. Members of the elite anticipated that a caretaker military government would demobilize autonomous mass movements, purge Communists and other political undesirables from government and the arena of formal politics, and then promptly restore to them the reins of state.The military did, as the traditional elite hoped, swiftly and decisively dismantle the populist coalition that had supported the deposed President Goulart. But instead of restoring power to Goulart's civilian rivals in the parties of the oligarchy, it excluded them from power. The military reserved governing power for itself, balked at adhering to a timetable for new presidential elections, and began an assault on the practice of politics within the state. The new rulers centralized economic policy making in the national ministries, strengthened the executive in firm military hands, and purged key federal state posts of traditional as well as populist politicians and replaced these with uniformed military officers and civilian economists, engineers, educators, and professional administrators – the core of a new technocratic elite. Slowly, the shape of a bureaucratic-authoritarian state took form.
Preface Hagopian, Frances
Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil,
03/1996
Book Chapter
Fifteen years after it had been established in 1964, most observers believed that the Brazilian “bureaucratic-authoritarian” regime had marginalized economic and political elites. Indeed, in a survey ...of the literature as of 1979 on post-1964 Brazil, I detected not one mention of the survival of the country's “traditional elites.” Accordingly, when I embarked on this study, I had no reason to doubt that they had fallen; I wondered only if and how they might have protested their fate, and if their presumed opposition, perhaps in alliance with other subaltern forces, to military-technocratic rule may have been consequential for regime instability. I was naturally disconcerted, then, in an interview for a Social Science Research Council dissertation fellowship, when one of the members of the screening committee, a historian familiar with the Brazilian hinterlands, badgered me to defend the usefulness of a study that was bound to uncover what everyone already knew – that traditional elites persisted throughout Brazil.In struggling to reconcile these two pictures – one of a major, if temporary, revolution at the highest echelons of the national Brazilian state, and one of remarkable continuity at lower levels of the political system – this study became a book about regime change as well as a book about Brazilian politics. More accurately, this book is about two regime changes – one to and one from authoritarian rule. It does not seek to cover old ground on the causes of the breakdown of democracy and transition from authoritarian rule, but rather to explain what regime change ultimately meant for broader political change.
From 1964 to 1985 Brazil, Latin America's largest and most industrialized country, was governed by a military dictatorship, which on the surface was unlike its predecessors and was soon to become the ...model for other authoritarian regimes on the continent. Like other military governments before it, it deposed an elected president, repressed labor unions in order to carry out an austerity program, and imposed a moratorium on politics. Within a few brief years of coming to power, however, it shunned former allies and enlisted the support of new ones in the international arena to impose its own vision of radical economic and institutional change on the nation. If the military copied parts of its design for a new institutional configuration from the tapestry of earlier Brazilian history, its blueprint unambiguously looked to the future, not the past. In order to accomplish a sophisticated set of economic and security objectives, the new governors set out to demobilize and depoliticize society. In the name of national security, they did not hesitate to torture their enemies, real and imagined, who did or merely appeared to harbor “Communist” sympathies or oppose military rule. This military dictatorship was South America's first “bureaucratic authoritarian” regime.The Brazilian “Revolution” of 1964, as the military called its coup d'etat, had two broad goals: to foster economic development and to recast politics. In the economic realm, Brazil's new military governors initially sought to control inflation and attract foreign investment. In the longer term, predominant factions within the military that envisaged Brazil as a future great power wished to harness the resources of the state to sustain a massive development project.
The first republic of Brazil was an archetypal oligarchical republic fashioned by regional elites to preserve their dominance within their respective states. The Old Republic (1889–1930), as it was ...known, restricted real political participation to a bare fraction of the population. Among participant groups, elites of smaller states were as helpless as the urban middle classes of the larger ones to challenge successfully the hegemony of the oligarchies of the strong states. These elites who were “coffee barons” or represented coffee interests used their political success to make coffee the nation's leading source of foreign exchange and wealth and thus to enrich themselves. The pattern of traditional, authoritarian politics practiced by these noncompetitive, regional oligarchies was underwritten by electoral fraud and the dependence of local governments on the state and, at the local level, by a grossly unequal distribution of land and the use of public and private force.After four decades, the “oligarchical republic” ruptured from within amid discontent in military circles and a crisis in the coffee economy. The “Revolution” that deposed the Paulista president and delivered power to Getúlio Vargas of Rio Grande do Sul strengthened the central state and expanded the scope of its activities; set in motion the processes of economic moderation and the incorporation of new, especially urban, classes and sectors into the political system; and effectively ended the oligarchy's monopoly over the state and politics.
A cornerstone of the military's economic project was to gain control of the levers of the economy through fiscal centralization. Traditionally in Brazilian politics, fiscal federalism had enabled the ...administration of public programs to become entangled with party politics in a clientelistic political order that blurred the divisions between public resources and private power. By transferring control of fiscal resources from the states to the federal government, the military hoped both to ensure financial stability and to remove the blight of political clientelism from state administration. In that the fiscal dependence of impoverished municipalities had left local elites, and their subjects, in a position of political subservience to whoever controlled the public purse, the military project also entailed shifting the focal point of municipal dependence from the states to the union and, ultimately, weakening the regional oligarchies.Clientelism soon proved to be less retractable than the military had anticipated, however, and eliminating it was no more politically feasible than dispensing with traditional political elites. The measures introduced by the authoritarian regime to centralize finance – primarily centralizing tax collection and pegging transfers to federal guidelines – did not complete the anticipated fiscal centralization, and as such were grossly inadequate measures to defeat clientelism. They did not transfer control over patronage from regional traditional political elites to the federal government and technocratic policy makers. Even during the period of strained relations between traditional political elites and military reformers, the Minas state oligarchy was capable, through state, transferred, and borrowed resources, of sustaining its patronage operations.
