| Leonel Brizola | |
|---|---|
| 23rd Mayor of Porto Alegre | |
| In office January 1, 1956 – December 29, 1958 |
|
| Preceded by | Martin Aranha |
| Succeeded by | Tristão Sucupira Viana |
| 23rd Governor of Rio Grande do Sul | |
| In office March 25, 1959 – March 25, 1963 |
|
| Preceded by | Ildo Meneghetti |
| Succeeded by | Ildo Meneghetti |
| 53rd Governor of Rio de Janeiro | |
| In office March 15, 1983 – March 15, 1987 |
|
| Preceded by | Chagas Freitas |
| Succeeded by | Moreira Franco |
| 55th Governor of Rio de Janeiro | |
| In office March 15, 1991 – April 2, 1994 |
|
| Preceded by | Moreira Franco |
| Succeeded by | Nilo Batista |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Leonel de Moura Brizola January 22, 1922 Carazinho, Rio Grande do Sul |
| Died | June 21, 2004 (aged 82) Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro |
| Political party | Democratic Labour Party |
| Other political affiliations |
Brazilian Labour Party |
| Spouse(s) | Neusa Goulart Brizola |
| Relations | João Goulart (brother-in-law) |
| Children | Neusinha, José Vicente, and João Otávio |
| Profession | Civil engineer |
Leonel de Moura Brizola (January 22, 1922 – June 21, 2004) was a Brazilian politician. Launched in politics by Getúlio Vargas, Brizola was the only politician to serve as governor of two different states in the whole history of Brazil. In 1959 he was elected governor of Rio Grande do Sul, and in 1982 and 1990 he was elected governor of Rio de Janeiro. He was also vice-president of the Socialist International, as well as Honorary President of that organization for a few months, from October 2003 until his death. Brizola and his party (Democratic Labour Party) preached and practiced a kind of social democratic left-wing[1] policy.
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The son of a small farmer who was killed when fighting as a volunteer in the 1923 local civil war for the rebel leader Assis Brasil against Rio Grande's dictator Borges de Medeiros, Brizola was christened Itagiba, but early in life adopted the alias of Leonel, for the rebel warlord Leonel Rocha, known as "The Muleteer of Freedom". He left his mother's house at eleven, working in Porto Alegre as a paperboy, shoeshiner and other occasional jobs until completing high school and entering college, where he graduated in engineering, a trade in which he never worked, as he entered professional politics in his early twenties, being elected to the Rio Grande State Assembly in 1946.[2] By his marriage to Neusa Goulart, João Goulart's sister, in which he had former President Getúlio Vargas as best man, Brizola became not only a wealthy landowner but also a regional leadership of the Brazilian Labour Party (Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro or PTB). After Vargas's death, he inherited the undisputed regional leadership of his party, while his brother-in-law ruled the PTB national caucus.[3] Both perpetuated Vargas' populist tradition, specially, in Brizola's case, the practice of a direct personal link between charismatic leader and the broad masses. During the presidency of Goulart (1961–1964) Brizola was an important supporter of his brother-in-law, first as governor and later as a deputy in the National Congress of Brazil.
As governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Brizola raised himself to preeminence for his social policies, expressed in the speedy building of public schools in poor neighbourhoods across the state (brizoletas)[4] as well as for his nationalist policies, specially his nationalization of American public utilities trusts' assets in the state, such as ITT and Electric Bond & Share.[5] He gained nationwide visibility mostly by acting in defense of democracy and Goulart's rights as president. When Jânio Quadros resigned from the presidency in August 1961, the Brazilian military ministers in the Cabinet attempted to prevent Vice-President Goulart from becoming president for his allegedly ties with the Communist movement.[6] After winning support from the local army commander, General Machado Lopes, Brizola forged a pool of radio stations in Rio Grande do Sul, the so-called "cadeia da legalidade" (legality chain), issuing a nationwide call from Palácio Piratini denouncing the intentions behind the Cabinet ministers' actions and conclaimimg common citizens to go into the streets protesting. Also, Brizola toyed with handing out firearms to civilians, surrendered the State Police Force to the regional army command and began organizing paramilitary Committees of Democratic Resistance.[7] After twelve days of impending civil war, the attempted coup failed, and Goulart was inaugurated as president.[8]
Brizola, however, had developed presidential aspirations of his own, which he could not legally fulfill, as Brazilian law didn't allow close relatives of the acting President to present themselves as candidates for the following term of office; therefore, between 1961 and 1964, Brizola acted as the radical wing of the independent left, pressuring for an agenda of radical social and political reforms in general as well as for a specific change in the electoral legislation that allowed for his presidential candidacy in 1965. Seem as personally authoritarian and quarrelsome, and not above dealing with his enemies by means of physical aggression - as in a famous case when he hit the maverick rightwing journalist David Nasser in public at the middle of the Rio de janeiro airport[9] - Brizola acted in the political game around the Goulart government - specially after his landslide 1962 election to Congress as a representative for the State of Guanabara - as a freebooter, being feared and hated by both the moderate Left and the Right.
In early 1963, Brizola took control of a radio broadcast, Rádio Mayrink Veiga, which he used as a means to propagate his fiery rhetorics, at the same time toying with constituting a grassroots network of political cells composed of small groups of armed men, the so-called "elevensome" (Grupos de Onze - paramilitary parties modelled on a soccer team).[10] In a classification developed by Goulart's Foreign Minister and leader of the moderate left, Santiago Dantas, Brizola was the epitome of the "negative left"[11] - a definition somewhat obscure, given the notorious absence, in Brizola's case, of clear ideological commitments. Generally, he stood for an extreme Left Nationalism (land reform, extension of the franchise for illiterates and NCOs)and for tight controls over foreign investment, something that earned him the hatred of the American ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, who went so far as to compare Brizola's propaganda techniques with those of Joseph Goebbels[12] - a mood partaken by most of contemporary American midia[13] In late 1963, after a conservative plan of economic adjustment (Plano Trienal) devised by the Ministry of Planning Celso Furtado had failed, Brizola involved himself in a bid for power by means of an attempt to topple Goulart's economically conservative Minister of Finance Carvalho Pinto in order to take the post himself, an attempt that failed—the post was given to a nonentity—but made much to radicalize Brazilian political life at the time.[14]
In April 1964, when a coup d'état successfully overthrew Goulart, Brizola one of the few political leaders to offer active support for the president, sheltering him in Porto Alegre, capital of Rio Grande do Sul with the hope that democracy would be restored. (Governor Miguel Arraes of Pernambuco also supported Goulart, but Arraes was detained as soon as the coup was declared.) Because of his connection with Goulart, the military regime exiled Brizola in 1964; he went to Uruguay, where Goulart had gone into exile earlier that year.
Excepted for a botched attempt by his sympathizers at the articulation of a theater for guerrila warfare in the mountains of Caparaó, which was suppressed without a single fire being shot and raised suspicions about his mismanaging of funds offered him by Fidel Castro[15] - Brizola spent the first ten-odd years of the Brazilian military dictatorship generally left on his own in Uruguay, where he managed his wife's landed property and kept aloof from various opposition movements in Brazil. In the late 1970s, however, the emergence of a military dictatorship in Uruguay itself allowed the Brazilian government to pressure the authorities of Uruguay to seize Brizola, into the framework of Operation Condor, the cooperation between Latin American dictatorships for hounding leftist opponents. Brizola may have owned his physical survival to the efforts of the Jimmy Carter administration to curb Human Right abuses in Latin America,[16] as in 1977 he was deported from Uruguay for alleged "violations of norms of political asylum", and was given immediate asylum in the United States.[17]
According to recent declassified Brazilian diplomatic documents, on the 20th. of September 1977, Brizola and his wife went to Buenos Aires - from whence they would take a plane to the USA, and at the time a very dangerous place for Latin American exiles - followed by American CIA agents, staying overnight in a CIA safe house at the Argentinian capital, from where they boarded a nonstop flight to New York on September 22.[18] Afterwards, Brizola moved from the USA to live in Portugal.
In the late 1970s the Brazilian military dictatorship was in the wane; in 1978, as passports were quietly being given to prominent political exiles, however, Brizola remained blacklisted, alongside with a core group of supposedly "radicals" as "public enemy number one", and was refused the right of return.[19] It was only in 1979, after a general amnesty, that his exile came to an end.
Brizola returned to Brazil with the avowed intention of restoring the Brazilian Labour Party as a radical nationalist Left mass movement and as a confederacy of historical Vargoist bigwigs. However he was hampered in that by the emergence of news grassroots movements such as the new trade unionism centered around the São Paulo metalworkers and their leader Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, as well as the Catholic grassroots organizations of the rural poor spawned by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, CNBB. Eventually, he was denied the right to use the historical name of the Brazilian Labour Party, previously conceded to a rival group centered around a military dictatorship-friendly figure, the Congresswoman Ivete Vargas, Getúlio Vargas' grandniece.[20] Instead, Brizola had to found an entirely new party, the Democratic Labour Party (Partido Democrático Trabalhista, PDT).[21] The party joined the Socialist International in 1986, and since then the party symbol contains a hand with a red flower (symbol of SI).
Brizola quickly restored his position of political prominence in his home state of Rio Grande do Sul, at the same time acquiring political preeminence in the State of Rio de Janeiro, where, en lieu of associating with official trade unionism, he searched a basis of support among the unorganized urban poor, by means of an ideological tie-in between traditional radical nationalism and a charismatic lumpen-friendly populism, in what a scholar called "the aesthetics of the ugly"[22]: for his accusers, Brizola and his Brizolismo stood for shady deals with the dangerous classes; for its supporters, they stood for the empowerment (although in a paternalistic fashion) of the destitute, the lowest, least organized and poorest layers of the working classes ("Politics, from a Brizolista viewpoint, is above all to assume a radical option for the poor and the meek"[23]). In short, the late Brizola shunned the class-based, corporatist character of his early populism, adopting instead a Christian rhetorics of friendship to the "people" in general, more akin to the Russian narodniks[24] than to classical Latin American populism.[25] Such radical populism, however, required the charismatic and highly personal leadership of Brizola's in order to function effectively; in his absence - or without the presence, at least, of his persona[26] - the PDT could never become a contender to power, something that hampered its development on the national level.
In 1982, Brizola entered the race for governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro, in the first free and direct gubernatorial elections in that state since 1965. He ran a ticket of candidates for Congress that tried to compensate his party's lack of cadres by offering a rooster of people with no previous ties to professional politics, such as the Native Brazilian leader Mário Juruna and the singer Agnaldo Timóteo. At the same time, he centered his personal campaign on burning issues such as education and public security, offering a candidacy that had clear oppositional overtones and proposed to upheld the Vargoist legacy. By developing a nucleus of combative militants around himself - the so-called Brizolândia - Brizola led a campaign that melded violent confrontations and street brawls with a paradoxically festive mood.[27] Brizola kept and expanded his nationwide political visibility during his controversial first term (1983–1987) as governor of Rio, during which he developed his early education policies in a grander scale, by means of an ambitious programme of construction of huge fundamental and high school buildings, the so-called CIEPs(" Integrated Centers for Public Education") whose architectural project had been made by Oscar Niemeyer and were supposed to function on a day long base, providing for feeding as well as for recreational activities to students. At the same time, he developed policies for providing public services and recognized housing property for dwellers in shantytowns. In a nutshell, Brizola opposed policies for shantytowns based on forcible resettlement to housing projects, proposing instead, in the words of his chief adviser Darcy Ribeiro,that "slums are not part of the problem, but part of the solution" - once property rights were acknowledged and basic infrastructure provided, it was up to the shantytown dwellers themselves to find their own solutions as far as house-building was concerned.[28]
Also, Brizola adopted a radically new policy for police action in the poor suburbs and slums (favelas) within the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area. Alleging old relations and modus operandi were founded on repression, conflict and disrespect, he ordered the state police to be refrain from random criminal-searching raids at favelas and also repressed the activities of vigilante death squads, which included policemen on leave.[29] These policies were opposed by the Right, who contended that it made slums an open territory for organized crime, represented by huge gangs like Comando Vermelho (Red Command), by means of a conflation between common criminality and leftism: it was alleged that gangs had been born through the association of common convicted prisoners and leftist political prisoners in the 1970s.
Brizola's policies, which included a no small amount of porkbarrel[30] poor management and wild spending of public funds, nevertheless procured for him the political clout required for running for president in 1989.
It was during the 1989 election that Brizola's charismatic leadership would expose its shortcomings, as he finished the first run third, losing the second position, which would have qualified him for a runoff, by a very narrow margin to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose Workers' Party had exactly the cadres, the professional activism and the deep penetration in the organized social movements that Brizola's lacked. Eventually, Fernando Collor de Mello was elected in the runoff. Brizola carried the elections regionally, winning huge majorities in both his home state of Rio Grande do Sul and in his adopted home state of Rio de Janeiro, but never got more than 2% of the votes from São Paulo state.
Brizola, however, was a staunch supporter of Lula's candidacy in the 1989 run-off elections, something he justified by an humorous declaration before PDT cronies the was to remain to this day in Brazilian political lore: "I will be candid: a politician from the old school, Senator Pinheiro Machado, once said that politics is the art of swallowing toads (engolir sapo). Wouldn't that be fascinating to forcefeed Brazilian élites and having them to swallow the Bearded Toad, Lula?"[31]
After the 1989 election, there were still chances that Brizola could achieve his dream of winning the Presidency if only he could overcome his party's absence of national penetration. Therefore, some of his advisers proposed him a candidacy to the Senate in the ensuing 1990 elections, something that could offer him national highlights. Brizola, however, refused, preferring to present himself as a candidate to the gubernatorial elections in the same year, winning a second term as Governor of Rio de Janeiro by a first-round majority of 60.88% of all valid ballots.[32] The second term of Brizola as Rio's governor was a political failure, whose hallmark were the various instances of disorganized management caused by Brizola's ultra centralism and distaste for proper bureaucratic procedure, being further marred by the support eventually offered by Brizola to the Collor administration in exchange for funds for public works, something that made Brizola to be charged with collaborating with the embezzlement schemes that would lead to Collor's 1992 impeachment.[33]
Clearly emptied of national support and forsaken by close associates such as Cesar Maia and Anthony Garotinho, who decided to abandon Brizola's ship for the sake of their personal careers, Brizola nevertheless ran again for president on the PDT's ticket, amid the success of Minister of Finance and presidential candidate Fernando Henrique Cardoso's anti-inflation Plano Real. The 1994 presidential elections were a huge failure for Brizola, who scored a poor fifth place on an election in which Cardoso was elected in the first round by an absolute majority.[34] It was the end of Brizolismo as a national political force, as expressed by the fact that, some weeks before actual elections, the kiosk in downtown Rio de Janeiro, around which Brizolandia cronies met, was torn down by City Hall officers, never to be rebuilt.[35] Four years later, Brizola contented himself with a Vice Presidential candidacy on Lula's ticket: both lost to Cardoso.
In his latest years, however, Brizola took still another shift in his jagged relationship with Lula and the Workers' Party, refusing to support them in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, supporting instead the candidacy of Ciro Gomes for president, while personally entering the race for a seat in the Senate. Gomes finished third, while Lula was elected president and Brizola lost his bid for the Senate, in what was his end even as a regional force. The PDT had a weak showing against new parties in Brazil's political scene, so Brizola became a secondary figure in his last two years. Despite supporting Lula at some periods during his career, Brizola's last public acts were criticizing Lula for what he termed neoliberalist policies and for neglecting traditional left-wing and workers' struggles.
Brizola died in 2004, after a heart attack.
| Preceded by Martin Aranha |
Mayor of Porto Alegre 1956 – 1958 |
Succeeded by Tristão Sucupira Viana |
| Preceded by Ildo Meneghetti |
Governor of Rio Grande do Sul 1959 – 1963 |
Succeeded by Ildo Meneghetti |
| Preceded by Chagas Freitas |
Governor of Rio de Janeiro 1983-1987 |
Succeeded by Moreira Franco |
| Preceded by Moreira Franco |
Governor of Rio de Janeiro 1991 – 1994 |
Succeeded by Nilo Batista |
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