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On September 1, 2013, O Globo, one of Brazil’s largest circulation newspapers, published a now-famous editorial declaring that its April 1964 support for the military coup that would control the country’s political life for twenty years had been “a mistake.” The apology came in reaction to large street demonstrations (now remembered as the “Jornadas de Junio,” or “June Days”), occurring two years into the investigations of the National Truth Commission, mandated by President Dilma Rousseff to uncover gross violations that took place under the Brazilian dictatorship. With the Commission’s findings reverberating through Brazilian political consciousness, demonstrations began to prominently feature the chant “a verdade e dura, a Globo apoiou a ditadura”—“the truth is hard, Globo supported the dictatorship.”
In acknowledging the demonstrations’ slogan, the newspaper explained that its enthusiasm for the collapse of João Goulart’s government had been due to fear that a “labor republic” was being set up in the country. It had found the unprecedented political space conquered by union leaders—the growing organization of workers and large sectors of the population in the cities, along with the impressive mobilization of peasants in rural areas—disturbing and frightening. Explaining the era’s anti-communist rhetoric and middle- and upper-class-conservative hysteria, the editorial admitted that the 1964 coup had been, first and foremost, a seizure of power against workers and their organizations.
The struggle for rights of Brazilian workers, and its fierce public presence since the end of the Second World War, reached its apogee early in the 1960s. While labor unions were the main driving force behind popular organizing in those years, mobilization also took place through community associations and informal spaces, such as local clubs and cultural institutions. In the countryside, the rise of the Peasant Leagues and their demands for a transformative agrarian reform took the country by surprise and put rural workers at the center of the political stage. Among other political forces, labor activists, Catholics, and communists fought and formed alliances within this movement. Strikes, protests, and a distinctly nationalist, reformist discourse carried demands for structural changes and achieved new rights, such as the 13th salary law, which compels employers to pay workers a month’s bonus, and unionization in rural communities, hitherto withheld.
Operation CleanUp
In a climate shaped by the Cold War, African and Asian countries’ decolonization, and the impact of the Cuban Revolution in Latin America, workers’ activism in the 1960s represented, for many, the antechamber to communism. It was no coincidence that the coup and its preparations were backed by the US government. Subject to particular execration was the intertwining of the nation’s labor federation—made up of peasant and labor leaders from Brazil’s national trade union confederation, Comando Geral dos Trabalhadores (General Labor Command)—with the government of Joao Goulart. The public display of this alliance at the Central Station in Rio de Janeiro during the famous rally of March 13, 1964, was the final straw for conservative proponents of military rule. Despite the intense offensive against the government, opinion polls carried out at the time but subsequently hidden demonstrated that the majority of the population supported Jango—as Goulart was popularly known—and his reforms.
The coup put a sudden end to all of this, and it took many union leaders, radicalized and overconfident in their political influence and mobilizing power, by surprise. For the victors, it was essential to destroy the “hydra of communism and workerism.” The so-called “Operation Cleanup” unleashed by the new regime invaded and squandered the unions’ inherited domains. In the first few years after the coup, more than a thousand unions had their leadership removed by the government. The labor movement was a priority target of the first wave of repression immediately following the coup, and union leaders and worker activists across the country were hit particularly hard. Various labor leaders were imprisoned, stripped of their offices, or murdered. Contrary to many subsequent historical accounts, the dictatorship was brutal from day one.
The worlds of labor were the young dictatorship’s central preoccupation. Although the Ministry of Labor was greatly weakened, the military and its allies did not intend to abolish unions, but rather to remove them from any political sphere of influence and make them partners in the construction of an authoritarian model of economic development. The aim was to turn the unions in the cities and in the countryside into workforce training agencies and institutions for health, leisure, and pension schemes.
At first, the generals enjoyed grand support from Catholic conservatives. The North American unions also saw in the coup a unique opportunity to influence their Brazilian counterparts. Through organizations such as the Cultural Institute of Labor (ICT) and the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), US labor offered a range of courses and exchange activities in Brazil. Soon, however, tensions with the military government and with many Brazilian trade unionists dampened American expectations. In any case, several figureheads forcibly appointed by the military coup over the Brazilian labor movement managed to gain some legitimacy and to form political groups that would control the unions for years to come. In trade union jargon, these groups were commonly dubbed “pelegos”—a term in Brazilian Portuguese referring to the blanket that sits between the horse and the saddle, comforting the animal to the masters’ rule.
Employer associations such as the powerful Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (FIESP) celebrated the new era. Businessmen, managers, and supervisors were exasperated by the presence of workers in the public sphere, their increased organizing in the shops, and their growing labor demands. In the period immediately before 1964, they saw the coup as a chance for a “bosses’ restoration.” Beyond the direct repression of union officials and well-known labor leaders, thousands of worker activists, grassroots representatives, or even mere sympathizers of unions and left-wing groups were fired and, thanks to the infamous “blacklists,” experienced extreme difficulties in finding new jobs. The alliance between businessmen and the political police (the infamous Department of Political and Social Order, known by the acronym DOPS) already existed before the coup, but it strengthened and proliferated. An atmosphere of fear and persecution pervaded inside companies. In the countryside, a still-uncalculated number of rural workers were expelled from their communities and many were killed by private militias and henchmen at the service of large landowners.
Burning through a miracle
The new labor policy of the first dictator installed by the coup, General Castelo Branco (1964–1967), consolidated into the Government Economic Action Program . Devised by a coalition of military officials and civilian technocrats, specifically Planning Minister Roberto Campos and Finance Minister Octávio Bulhões, the program’s main objective was to contain the inflationary process and accelerate the rhythm of economic development through the free initiative of the so-called market.1Roberto Campos is the grandfather of Roberto Campos Neto, the president of the Central Bank of Brazil from February 2019 to December 20024. An essential feature of the plan was the control of wages and salaries. It is no coincidence that between 1964 and 1968 the real value of the minimum wage declined by an estimated 30 percent; workers were asked to “sacrifice” for the goal of economic stability.
New laws aimed at wage control, suppressing strikes and protests, and the end of seniority rights provided an institutional framework for the regime’s widely unpopular labor-market policies. This created an economic environment that greatly facilitated layoffs and labor turnover. The phrase “wage squeeze” became common in workers’ conversations and the union leaders who supported the new regime found it difficult to reconcile the opinions of the membership with their support of the government’s labor measurers. Many began to criticize the government. Castello Branco was obliged to reiterate, in vain, that “the Revolution”—the term by which the military and their supporters called the coup—“was not against the workers.”
This growing dissatisfaction, combined with radicalization of sectors of the left and the mass movements unleashed by students in 1968, created a propitious environment for the growth of protests by workers. Social pressure gave way to a smattering of strikes in the countryside and in the city. The strikes by metalworkers in Contagem, Minas Gerais, and sugarcane cutters in the city of Cabo, Pernambuco, surprised and frightened the government, which ended up partially accepting the workers’ demands. Meanwhile, the famous metalworkers’ strike in Osasco, São Paulo, was forcefully repressed as a lesson by example. With the enactment of Institutional Act No. 5, which consolidated the regime’s authoritarian grip over democratic institutions, fear and social control took over Brazilian society once and for all.2 AI-5, the most severe of the 17 institutional acts decreed by the military dictatorship, authorized the removal of elected politicians at all levels of the federation, authorized the president to intervene in state and municipal governments, and suspended citizens’ constitutional rights and guarantees, such as habeas corpus actions. The enactment of AI-5 inaugurated the dictatorship’s phase of greatest repression and made it possible to carry out widespread disappearances, murders, and torture as tools of state political control.
While the year 1968 marked the deepening of the dictatorship and the beginning of its most repressive phase, it was also the moment when the Brazilian economy overcame the crisis of previous years and entered a period of rapid growth, improving the regime’s popularity. Benefiting from a global climate that was very favorable to the flow of international investments and loans, the economic policy—billed as the “Brazilian economic miracle”—brought the country annual growth rates of over 10 percent for four consecutive years.
The country attracted direct investment from multinational companies, particularly in the manufacturing of consumer durables. In fact, in addition to tax incentives and the expansion of business credit, the very repressive climate of the wage squeeze and the containment of social demands was a decisive factor for both national and foreign industrialists, who could profit from the intense exploitation of an abundant, strongly curtailed, and cheap labor force. The “miracle” was also freighted with the dictatorship’s nationalism, which promised to “integrate” the country and thereby transform it into an international power: “Greater Brazil.” Therefore, ample investments in infrastructure, particularly in the areas of transportation, telecommunications and energy, characterized those years.
The miracle didn’t endure for long: 1973 marked a turning point in the regime’s economic policy. The increase in oil prices influenced by the oil-producing countries provoked a crisis of global dimensions. Faced with international instability, the government of Ernesto Geisel, the dictator who took office in March 1974, decided to put its “foot on the gas” of the economy to guarantee growth, popularity, and political power. The Second National Development Plan sought to adjust the national economy to the new moment of the oil crisis, redoubling its wager on industrialization, particularly in the capital goods and energy infrastructure sectors. In a bid to complete the country’s industrialization process, the military dictatorship relied on various mechanisms employed by the state since the 1930s, such as planning, protectionism, and the extensive use of state-owned companies.
This accelerated industrialization, however, was followed by two major afflictions that would mark the Brazilian economy for almost two decades: inflation and foreign debt. These problems came to light when two gigantic international crises reached the country in full: a new oil crisis in 1979 and the crisis of Latin American foreign debt during the early 1980s.3Eds.: The relationship between these crises should be noted: to stem the re-acceleration of world inflation following the Iranian revolution, the Carter administration appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose tight monetary policies dramatically increased the debt burdens of the global South. Ultimately sovereign default in Mexico, and the risk of such default spreading across Latin America, provoked Volcker to ease US monetary policy in late 1982. Occurring during the government of the last dictator, João Batista Figueiredo, these conjoined crises, together with the macroeconomic prescription proposed by the IMF, provoked a brutal economic recession, increasing unemployment, spreading hunger, and finally souring once and for all the popular mood toward the military regime.
“Conservative modernization”
The dictatorship also sought to redefine the agrarian question in Brazil—a fundamental issue over decades of political debate—without altering the structure of land ownership. The regime drove an enormous transformation in the Brazilian rural environment through stimulating the conversion of large estates into companies, the expropriation of small farmers, the migration of farmers, particularly from the south of the country (seen as entrepreneurial and ethnically superior to people of color) and opening new agricultural frontiers in the Central-West and Amazon regions—establishing a relationship between agrarian elites and conservative forces that persists to this day. The expression “conservative modernization” would be consecrated as a synthesis of the dictatorship’s economic policy as a whole.
Despite the repressive environment, the censorship, and the government’s nationalist rhetoric, trade unionists, intellectuals, and sectors of civil society denounced the extreme concentration of income, the intensification of social problems, and inflation as the “miracle’s other side.” Nevertheless, the official propaganda promoted an image of Brazil under the “miracle” as a promising country in which rural migrants, now in the city, worked in construction, in factories, while their wives, as domestic servants in middle-class homes, could acquire “civilized” and “modern” habits. Volkswagen Beetles, refrigerators, and television sets were the hallmarks of that era.
And despite economic growth and some social mobility, the country’s deep social inequalities were felt by millions of workers as a dominant feature of the military regime and a common denominator of identities and demands in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Economic growth augmented the concentration of income, favoring businessmen, an upper middle class of managers, self-employed professionals, and the upper echelons of the state bureaucracy. The policies of the wage squeeze and social control reduced the weight of the wage bill in the national GDP. The dictatorship left a country in which the rich were even richer and the poor even poorer. The growth of inflation after the mid-1970s amplified the feeling of loss and impoverishment.
The dictatorship had both its political and social consequences, from the general’s coup to the tyranny of masters and foremans. Fear became quotidian in the workplace under managerial despotism and super-exploitation; intense rhythms with long working hours and mandatory overtime often posed risks to health and physical integrity. During the 1970s, Brazil became the “world champion of workplace accidents,” as the regime’s disregard for labor rights, naturalized by the managerial classes’ logic of human fungibility, prevailed.
A twofold crisis marked the decade’s end: the deterioration of the military’s economic model—the economic exhaustion of the “miracle”—coincided with growing political frustration at the dictatorship’s tenuous hold on legitimacy. Proposing a slow and gradual loosening of the regime, the military in the second half of the 1970s confronted the mobilization of numerous sectors of society demanding the dissolution of its power and a return to democracy.
The dictatorship and a “new” working class
The 1970s also marked a profound metamorphosis in the composition and self-conception of workers. A broader and even more multilayered and diverse working class emerged in Brazil during those years. The economic and social transformations that had taken place over the previous decades and the diverse political and cultural traditions present in the workers’ movement reconfigured the processes of class and identity formation. The strikes at the end of the decade and their political mobilization as part of the struggle against the military dictatorship gave visibility and self-recognition to this “new” working class, a phenomenon that cut across the country’s geography and its various categories of employment.
It was, above all, a working class characterized by an intense process of urbanization and internal migration. At some point in the 1960s, a majority of the country’s population had transitioned into city living; by 1980 this had grown to 68 percent of Brazilians. The peripheries of the capital cities and their surrounding towns, what we now call metropolitan regions, became the “typical” places of living for millions of workers. The favelas—an even older phenomenon and also stigmatized by precariousness, racialization, and the self-built character of its housing—were further impacted by these waves of internal migration.
So-called “urban blight” was a central part of life for millions of workers. But these peripheries and favelas, in their sociability, represented a fundamental process of identity reformation through cultural exchange as housing and work experiences increasingly constituted a shared realm of struggles for rights and recognition. The repertoire of working-class collective action was developed in the urban peripheries and among the favelas, and as wellsprings of intense associative life they would have a profound impact on the country’s public sphere during the redemocratization and its subsequent decades.
Internal migration shaped the working class forged in those years. Between 1950 and 1980, an estimate of nearly 40 million Brazilians had some kind of migratory experience. The states of the Northeast—Alagoas, Bahia, Ceará, Maranhão, Paraíba, Piauí, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte, and Sergipe—and Minas Gerais are popularly known as the areas where most of these rural migrants left, arriving particularly in metropolitan areas around major cities of the Southeast.
This was a young country with a young working class. Although birth rates were beginning to decline rapidly, the average age of Brazilians in 1980 was still around twenty. That year, around 70 percent of the population over the age of fifteen had not finished elementary school and had precociously entered into the workforce. It was also a work environment with a relatively greater female participation in formal employment. Women’s participation in the Economically Active Population (EAP) in Brazil jumped from 21 percent in 1970 to almost 28 percent in 1980. Pressured by family budget constraints and changes in a competitive labor market, these young women were working in low-paid jobs with little prospect of promotion, and they were often considered underqualified. Employers fired them more frequently, and used marriage and motherhood to hamper their ability to find and hold on to employment. In 1973, the average salary for women was 60 percent lower than for men.
Despite women’s subordinate status, their presence in the labor market had an impact on gender relations and challenged traditional views of their place in society. Women’s growing economic emancipation played a central role in the transformation of family models and in public life more generally. It is not possible to understand either the women’s movements and the wave of feminism during the late 1970s or the general emergence of social movements during redemocratization without grasping the role of these workers.
The decade of the 1970s consolidated a complex and diversified structure in the Brazilian labor market. The regime’s developmentalist policies propelled manufacturing, energy, and construction as leading industries in the national economy. Occupations and professions in these areas, as well as the expansion of the civil service in general, grew and came to play a particularly prominent role in the labor market—especially metalworkers, construction workers, energy workers, and transport workers. By the end of the 1970s, the quest for dignity, respect, and autonomy had spread across thousands of workplaces in Brazil, uniting millions of workers who felt humiliated, oppressed, and exploited. When the first factories and plants initiated strikes, many more perceived that it was possible and worthwhile to struggle, protest, and demand a different life.
In the second half of the 1970s, though curtailed by dictatorial repression, a wave of organizing took hold of working-class neighborhoods in Brazil. Neighborhood Friends Societies, Residents’ Associations, mothers’ clubs, mutual aid collectives, groups calling for healthcare, education, and public transport, among many other organizations, made up a mosaic of popular associations that proliferated throughout the country. Fragmented, geographically dispersed, and carrying out everyday, small-scale resistance practices, these associations were, incrementally, creating mechanisms for self-recognition, collecting common experiences and constructing a collective identity. During redemocratization, this self-proclaimed “popular movement” began to operate more broadly, occupying public space with protests, demonstrations, and marches. The movement found expression through alliances with opposition leaders in the political world, while at the same time drawing the attention of the authorities at local level.
The progressive wing of the Catholic Church played a key role in this process. Present in Brazilian political life since before the 1964 coup, the Catholic left became hegemonic within the Church between the late 1960s and early 1970s, proving to be a central actor both in opposition to the military regime and in reshaping the role of the working class in the public sphere throughout redemocratization. As an international phenomenon, particularly in Latin America, “Liberation Theology” brought together a set of practices and theories that would represent a leftward turn of the Church and a commitment to social emancipation. Grassroots ecclesial communities (CEBs), along with more specific pastoral work (workers’, land, indigenous, etc.) came to be the phenomena that best represented the action of the progressive Catholic Church in those years.
However, this associative effervescence should not be exaggerated. Notwithstanding the informal nature of the public’s relationship with social movements and the lack of data on the various ways in which people organized into associations, it was a minority of the population that was actually organized. The old hierarchies of social domination were still very strong, and questions such as public safety tended to spark conservative and authoritarian reactions, including in the peripheries and favelas—such themes would be increasingly exploited by the political right in the coming years. Nevertheless, there was a clear qualitative leap in popular participation, in the politicization of the working class, and in the building of a collective vision “of the right to have rights”—a slogan during the heyday of democratization organizing.
Unionism and redemocratization
At the end of the 1970s, the social movement in Brazil that best catalyzed popular dissatisfaction, and demands against the government, while at the same time establishing a collective identity and a common language, was labor unionism. The widespread and massive strikes of the period were the repertoire of collective action that best brought visibility to the presence of workers in public life and in the political struggles for the country’s redemocratization.
The metalworkers of Sao Paulo’s ABC region—named for the cities of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano do Sul to the south of Sao Paulo proper—were central protagonists in this movement. Since the late 1950s, a series of industrial parks had been established in this region around the manufacture of automobiles that, for many, was the symbol of Brazilian capitalist modernity. It was there that successive strikes in 1978, 1979, and 1980 had a major impact on social struggles and the process of redemocratization.
Despite employer pressure and police repression, these strikes were massive. Under dictatorial rule, it was impressive to see thousands and thousands of workers, ordinary blue-collar workers, fighting for their rights to strike and for higher incomes in defiance of the military and the powerful multinational corporations that owned and managed the region’s factories. Images of the packed assemblies at the Vila Euclides Stadium, led by the union’s leader Lula da Silva, a charismatic and emerging popular union figure, were broadcast nationwide by newspapers and television channels that had just been freed from various government censorship constraints.
Yet the workers’ protest movements were far from being limited to the ABC metalworkers. The ABC strike and the Vila Euclides images propelled one of the most impressive strike waves in Brazilian history. In addition to industries with older union traditions, such as manufacturing, transport, and oil workers, workers in agriculture, commercial banking (tellers), civil servants, teachers, among others, struck in millions to paralyze the country, despite pressure and attempts by the military government to control them. In 1979 alone, more than 3 million workers stopped their activities at some point as part of 246 strikes that swept the country from north to south, in the cities and in the countryside.
Even with the economic recession and a reduction in strikes, the early 1980s were an intense time for trade unionism and social movements in general. It was a time of reorganization and institutionalization. The public upsurge in social struggles at the end of the 1970s had mobilized millions of people and thousands of new militants had sprung up. Opposition to the regime politicized many of those social movements in an unprecedented way while party reorganization and the end of the dictatorship opened up space for new political arrangements and alliances, which differed greatly both locally and regionally.
In its twilight, the dictatorship was challenged by a wide and diverse range of social and political movements. The opposition to the regime was multi-class, but its most fierce and combative sectors identified themselves as members of the working class and called not just for a formal rule of law, but for a “true democracy” that recognized the dignity of work and human rights, that fought social inequalities and built a fair and democratic country.
The different opposition strategies and voices converged into a broad movement between the end of 1983 and 1984. Twenty years after having imposed its rule by force, the military regime was facing gigantic political demonstrations in which millions of Brazilians across the country were demanding the return of democracy. Popular social movements and trade unions played an active and fundamental role in mobilizing the masses during the “Diretas Já” campaign—“Direct Elections Now”—that peaked in these years, demanding direct election of the presidency. But, just like the campaign, they were defeated in this goal. Split along different lines between the majority sectors of the opposition and those of the dictatorial regime, the movement for direct elections failed in 1984 and the Brazilian electoral college became the passageway to the transition from dictatorship to democracy, bringing the Tancredo Neves and José Sarney ticket to office.
The impact of organized workers and social movements in the public arena, however, was still far from exhausted. Although many analysts, political scientists, and historians of redemocratization tend to neglect their role, reinforcing an elitist perspective that the political transition was fundamentally conducted inside military barracks and offices, it is impossible to understand the country’s history over the last forty years without acknowledging the place of the working class, its organizations, leaders, and struggles in those years.
This article was translated from Portuguese to English by Marina Vello and Andrew Elrod.
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