Leonel Brizola

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Leonel de Moura Brizola (22 January 1922-June 2004) was a Brazilian politician.

Born in politics by Getlio Vargas, Brizola was the only politician to serve as the prime minister of two Brazilian states until and after the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.

He was elected governor of Rio Grande do Sul in 1958, and in 1982 and 1990, he was elected governor of Rio de Janeiro.

He served as Honorary President of the Socialist International from October 2003 to his death in June 2004.

Brizola, one of the few Brazilian major political figures to survive the dictation's 20-year ban on his political work, was a non-Marxist Left nationalist who had successfully reframed his political platform to cope with a post-Cold War environment.

The Democratic Labour Party, his twenties, practiced a style of populism based on a model of nationalism derived from earlier Varguism, a militant social democratic mass movement in the United States.

(1922–1964) b.a. youth and ascension to prominence (1922–1964)

José Brizola, the father of Brizola's small-scale farmer who was killed while serving as a volunteer in 1923 in a local civil war against Rio Grande's dictator Borges de Medeiros. Brizola was named Itagiba, but Leonel alias Leonel, which he took from rebel warlord Leonel Rocha who had commanded the cavalry column in which José Brizola had served, was adopted early in life. Brizola left his mother's house at the age of eleven; he worked in Passo Fundo and Carazinho as a newspaper printer, shoeshiner, and other odd jobs. He was aided by a Methodist minister's family to complete high school in Porto Alegre and enroll in college. He obtained a degree in engineering but never worked in that field. He began working in academia in his early twenties, joining the Brazilian Labor Party's youth team (Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB) in 1945. He was elected to the Rio Grande State Legislature in 1946 as an undergraduate. The Labor Party had been established in order to provide political assistance for former President/dictator Getlio Vargas of Rio Grande's staff and his sister Espartaco, as well as Vargas' brother Espartaco, who was in exile after being deposed from office in late 1945. Brizola, a member of the state Legislature, made a televised speech from the tribune, in which he launched Vargas' candidacy nationally to the forthcoming 1950 presidential election.

Brizola married Neusa Goulart, Jo Goulart's sister, in 1950 and Vargas as his best man. Brizola rose from humble landowner to PTB regional leader through this marriage. Brizola inherited the PTB's national caucus following Vargas' death in 1954 during his second presidential term. Both Vargas' populist tradition was perpetuated; in Brizola's case, the use of a personal association between the charismatic leader and the general public was a common feature. Brizola served in a short time as both a member of the Rio Grande State Legislature and as the PTB's representative (and as the PTB's top brassman for the Rio Grande). In 1958, he would resign from his mayoralty in order to campaign as a candidate in the state governor's election. Brizola would then rise during Goulart's presidency (1961–1964) to his position as governor and then deputy in Brazil's National Congress.

Brizola, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul (1959-63), came to fame for his social policies, which included the rapid construction of public schools in impoverished communities around the state (brizoletas). He approved legislation aimed at strengthening the lives of small-scale, autonomous farmers, and landless rural workers, as well as the funding of the company MASTER (Rio Grande Landless Rural Workers Movement).

Brizola gained national attention when standing in defense of democracy and Goulart's right as president. When Jânio Quadros resigned from office in August 1961, the Brazilian military ministers in the cabinet threatened to discourage Vice President Goulart from becoming president on the grounds of his suspected links with the Communist Party. Brizola forged the cadeia da legalidade (legality broadcast) from a national radio station in Rio Grande do Sul, which launched a national call from Palácio Piratini condemning the Cabinet ministers' activities and urging common citizens to protest in the streets, after winning admiral from local army commander General Machado Lopes. Brizola surrendered the State Police Force to the regional army command, established paramilitary Committees of Democratic Resistance, and considered handing over weapons to civilians. The attempted coup attempt failed, and Goulart was inaugurated as president after twelve days of raging civil war.

Brizola's international recognition for his nationalist policies, including the establishment of state-owned industrial utilities (Amfort for short), led to nationalization of American public utilities trusts in Rio Grande, which was owned by the holding Electric Bond and Share Company, which is owned by the controlling Electric Bond and Share Company.

Many scholars believed that nationalizations would announce socialist policies at the time as well as later. However, Brizola's justification for the nationalization was almost an expropriation as the compensation was based on a single monetary unit, pending a Brazilian court's decision that the services were distributed in a short period of industrialization." Brizola had invited ITT to participate in a new mixed, state-private ownership telephone company, which would be funded by the selling of new shares to the State of Rio Grande as well as to the general public - in this new venture, ITT will remain with a 25 percent stake. This plan, according to Leacock, was unlikely because ITT CEOs didn't want to be involved in a joint venture they did not understand. A later American scholar who finds that Brizola's government, although "marred" by these "controversial" nationalizations, was nevertheless "vigorous and beneficial." According to another American scholar, the same rightist military government that would later exile Brizola found it necessary to nationalize the entire Brazilian telecommunications system in order to establish necessary infrastructure.

Amforp was much more accommodating than the two main American contractors involved in Brizola's nationalization; it had been operating in Brazil at a loss and was secure in securing an agreement with the Federal government; i.e. Goulart is the Portuguese company that shuts down its Brazilian operations. ITT had been running at a loss, but the fact that it had already been taken by surprise by Fidel Castro's expropriation of its Cuban operations as a factor that might have a ripple throughout Latin America's whole operation.

When the John F. Kennedy administration was attempting to combat "Communist infiltration" in Brazil by inking a deal with Goulart that included US federal assistance to Brazil, the Brizola nationalizations became national news in the American media. Brizola's conduct in this sense turned Brizola's State government into a potential target for the Hickenlooper Amendment. Goulart buckled down under American pressure, promising to pay what the Left deemers excessive compensation to both ITT & Amforp in exchange for financial assistance, while Brizola pleaded out as a rebel from the nationalist movement.

Brizola's rise to prominence in Brazilian politics led to the emergence of presidential aspirations that he was unable to fulfill at the time; Brazilian law did not encourage close relatives of the acting President to serve for the following term of office. Brizola was active as the radical left's radical social and political reformer in 1961 to 1964, where he pressurized the office for a reform of the electoral law that allowed for his presidential candidacy in 1965. He was seen as a personally authoritarian and quarrelsome figure, as well as a physical defender able to confront his opponents by using physical violence; for example, he assaulted rightwing journalist David Nasser at Rio de Janeiro airport. Brizola was an explorer in the Goulart government's political struggle, fearing and feared by the political moderate Left and Right, respectively. Since Brizola shifted his constituency from Rio Grande do Sul to a national political center, winning a landslide victory (269,384 votes or a quarter of the state's electorate) in the 1962 election as a representative for Guanabara, Rio de Janeiro's capital had been relocated to Brasilia, the Rio de Janeiro municipality reorganized as a city-state. Around Brizola's attempts to "steal" his brother-in-law's Goulart "political thunder," a layer of lore emerged.

Goulart was elected President in 1961 by a deal in which he was head of State in a parliamentary republic. However, a plebiscite scheduled earlier restored Goulart to the position of chief of government and extinguished the cabinet on January 6, 1963. Brizola launched a weekly radio show on the Rio radio broadcasting of Seman Leuzzi, a congressman from So Paulo, which he broadcast nationally, and planned to establish a network of electoral cells based on small groups of armed men; the "eleventive" Grupos de Onze—paramilitary parties modeled on a soccer team, while others modeled on a soccer team. These were supposed to function as grassroots groups that would "defend and diffuse" the main points of a reformist agenda that would have to be achieved "by hook or by crook" (na lei ou na marra). Brizola's use of metaphors from the world of soccer was one of his apt rhetoric, making him at the time a master of the broadcasts. In the words of a contemporary journalist, "Brizola was ready to pay any price to keep the ball"), so apt, really as to prevent the whole of modern political specter's haze of sex in the first place. (ser o dono da bola).

Brizola's posturing and rhetoric defended the classification established by Goulart's Foreign Minister and leader of the moderate left, San Tiago Dantas: Brizola was a symbol of a "negative left" which, in its uncompromising, ideological defense of socialism, forsook any compromise with democratic institutions. Dantas' defiance of Brizola was reciprocated: War Minister Amaury Kruel and Commerce Minister Antônio Balbino of Dantas and Goulart developed a "anti-reformist tripod" of "traitors to the national interest. Dantas, who negotiated the 1963 US-Brazil financial deal, had been welcomed in Washington "more like a head of state than a minister of finance" and was expected to be greeted "with admiration if not fanfare"; a hope Brizola quickly responded with "venomous threats."

Despite the apparent radicalism, Brizola was not an ideologue or doctrinaire. Generally, he favoured a strong Left Nationalism; land reform, extension of the NCO franchise, and tightening controls over foreign investment that prompted the American ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, to dislike Brizola and compare his propaganda methods with those of Joseph Goebbels; a mood mirrored by the majority of contemporary American media. Many contemporary American intellectuals also looted Brizola; John dos Passos said Brizola attempted to "starve" Rio de Janeiro by retaining rice consignments from Rio Grande do Sul during his governorship.

Brizola stepped forward in late 1963, after the failure of a conservative reconstruction (Plano Trienal) formulated by the Ministry of Planning Celso Furtado, Brizola's economically conservative Minister of Finance Carvalho Pinto to take the position himself. "If we want to make a revolution, we must have the key to the safe," Brizola said. Brizola's bid for the Ministry fell apart; the position was given to an unpolitical Banco do Brasil chief. This helped radicalize contemporaneous Brazilian political life; O Globo, Brazil's most liberal newspaper, said it was as though "the job of putting down the fire fell to the chief arsonist." A division between Brizola and his brother-in-law was revealed in late 1963 and early 1964, and Brizola became convinced that Goulart planned to stage a revolt backed by loyalist military kings to prevent the continuing process of radicalization, and that the only way to stop Goulart from moving was a grassroots resistance movement.

Brizola's uncompromising radicalism denied his brother-in-law's government the ability to "compromise and conciliate" and establish a new reformist platform, according to several commentators. Brizola's "rhetoric of resentment" gained Goulart a few followers but also some influential and strategically located opponents, as was the case when Brizola, out of a public rostrum, called a commanding general to his face, a "gorilla." According to Rose, Brizola's reasons for this were egotistical; "Leonel Brizola was more concerned with Leonel Brizola." Brizola's project, according to other writers, was based on concrete problems (land reform, extension of the franchise, and foreign capital controls), whose recognition was deemed unavoidable and indigent by the ruling classes and their international allies, and whose implementation was foreign to the contemporaneous political system. In a telegram sent by the State Department to Goulart and Brizola in March 1964, the incoming military coup was equated with denying Goulart and Brizola a sense of political legitimacy that enabled them to implement their "extremist" policies. Some senior American policymakers had expressed their displeasure with Goulart's proposal as "an attempt to pressure the US to finance an impoverished dictatorship." Brizola's adamant attitude towards the reform process was more cohesive than Goulart's, who promoted a reformist agenda but rejected the need to use force to promote it, according to José Murilo de Carvalho. Goulart's ambival about his in-law did not win him any foreign recognition: the United States. Goulart was considered a "mesmerized" by Brizola by Ambassador Lincoln Gordon.

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