Resistance to Military Rule in Brazil
In the early nineteenth century, Brazil experienced a period of military dictatorship that began when the current president stepped down from office and left the way open for a military coup that attempted to reform economics and government policies within the nation.
There was also a great movement of resistance to this military rule in Brazil. Joao Goulart was the vice president when the president stepped down and he assumed the presidency at that point. He was president until he fell to the military regime. His fall radicalized many student groups. These student groups were unable to mobilize many of the impoverished Brazilians, so they began to adopt other direct action tactics, greatly resembling the Red Army Faction that rose in Germany in the 1970s (the influences of Communism played a large role in the development of political situations in Brazil at this time).
The very first signs of resistance appeared in 1968 when widespread student protests could be seen across the country. The government issued Institutional Act Number Five as a response to this upsurge in December of 1968. This act suspended habeas corpus, increased the power of the executive branch of government by shutting down the other branches of government, and a declared a nationwide state of siege. Heavy violence was used to suppress the protests, but the anti-military movement continued and descended into the political underground, eventually turning into armed action.
At the end of the decade, twenty different organizations were involved in the urban guerilla movement. The old-left groups like the Brazilian Communist Party, became irrelevant and outdated, because groups of Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, and Castroist believers began to compete for the loyalty of young militants in places like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. They carried out recruitment drives in universities and schools, using Marxist theory lectures to inform the young. The most determined of the activists went completely underground, leaving their families behind completely and devoting themselves to the cause.
The Revolutionary Movement of October 8th, 1969, kidnapped Charles Burke Elbrick who was the United States ambassador to Brazil. The rebels who had kidnapped him promised to release the ambassador only when several imprisoned dissidents were released. The government only adopted more brutal methods of counter insurgency, which lead to the assassination of Carlos Marighela who was a guerilla leader, only two months after the ambassador was kidnapped. This event can be called the beginning of the decline of armed resistance.
In 1970, a Japanese consul general in Sao Paulo, named Nobuo Okuchi, was kidnapped, along with Curtis C. Cutter, a United States consul in Porto Alegre. The latter was wounded in the shoulder but later escaped kidnapping. That same year, the West German Ambassador Ehren von Holleben was kidnapped from Rio and one of his bodyguards was killed.
A government-sponsored truth and reconciliation commission was issued in 2007 and stated that by the end of the twenty-one years of military dictatorship, there were over three hundred cases of government-sponsored political assassinations or disappearances. An even greater number were question, tortured, and jailed.