Maud Chirio. Politics in Uniform: Military Officers and Dictatorship in Brazil, 1960-80. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 280 pp. $28.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8229-6537-4.
Reviewed by Rafael Ioris (University of Denver)
Published on H-War (August, 2019)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
The Contradictory Politics of the Military Regime in Brazil
The scholarship on the military regime in Brazil (1964-85) has grown significantly in recent years. Works produced by Brazil and US-based scholars have enriched our understanding of the many complexities manifested in the long, multifaceted, and consequential authoritarian period the country experienced. This trend is enhanced by the publication of Politics in Uniform: Military Officers and Dictatorship in Brazil, 1960-80, written by French scholar Maud Chirio. The book, based on doctoral work produced in France in 2009, is largely grounded on extensive archival documentation pertaining to internal military publications (journal, manifestos, reports, etc.), thus providing an insightful take on the complexities and enduring cacophony of competing views and project for the country held by different segments of the military.
In its detailed, year-by-year account (divided into six chapters of historical account and much-needed introductory and concluding sections) of internal disputes among several sectors of the military, Politics in Uniform is arguably the closest investigation to date of the many and continuing, often contradictory interactions between ideologically diverse and hierarchically disparate military actors. Chirio rightly argues that accounting for the different paths taken by the dictatorial regime (which moved from a liberal economic and mildly repressive regime in the mid-60s to an autarkic economy encircled in deeply repressive measures in the early 70s) requires a closer examination of the divergent views existing within its most important political actor of the period. Ironically, this actor was the Brazilian armed forces, the very institution that strove for a long time to present itself as being a technical and unified actor.
In revealing this important paradox, Politics in Uniform cogently demonstrates that, though it consistently claimed before and during the regime, to be an apolitical actor, the fact was that the military increasingly behaved as an institution mired in internal debates typical of a more traditional political agent. In effect, the very claim to be a nonpartisan agency imbued with a technical mission became, over time, a central topic for intense internal negotiation involving disputes about who indeed spoke for the institution. Consequently despite the fact that middle officers consistently claimed to better perform this role, ultimately the hierarchical logic inherent in military organization prevailed, thus paving the way to an ever more insulated system—which Chirio insightfully defines as the "Generals' Regime."
The book examines several important dynamics of the military logic at work. One of them is the fact that within these intense internal disputes, the more adamant defenders of increasingly repressive measures claimed to be the more apolitical front, the ones who did not give in to older political negotiations and sought purely technical solutions to the country’s problems. In effect, the apolitical narrative not only did not prevent military interventions, being rather an important justification for it, but was rather manipulated in order to present justification for the growing repressive machine (e.g., torture and censorship) of the regime in the late 1960s onwards. To be sure, the military coup of March 31, 1964, represented a new and, in many ways, paradoxical historical dynamics.
This was indeed a novel experience when the Brazilian armed forces, which had intervened in the political realm several times before (e.g., 1930, 1945, 1954, 1955, 1961), decided to change course and to entrench themselves in the nation’s leading offices in order to promote an entire overhaul of the country’s established political institutions and economic policies. In order for this to take place, Humberto de Alencar Castello Branco, the deposed president’s military chief of staff, until a few months before the coup had defended the apolitical role of the military and only switched allegiances when he became convinced that the military hierarchy was being subverted by political authorities supporting the unionization of the rank and file. This reasoning was key in providing the argument for the coup plotter and supporters that they were the true defenders of the constitutional order and thus make the case that their coup was in fact a constitutional intervention. In this regard, as another merit of the book, Politics in Uniform deepens our knowledge of the French connection to traditional analysis of the 1964 coup. Translations of French military articles on the so-called theory of revolutionary war helped promote (along with the US-based Doctrine of National Security) an interventionist and counterinsurgency logic among growing numbers of the armed forces who acted accordingly, in their eyes, to prevent further subversion and chaos.
Central to the analytical thread of the book, Chirio demonstrates that the military was not nearly as unified, apolitical, or technical as it claimed to be and that the military’s internal divisions could not be neatly portrayed in a binary rivalry between moderate (called Sorbonne group) and hard-liners. In doing so, heupdates some of the most classic and influential initial examinations of the military regime in Brazil—such as Alfred Stepan’s The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (1971) and Ronald M. Schneider’s The Political System of Brazil: Emergence of a “Modernizing” Authoritarian Regime, 1964-1970 (1971)—which in the early 1970s had advanced some of these same notions, though they are now better detailed and more fully examined. Chirio further debunks this simplistic portrayal by demonstrating how hardliners were indeed not a unitary block. In effect, when Artur da Costa e Silva (the second of the five generals who ruled the country in the period), said to be a central figure of the hardliners, forced his hand in the 1967 succession by finding support in the barracks, he did not seek to fully implement their more nationalistic and repressive demands though these were instrumental in paving his way to the presidency and in providing support for further repressing traditional civilian political elites.
Thus, one of the most important contradictory historical experiences that Politics in Uniform identifies involved middle-ranking officers who played a central role in fomenting the military intervention but were not granted actual powers of decision-making. In this sense, though unable to prevent internal ideological dissent and even loud protests, the military leadership was nonetheless extremely successful in maintaining the hierarchical logic at work, despite the fact that the persistent frustration among mid-officers (mainly colonels) was a constant source of tension and concern among top leadership. What is more, Chirio demonstrates how top leaders of the military regime were not always distraught by the complaints from middle and lower officers since they provided justification for more repressive measures (e.g., censorship, purges, torture, and executions) positioned under the label of being responsive to the “opinion of the barracks.”
The work also surveys the protracted path of attempted political opening starting in the mid-1970s. In specific, the book reveals how Ernesto Geisel (the fourth general in power who sought to liberalize the regime from the top) had to deal with the resistance to give up established repressive mechanisms among a new generation of middle-rank officers imbued with a revived revolutionary zeal. Here the book describes, better than most available works, how, once again, paradoxically, some of the most vocal so-called hardliners ended up joining the democratic opposition as way to denounce the Generals Regime. In many ways, as the book demonstrates, more than Emílio Garrastazu Médici (the third general in power who led the most repressive period of the dictatorship), Geisel represented more clearly this insulated logic of the regime. He sought to reconcile the divergent trends within the military (the pro-business policies of Castello Branco versus the statist ones of Medici) by centralizing power in his own hands. This was perhaps why the barracks, and others, resisted the liberalizing move, not so much from a different view for the country but as resistance against the institutionalization of the generals’ control. In fact, in the presidential succession of 1978, the regime saw arguably its most intense fracture as members of the so-called true revolutionary faction, former cabinet members of Geisel, and the civilian opposition joined forces to challenge the centralized decision-making logic at work. This was a foundational experience that helped pave the way to the return of democratic life in Brazil, which helps explain the slow, controlled, and top-down transition that cannot be fully understood by the traditional moderate-hardline dichotomy.
As a whole, Chirio’s work skillfully demonstrates how “the Generals Regime managed to maintain centralized powers but did not depoliticized the military” (p. 200). Had the regime sought to find actual (not rhetorical) legitimacy in the barracks, the military dictatorship in Brazil could have become a mass-based (fascist-like, perhaps even leftist) regime. Alternatively, since it only manipulated that claim (in a fragile balance that at times had to concede to some of the demands from lower ranks), the regime became ever more centralized in an institutional logic that harkened back to other authoritarian experiences and with long-term results for Brazil’s curtailed democracy of today. To be sure, another contribution of Politics in Uniform is to confirm the existence of a leftist and nationalist current within the military, espousing a Peruvian-like turn in the late 60s. The top echelons of the regime masterfully repressed this group though some of its demands were included in the generals' project of development of the early 70s (e.g., more focus on regional inequality with the creation of new agencies for the Amazonian region).
Chirio’s detailed account of events helps us make sense of the many contradictory articulations deriving from a dilemma provoked by growing political involvements of an institution that branded itself as being nonpolitical, especially important for coup plotters. The book thus enriches our scholarship with new data from internal military publications, thereby consolidating our understanding of the military regime in Brazil while also paving new important lines of investigation. In effect, in addition to the curtailed leftist push of the late 60s, Politics in Uniform notes the ongoing influence of retired generals in shaping the directions for the country during Brazil’s most important authoritarian experience. Given today’s unprecedented presence of retired generals in top positions in government, a concerning trend for democratic politics today as it was in the 1960s and 70s, new examinations following the leads skillfully advanced by Chirio’s book would be welcome.
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Citation:
Rafael Ioris. Review of Chirio, Maud, Politics in Uniform: Military Officers and Dictatorship in Brazil, 1960-80.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53829
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