1

“The Blood of the Youth Is Flowing”

The Political Class and Its Children Take on
the Military in 1968

On the morning of August 29, 1968, hundreds of heavily armed policemen

descended on the campus of the University of Brasília (UnB), located barely two
miles from Brazil’s futuristic Congress. Brandishing arrest warrants for leftist stu-
dent activists, they kicked in classroom doors, smashed laboratory equipment,
and marched the children of Brazil’s elites across campus at gunpoint to be held
in a basketball court for processing. When politicians arrived to intervene, they
were met with insults and even beatings. The political class had largely supported
or tolerated a “Revolution” to save the country from leftist subversion, economic
ruin, and political malfeasance; the few who protested had been removed from
office. Yet four years later it was clear that the military sought not a passing inter-
vention but a profound transformation of Brazil’s political system and the political
class with it. Although the military was adamant that it desired a partnership with
politicians, politicians were to be the junior partners. In 1968, politicians’ mount-
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

ing frustration reached a breaking point.

After explaining politicians’ reaction to the changes imposed after 1964, this
chapter analyzes the first act in the showdown of 1968: the political class’s reac-
tion to repression of the leftist-dominated student movement. Given the social
and family ties between politicians and students, both regime allies and oppo-
nents were furious when the military attacked them with unprecedented (at least
for them) levels of violence. Frustrated by their inability to stop it, they could
only hurl denunciations at the police, the military, and the regime. How had a
­“Revolution” to save the country from communism devolved into Soviet-style
repression? Regime allies had never dreamed that their “Revolution” would one
day turn on their own children, and even the opposition was shocked at the feroc-
ity of the violence.
14

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
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 “The Blood of the Youth Is Flowing”     15

F R OM J U B I L AT IO N T O D I SI L LU SIO N :
A “R EVO LU T IO N ” G O N E A S T R AY

On March 31, 1964, a military uprising drove the left-leaning president, João
Goulart, into exile. Ten days later, Congress selected General Humberto Cas-
telo Branco to serve the remainder of Goulart’s term. A significant portion of the
political, landowning, and business classes was overjoyed. Goulart’s talk of leftist
reforms was threatening to an elite that had been shaken by the Cuban Revolu-
tion, and his friendliness to labor, openness to land reform, and encouragement
of popular mobilization challenged ingrained hierarchies. Moreover, Goulart was
“the beloved disciple of the dead dictator” Getúlio Vargas,1 whose centralizing rule
was recalled with horror by regional elites.2 For its protagonists, the coup repre-
sented not democracy’s collapse but its salvation. This message resonated strongly
in São Paulo, which in 1932 had waged a brief war—the Constitutionalist Revolu-
tion—against Vargas. An Estado de S. Paulo editorial crowed, “As one man, São
Paulo finds itself today fully mobilized, and, with the same spirit as three decades
ago, rises up in defense of the present Constitution.”3
The most enthusiastic supporters came from the National Democratic Union
(UDN), the right-leaning party established in 1945 to oppose Vargas. São Paulo
federal deputy Herbert Levy applauded Brazil for “vigorously repelling its Cuban-
ization and demonstrating its democratic maturity.”4 Yet it was not only the UDN
that cheered. Governor Adhemar de Barros, of the Social Progressive Party (PSP),
congratulated paulistas (residents of São Paulo) for “ris[ing] up . . . once more
in defense of democratic ideals, safeguarding the supreme values of our Chris-
tian civilization.”5 Even future leaders of the opposition such as federal deputies
Ulysses Guimarães and André Franco Montoro remained silent when Goulart
was deposed.
It did not take long for the coup’s civilian collaborators to begin worrying that
they might have made a mistake. Paulo Egydio Martins, a businessman and aspir-
ing politician who had participated in the conspiracy, later complained, “Days
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

after the Revolution, we civilians in São Paulo felt that our role had ended, that . . .
we became totally forgotten. . . . We felt literally dismissed; we realized that power
was in the hands of the Army and that we would have nothing more to do with it.”6
Sure enough, the military soon decreed an “Institutional Act” that, among other
measures, granted the president sixty days to cassar (summarily remove from
office) politicians, fire public employees, and suspend the political rights of both
for ten years.7 Still, the act stopped short of the sweeping intervention some coup
supporters had urged, and rather than an attack on the political class as a whole,
it was a temporary measure enabling the new government to rid itself of commu-
nists, getulista (Vargas-allied) holdovers, and assorted “subversives.”
The next sixty days saw the cassação (removal) of 3 former presidents (one of
whom, Juscelino Kubitschek, was currently a senator), 3 governors, 62 current

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 16    Chapter 1

and former federal deputies and substitutes, 53 current and former state
deputies and substitutes, 15 current and former mayors and vice mayors, and 12
municipal councilors. The act mainly targeted allies of Goulart; his home state, Rio
Grande do Sul, bore the worst of the punishment, with a quarter of the removals.
As Montoro pointed out later, the act had not gone very far; it had an expiration
date and left untouched the October 1965 presidential election.8 Even after June,
when Kubitschek was cassado and Castelo Branco’s term was extended by a year
via a constitutional amendment, it seemed that by 1966 the “revolutionary pro-
cess” would end, and direct elections would pick Castelo Branco’s successor after
an unprecedented two-year military intervention.
A crisis in October 1965 shattered this illusion and began to turn some of the
political class against the regime. In response to the victory of Kubitschek-allied
candidates for governor in two states, Castelo Branco decreed a new institutional
act. The first act had had eleven articles; this one had thirty-three. In addition
to renewing the president’s right to cassar politicians and public employees (for
seventeen months instead of sixty days), AI-2 (Ato Institucional no. 2) made presi-
dential elections indirect, decided by a simple majority in Congress; allowed the
president to place Congress in recess; packed the Supreme Court; and transferred
jurisdiction over crimes against national security to military courts. Most trau-
matically for politicians, in an expression of military frustration with their faction-
alism, AI-2 abolished the existing political parties.9
Thirty-five years later, Montoro identified AI-2 as “the watershed of Brazilian
political life,” when “the government renounced all its promises of redemocra-
tization and plunged the country into the night of the discretionary regime.”10
­Similarly, Paulo Egydio Martins later argued that by caving to military pressure,
Castelo Branco had chosen the unity of the military over the good of the nation.11
Yet at the time neither voiced his disagreement publicly. Those who did react did
so cautiously, although their discontent often shone through. Upon receiving a
call with news of AI-2, São Paulo’s governor, Adhemar de Barros, was overheard
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

remarking, “May God our Father help us to endure this crude blow.” Yet later,
when a telegram offering the justice minister’s justification for the act arrived, the
governor sent a reply expressing “the full trust of . . . São Paulo in the patriotic
action of our President Castelo Branco.”12 The paulista UDN released a state-
ment that applauded most of the act’s measures but condemned, “with all vehe-
mence,” the abolition of the old party system while stating while that the UDN
could not “applaud indirect elections, which abruptly alter the tradition of our
republican life.”13 A Social Democratic Party (PSD) statement explained that the
party was “surprised by this discretionary manifestation” and promised “to fight
for the full recuperation of the normality and tranquility of democratic life in our
country.”14 Deputy Doutel de Andrade, president of the Brazilian Labor Party
(PTB), remarked that Castelo Branco had “dealt a mortal blow to what remained
of republican institutions” and called on Congress to push back, lest Brazil suffer
“the irremediable liquidation of the democratic regime.”15

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 “The Blood of the Youth Is Flowing”     17

While AI-2 abolished the old parties, it also stipulated that the president could
set rules for forming new ones. A one-party system; a two-party system with a
­government-allied party and an opposition; and a three-party system with a govern-
ment-allied party, an opposition, and an “independent” party were all considered.
Ultimately, a “complementary act” permitted three parties, each with a minimum
of 20 senators and 120 federal deputies.16 Yet politicians were so eager to join the
new government-allied party, ARENA, that there were barely enough legislators
remaining to form even one more party. The few legislators who wished to risk open
opposition (or who were unable to tolerate coexisting with enemies who had joined
ARENA) formed the rival MDB.17 Some joined the MDB because they were unable
to stomach the regime’s attacks on democracy; when asked in our interview whether
he joined the party because it opposed the regime, former deputy José de Lurtz
Sabiá (MDB-SP) exclaimed, “Obviously!”18 But he was in the minority. According
to one oft-repeated legend, Castelo Branco had to intervene personally to convince
Paraíba’s Rui Carneiro to join the MDB so that the party could manage twenty
senators.19 Others simply picked whatever side their political rival had not chosen.
After Pedro Ludovico, who had dominated Goiás politics for over three decades
as appointed interventor, elected governor, and senator, chose the MDB, the state’s
­factions that opposed him joined ARENA, not because they were loyal to the regime,
but because it represented their best chance to displace the state’s godfather.20
Still, AI-2 did not go as far as many politicians feared it might. Castelo Branco
used the act to remove only sixty-two politicians, including only six at the federal level.
The most notable casualty was Adhemar de Barros, who despite his initial support
had begun to spar with the generals publicly. In 1966, AI-3 extended indirect elec-
tions to governorships and authorized governors to nominate mayors of state capi-
tals, to be confirmed by the state legislatures. Several months later, Castelo Branco
chose General Artur da Costa e Silva as his successor, and the nomination was
ratified by Congress in October. Castelo Branco and his legal experts also drafted
a new constitution that expanded presidential and reduced legislative power and
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

institutionalized many of the provisions of AI-2, such as indirect presidential elec-

tions.21 Congress rubber-stamped it in January 1967. The MDB complained that the
new constitution had institutionalized military rule and suffocated basic l­iberties,
yet MDB secretary general, José Martins Rodrigues, confided to US diplomats that
the statement was “more a declaration of position than [a] call to sabotage [the]
Constitution” and that the MDB would wait and see how Costa e Silva applied
it before deciding whether to try to amend it (a move doomed to failure since
ARENA enjoyed a commanding congressional majority).22
Rodrigues’s position was typical. While they were displeased with new parties,
indirect elections, and curtailed legislative powers, politicians were uncertain how
to express their discontent. Vocal opposition was one option. Unconditional public
support despite private disagreement was another. Yet another was measured criti-
cism of specific measures without challenging military rule. Or a politician may
have shifted positions depending on the winds at the moment, the ­instructions

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 18    Chapter 1

of a prominent ally, or the cassação of a friend or mentor. Criticism thus some-

times came from unexpected sources. In a January 1968 interview, ARENA sena-
tor Carlos Carvalho Pinto, a former paulista governor, complained that the two-
party system and indirect elections were “retarding dangerously” Brazil’s return to
full democracy. He also argued that the military as an institution should have no
political role beyond defending democratic institutions. Now that the military had
saved Brazil from anarchy, civilian politicians must prove that they were respon-
sible enough for power to be returned to them.23 His discontent was representa-
tive. In January 1968, the magazine Realidade published the results of a survey of
246 federal deputies and senators (over half of Congress). An overwhelming 85
percent supported a multiparty system, 84 percent believed states did not have suf-
ficient autonomy, 80 percent preferred direct presidential elections, and 65 percent
thought the executive branch had taken over too many powers rightfully belong-
ing to the legislature. Only 11 percent believed that the new Constitution reflected
the aspirations of the Brazilian people. The regime’s encroachment on the preroga-
tives of the political class had provoked deep discontent in both parties.24
Yet despite the curtailment of legislative powers and the enshrinement of indi-
rect elections in an authoritarian constitution, things were looking up as 1968
began. AI-2 had expired on March 15, 1967, when Costa e Silva took office. The act
had been used only sparingly; Costa e Silva began his term with talk of a “human-
ization” of the “Revolution”; and the new constitution, if it limited the powers of
Congress, theoretically gave the regime the power it needed to transform Brazil
without new institutional acts while stipulating that cassações could only be car-
ried out via a Supreme Court trial, with congressional approval. The “Revolution’s”
legitimacy was based on the claim that it had saved democratic institutions from
dictatorship; it was thus essential for the military to collaborate, however one-
sidedly, with politicians. In 1964, the UDN, never able to win power via elections,
had conspired with the military to overthrow Goulart. Now they found themselves
running Congress, and UDN stalwarts like Senator Daniel Krieger (president of
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

ARENA) and federal deputy Rondon Pacheco (the president’s civilian chief of
staff) enjoyed ready access to the president. Even in the MDB politicians remained
free to criticize the government. By early 1968, then, the political class had reached
an uneasy truce with the military, with hope that the “revolutionary” cycle would
soon draw to a close.

“I STA N D I N S O L I DA R I T Y W I T H T H E ST U D E N T S” :
P O L I T IC IA N S A N D T H E S T U D E N T M OV E M E N T

Yet in 1968 this truce began to collapse as the military violently repressed the
student movement. On March 28, Edson Luís, a Rio de Janeiro secondary stu-
dent, was killed by police during a protest over cafeteria food. Previously student
demonstrations had focused on issues like the number of admissions slots and
university governance; other than the most politically active, few cared about

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 “The Blood of the Youth Is Flowing”     19

­ verthrowing the regime.25 Now Luís’s death galvanized students to take to the
o
streets. The largest demonstration occurred in June when students marched in Rio
de Janeiro in the famous March of the 100,000. As the size and political tone of the
protests increased, so too did the repression, culminating in the arrest of hundreds
of student activists at the clandestine congress of the banned National Student
Union (UNE) in October.
All the members of the MDB took the students’ side, and they were joined by
a significant minority of arenistas. For in a country where a university education
was the privilege of a tiny elite, the protesting students were “our children, our
brothers, our relatives.”26 Guanabara deputy Breno da Silveira had a son attending
UnB who was arrested in March; his other son was part of the army force sent to
break up the demonstration.27 One of the organizers of the March of the 100,000,
Vladimir Palmeira, was the son of ARENA senator Rui Palmeira. And the student
activist son of deputy Pedro Celestino Filho (MDB-GO), Paulo de Tarso, would
be “disappeared” by the regime in 1971.28 As former colonel and ARENA deputy
Paulo Nunes Leal said, “When we have children in school, we . . . [imagine] that
the parents who cry today at the disappearance of their beloved child could be us,
since no one can presume to claim that their child will never participate in a stu-
dent demonstration.”29 Mário Piva put it more pointedly: “Those who today try to
defend the ones responsible [for the death of Luís] or who overlook the graveness
of the problem were either never young themselves, or don’t have children study-
ing in university like I do.”30
Politicians saw younger versions of themselves in students, who one deputy
called “the vanguard of the people’s conscience.”31 It was natural that the deputies,
over 80 percent of whom had attended university, would identify with students;
in them they saw “future economic, political, and financial leaders,” the “new elite
of an ignorant country.”32 José Mandelli explained, “The youth of today will be the
men of tomorrow. It is they who should take our place in public affairs, as profes-
sors, in the liberal professions, in trade.33 Mário Covas, Chamber minority leader,
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

was particularly impressed with Honestino Guimarães, a student leader at UnB,

once remarking to his wife, “He’s going to be a great politician. . . . I was overcome
when I heard that born leader.”34 Regime allies such as Júlio de Mesquita Neto (son
of the owner of O Estado de S. Paulo) and São Paulo governor Roberto de Abreu
Sodré had fought as students against the Vargas regime decades before. Their
activities generated a file with the São Paulo political police and earned the latter
more arrests than he could count.35 Although Miguel Feu Rosa was too young to
have opposed Vargas, he spoke for many who had when he said, “Whatever my
party affiliation, I cannot deny my origins. It was in student politics that I forged
my personality as a public man. . . . I stand in solidarity with the students of my
country; I participate in their sufferings and in their pain.”36 As former deputy Léo
de Almeida Neves explained in 2015, “It was a serious error for the dictatorship
to ban student organizations because that is where the country’s political leaders
were shaped.”37

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 20    Chapter 1

As university graduates in a country where most did not complete primary

school, members of Congress could identify with student activists in ways that
they could not with members of other social movements. Idealistic by nature, stu-
dents were “generous, impulsive, noble, and patriotic,” and their elders owed them
“a little bit of understanding.”38 They were “the most enlightened segment of the
Brazilian population, . . . citizens who have a cultural and humanistic refinement
far above the average.”39 While many deputies may have frowned upon the repres-
sion of labor unions and peasant movements, repression of students was different
because it pitted uneducated, lower-class, often Black and Brown police against
students who reminded politicians of themselves.40 Their denunciation of violence
against students was the indignant cry, “How dare you do this to people like us!”
The reality was that most Brazilian university students had little in common
with the politicians whose families had walked the halls of power since at least
the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889. As Brazil industrialized in the 1950s and
a growing middle class demanded access to higher education, the populist gov-
ernments of Vargas and Kubitschek had greatly expanded the university system,
and in the 1960s the military regime accelerated this trend. University enroll-
ments grew from 27,253 in 1945 to 93,202 in 1960 to 278,295 in 1968.41 Most of
these students came not from the political elite but from the growing and largely
immigrant-descended middle classes in the industrializing Southeast and South.
Yet none of this mattered to politicians who were nostalgic about their own
activism of yesteryear; whatever the actual composition of Brazilian universi-
ties in 1968, politicians viewed those involved in the student movement as sim-
ilar to themselves and deserving of deferential treatment from their “inferiors.”
­Anecdotal evidence indicates that the student movement was largely made up
of upper-class students for, unlike middle-class students, who often had to work
while they ­studied, the children of the elite enjoyed financial support from their
parents, leaving plenty of time for activism.42 And even if they did not come from
the same social class, chances are they looked a lot like politicians. Although
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

data on the racial composition of Brazilian universities in the 1960s are difficult
to obtain, if the vast majority of students did indeed come from the middle and
upper classes, it is almost certain that the vast majority were also white, according
to Brazilian standards.43
In the wake of each new confrontation, senators and deputies denounced the
violence, nearly invariably blaming the police and, occasionally, the military.
Márcio Moreira Alves was perhaps the most forceful: “What this military regime
has done in Brazil is transform every uniform into the object of the people’s exe-
cration. . . . [The government] has turned [the Armed Forces] into a shelter of
bandits.”44 Antônio Cunha Bueno, who during his studies at the São Paulo Law
School had been active in student politics, offered his “vehement protest” of police
repression of students, which, “if not restrained, will inevitably create the cli-
mate necessary for the implantation of a dictatorship.”45 The protests came most
­frequently from younger, vocal members of the MDB, but they were joined by

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 “The Blood of the Youth Is Flowing”     21

arenistas (ARENA members) who were aghast at the attacks on students. Others,
while deploring police violence and defending the students, argued that nefarious,
communist subversives were exploiting students’ “enthusiasm, good faith, and
excitement” in order to advance their own “criminal and unspeakable objectives.”46
When student protests included the burning of American flags or throwing rocks
at the American embassy, according to Nazir Miguel, “that is communist infiltra-
tion. And communists belong in jail, because they are subversives. Students should
be in school studying, not starting street riots.”47 Still, few arenistas defended the
police or attempted to shift the debate to violence committed by students.48 Most
government allies kept silent, joined by more prudent oppositionists.
Other politicians, particularly from the opposition, left the halls of Congress
and joined students in the streets. Such activities were controversial; ARENA’s
Haroldo Leon Peres provoked a shouting match when he implied that MDB depu-
ties were inciting students and thus shared responsibility for the violence.49 The
image of politicians standing alongside “subversives” who were often related to
them must have infuriated those in the military who already resented the political
class. As Costa e Silva’s military chief of staff, General Jayme Portella, complained,
opposition deputies, “using their immunities, were inciting agitation.”50

Media File 1. Tumult during the speech of Haroldo Leon Peres,

March 29, 1968.
Source: Câmara dos Deputados, Coordenação de Audiovisual
(COAUD), Arquivo Sonoro, http://imagem.camara.gov.br/internet
/audio/default.asp.

However, there were limits to politicians’ involvement. Covas insisted that his
respect for the autonomy of the student movement would not permit him to
­interfere in its internal functioning; his role was limited to dialogue and media-
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

tion.51 Moreira Alves hit closer to the truth when he argued that the real barrier
to deeper involvement was that leftist student activists were suspicious of even
opposition politicians, whose attempts to oppose the regime through legal chan-
nels, they believed, were insufficiently revolutionary.52 In a meeting of MDB leader-
ship, deputy Edgar Godoy da Mata Machado (MDB-MG) admitted, “Students and
workers want nothing to do with the MDB because they believe that the current
political system is artificial and inauthentic.”53 The former student leader Franklin
Martins, writing in 2002, argued that a chasm separated the student movement
from opposition politicians: “They had been defeated in 1964 without putting up
any resistance. . . . Why, then, should the youth take their advice into account?”
Their very presence in Congress was a betrayal that proved how tepid their oppo-
sition was. The MDB was merely “a plaything in the hands of the military whose
sole objective was to prop up a simulacrum of a Congress and a mimicry of
democracy.”54

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 22    Chapter 1

Students heaped even more scorn upon politicians who supported the regime;
even if they stood up to the military, “it was . . . because they had been thrown
overboard by those who held power.”55 In São Paulo, students’ anger was vividly
illustrated on May Day, when Sodré attempted to speak to ten thousand workers
and students but was drowned out with cries of “Murderer!” Soon the jeers were
accompanied by eggs, wood, and rocks, and after he was hit in the head by a rock
(or in his account, a nail-studded potato), the governor retreated to the safety of a
cathedral.56 Students and workers took over the stage and unfurled a banner with
an image of Ché Guevara.57 Although Sodré—not inaccurately—blamed commu-
nist infiltrators, the event strikingly demonstrated the disgust student activists felt
for regime-allied politicians.58 If politicians could look back on their own mili-
tancy with nostalgia, the very students with whom they sympathized were deter-
mined not to grow up to be like them.

“I T I S OU R C H I L D R E N W HO A R E T H E R E” :
T H E I N VA SIO N O F T H E U N I V E R SI DA D E D E B R A SÍ L IA

Although the largest marches took place in Rio and repression occurred across the
country, federal legislators were most directly involved in Brasília.59 In part this was
because of the capital’s isolation. Though Brazilians had long dreamed of establish-
ing a capital in the sparsely populated interior, it was only during Kubitschek’s
administration that it came to fruition. Designed in the shape of an airplane, its
modernist buildings drawn up by the communist architect Oscar Niemeyer, Brasí-
lia potently symbolized Brazil as the “country of the future.” But the city had been
rushed to completion in 1960, barely in time for Kubitschek to inaugurate it, and
even by 1968 many government agencies had yet to relocate from Rio. Located
over a thousand kilometers from Rio and São Paulo, its isolation was exacerbated
by poor roads and unreliable telephone service. As one deputy lamented, “We live
in a capital that most of the time is poorly informed about the reality of events, due
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

to its distance from the large cities where news is made.”60 The metropolitan area’s
population was only 400,000 in 1968; many were migrant laborers who had little
in common with legislators and federal employees. Its symbolism as the harbinger
of a modernizing Brazil combined with its isolation meant that events in Brasília
were enormously relevant to politicians forced to spend time there.
This was particularly true for events at UnB, where politicians’ children often
studied. The University of Brasília was part of the city’s original “pilot plan”—a
national university for the new capital of a modernizing nation. In the vision of
its first rector, the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, UnB would challenge outmoded
ideas about admissions, pedagogy, and university governance. The university was
also unique at the time in that it united all its academic programs on a single
campus—an arrangement that not only facilitated intellectual exchange but also
heightened opportunities for mobilization.61 Yet only two years after he began to

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 “The Blood of the Youth Is Flowing”     23

implement his plan, the coup brought to power the enemies of Ribeiro, who had
been Goulart’s minister of education and culture and later his civilian chief of staff,
and the generals fired him almost immediately. After all, academics who held pro-
gressive ideas about education may have also been subversive. UnB’s location at
the center of political power and its unorthodox approach placed it squarely in the
regime’s gaze. The campus, barely six years old in 1968, was only four kilometers
from Congress. Demonstrations nearly always occurred on weekdays, when it was
easiest to assemble a crowd and when Congress was in session.62 Thus while politi-
cians stayed informed about events in their home states, their proximity to UnB
during the week meant that they were always aware of events there, often more
than at universities back home.
UnB students knew that their deputy or senator fathers (or friends’ fathers)
enjoyed a measure of security because of their parliamentary immunity, which
protected them from arrest. After all, Covas and other deputies had demanded an
explanation from the justice minister and visited students in the hospital in April
1967 after police invaded the UnB library and beat students protesting the visit of
the US ambassador. When Edson Luís was killed in March, UnB students again
mobilized, and a group of opposition deputies attended their protest march. When
the police began attacking the students, Covas and fellow deputies attempted to
intervene, but the police ignored their pleas, and in the melee deputy José Martins
Rodrigues was hit in the head with a truncheon. A few days later, after students
captured a plainclothes National Information Service (SNI) agent and confiscated
his revolver, at the urging of their professors they agreed to give it back—but only
if they could hand it over to an opposition deputy. Then, at a Mass to commemo-
rate the death of Luís, police arrived to arrest Honestino Guimarães; he fled into
the sacristy, and while the bishop held the police at bay, students rushed to Con-
gress, where the congressional leadership was in the midst of a meeting with other
student leaders to negotiate the end of the military occupation of the campus.
Covas and ARENA vice-leader Peres—who had accused opposition deputies of
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

inciting student violence—rushed to the church and saved Guimarães from arrest,
and Guimarães and other student leaders left in official cars of the Chamber.63 On
another occasion, students took refuge in Congress after a demonstration; after
twelve hours of negotiations, politicians used their private cars to take the students
home.64 And at a march at the end of June, Covas and several other MDB deputies
marched at the head of the students’ procession. Later Covas hid Guimarães and five
other students in his apartment with his family for days while the police searched
for them.65
On the morning of August 29, the long-standing tension between the regime
and UnB erupted into open conflict. With arrest warrants for Guimarães and four
other “subversives,” officers of the political and social police (DOPS) and federal
police, backed up by two hundred military police officers, descended on the cam-
pus “as though they were Russians entering Prague” and arrested Guimarães.66

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 24    Chapter 1

Students fought back, a patrol car was tipped over and set on fire, and police began
a brutal sweep, kicking in doors, smashing lab equipment, and using tear gas,
truncheons, rifles, and machine guns to round up students and herd them to a
basketball court for processing. One student was shot in the head, another in the
knee, and others suffered broken bones, either at the hands of the police or when
they fell attempting to flee.67
Congress was in the midst of its morning session when the invasion began. In
the Senate, Aurélio Vianna (MDB-GB) announced that he had just heard news
of a confrontation at UnB and would be leaving with a group of senators to find
out what was happening. Celestino Filho made a similar announcement in the
Chamber. At the urging of ARENA leader Ernani Sátiro and Chamber president
José Bonifácio Lafayette de Andrada (great-great nephew of the famed patriarch
of Brazilian independence, José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva), a group of depu-
ties rushed to their cars and departed for UnB, a short drive down Brasília’s broad
avenues. All told, at least twenty deputies and three senators converged on the
campus.68 São Paulo deputy José Santilli Sobrinho rushed to UnB with his son
to pick up his daughter. When they exited their car, police surrounded them and
began to beat the son with a truncheon. Santilli Sobrinho attempted to intervene,
waving his congressional identification and crying out that he was a deputy, but
the police knocked the ID out of his hand and began to beat him too, shouting,
“That’s why we’re doing this!”69 They were only saved from arrest when other legis-
lators intervened as they were being dragged to a police car, with Santilli Sobrinho
shouting, “You’re beating a federal deputy! I protest!” The police tried to arrest
them too, until Senator Argemiro de Figueiredo (MDB-PB), whose own son was
in the basketball court, stated that if the officers attempted to arrest legislators,
they wouldn’t go without a fight.70
The university was in chaos. Politicians saw hundreds of students marched
across the campus at machine gun point. The police refused to allow wounded
students to leave for the hospital before receiving higher orders.71 The press noted
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

indignantly that women students and faculty had fainted under the stress and that
the police had entered restrooms where women were hiding.72 An ARENA deputy
gave an impromptu speech calling for reductions in funding for DOPS and the
SNI, and Rodrigues told a federal police commander, “General, I’m proud to be
on the side of the students and the people, and against these bandits,” to which the
commander shot back, “You’re the bandit!”73 Even ARENA deputy Clovis Stenzel,
a UnB professor and enthusiastic supporter of the regime, was overheard exclaim-
ing, “I, who am identified as belonging to the hard line, think all of this is an
atrocity.”74
Eventually the police let most students leave, arresting only a few “ringlead-
ers.” They left behind bloodstained floors, spent shell casings, and shattered lab
equipment. Politicians were in shock, and all who maintained a home in Brasília
had a story to tell. Oswaldo Zanello feared for his daughter, who had received

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 Image 1. Federal deputies scuffle with police at UnB. source : Arquivo Central da UnB.
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Image 2. Federal deputy José Santilli Sobrinho attempting to protect his children from arrest.
Source : Arquivo Central da UnB.

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 26    Chapter 1

threats from DOPS. Aniz Badra was stung when his son accused him of serving a
Nazi government.75 Deputies’ children and their friends’ children had been treated
like common criminals, and they themselves had suffered violence and threats of
arrest by the police, who respected neither congressional credentials nor social
class. Few had any doubts as to the source of the invasion. It may have been the
police who conducted it, but the orders had obviously come from above. The most
likely source appeared to be the hated Justice Minister Luis Antônio da Gama e
Silva, to whom the federal police were subordinate.76
Reaction from Congress was immediate and outraged. After the announce-
ment of the invasion, sixteen of the remaining thirty-three deputies on the docket
discarded their prepared remarks to denounce it. Nearly all questioned why hun-
dreds of police were necessary to arrest one student. Two deputies compared it to
the Soviet crackdown on Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring the week before.77 Oth-
ers took the opportunity to inveigh against those who gave the police their orders
(by implication, the military). Getúlio Moura (MDB-RJ), for example, stated, “We
protest against those who ordered these poor, incompetent, completely unlettered
and incapable policemen to commit these acts of violence.”78 Before rushing to
UnB, the MDB’s Rodrigues expressed feelings likely shared by many deputies: “It
is our children who are there, and we find ourselves powerless.”79
Emotions were raw during the tumultuous afternoon session; it nearly had to
be suspended five times amid hostile confrontations.80 Wilson Martins lamented,
“Those of us who have children in university, instead of being content, expecting
that tomorrow we’ll have a doctor, an engineer, a liberal professional in our home,
[now] fear at every moment that we’ll find their corpse in their own classrooms.”81
Seven deputies, including two from ARENA, gave speeches decrying the invasion,
and eleven more, including three arenistas, offered sympathetic rejoinders to a
speech by paulista Gastone Righi Cuoghi excoriating the police. Moreira Alves
inveighed, “We don’t have a government in this country; we have a mob in power,
a gang, a group that uses its hired guns against the nation.”82 Another deputy
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argued that it was clear that the police had received their orders from the army
and that the arrest warrants were but a pretext for an operation of psychological
warfare designed to demoralize the university. Righi agreed, claiming that the fac-
tions of the military now in power had opposed placing a university in Brasília
out of fear of the unrest fifteen thousand students could generate.83 Only paulista
Cantídio Sampaio supported the police, claiming that the students attacked them
first. When fellow paulista David Lerer called him a liar, Sampaio punched him in
the face.84
But not everyone was incensed. For although many arenistas defended the stu-
dents, a significant minority sided enthusiastically with the military. Despite both
parties’ lack of ideological cohesion, ARENA was more likely to attract politicians
with a deeply conservative worldview that venerated authority, eschewed disor-
der, and loathed leftist politics. ARENA vice-leader Peres spoke for these when

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 “The Blood of the Youth Is Flowing”     27

he begged the deputies to suspend judgment until all the facts were known. After
all, abuses were unavoidable in a tense atmosphere. Deputies should know this,
since they had all been involved in rallies or protests that had gotten out of hand.
What right did they have to cast stones when they had similarly repressed unruly
mobs?85 ARENA’s Carlos de Brito Velho (a physician by training) interrupted, to
thunderous applause, “I’ll cast the first stone! . . . I have committed many acts
of violence against the strong and the powerful, but against the weak, never.”86
Regardless, Peres emphasized, if the police committed excesses, the students had
too; after all, a police car had been set afire, and an officer had allegedly been shot
in the arm.87 When Ernani Sátiro, ARENA’s leader, defended Peres for his “equi-
librium and serenity,” he was roundly booed, as Unírio Machado exclaimed, “How
can you be so callous? Let heaven be astonished!” When Bonifácio charged the
deputies to listen “with tranquility,” Machado cried, “Tranquility? When the blood
of the youth is flowing? I want to see how tranquil some of you are when it’s your
children in this situation!”88
Mário Covas gave the MDB’s official position in a speech sufficiently vehement
that he withheld it from publication in the Diário da Câmara dos Deputados, the
daily record of the Chamber’s proceedings. He began with a blow-by-blow account
of events at UnB, emphasizing that unlike Peres’s “police version,” his account
contained the eyewitness testimonies of deputies and professors. Other deputies
added details as he went along. Moreira Alves reported that the student shot in
the head had been left lying atop a table for an hour before the police would allow
him to be taken to the hospital. Mário Maia, a practicing physician, arrived from
the hospital where he had just served as the anesthesiologist for the brain surgery
that saved the student’s life. An ARENA deputy received lengthy applause when
he proposed that the Brazilian flag above Congress be lowered to half-mast in
mourning.89
For Covas, the police’s boorish behavior was the result of a society “that did
not educate them . . . to have the human reactions worthy of a civilized people.”
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

The real fault for the repression lay with the government, which had still not held
anyone responsible for the killing of Edson Luís, a “dictatorship” that used the
“magic word” “subversive” as an “excuse for all sorts of violence.” He stated that if
he thought that resigning from Congress could help the students’ cause, he would
do it in instantly and promised that if he found himself in a similar situation again,
he would offer himself for the police to beat instead. Although he had no children
in college, after a day like this he suspected that he may not want them to go when
they grew up; “a lack of knowledge and culture” might be preferable to “one day
having to pass through the grievance and humiliation” that students in Brasília
had experienced today.90
The invasion was hotly discussed into the next week. Behind the scenes, some
arenistas were infuriated. Although Sampaio had punched Lerer for question-
ing his claim that the students had attacked first, his wife was rumored to belong

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 28    Chapter 1

to a group of women preparing a letter to Costa e Silva demanding that he stop

ordering their husbands to defend lies. And it was later claimed that Jorge Curi
had proposed that ARENA vice-leaders refrain from giving speeches defending
the government: “No one can violate their conscience to defend the indefensible.
I’ve had it with tolerance and swallowing toads.”91 Over the next three weekdays,
forty-seven deputies gave speeches condemning the invasion. The first two days,
Thursday and Friday, they maintained a degree of caution by focusing their attacks
on the the police and the Costa e Silva administration rather than the military as
an institution. But as days passed without any explanation for the assault on UnB,
frustration among the deputies began to mount. Rumor had it that ARENA leader
Sátiro had gone to the presidential palace on Friday seeking an explanation but
had been denied an audience.92 On Monday MDB deputies, especially younger
ones known for their vehement criticisms of the government, went on the attack.
Hermano Alves complained that five days had passed with no investigation
or identification of those responsible and speculated that the silence was because
those who had issued the orders were “shielding themselves with Army officers’
uniforms.”93 Rodrigues interjected that he had heard that the police and DOPS
officers who ordered the invasion were actually army officers assigned to the police
forces, noting sarcastically, “All the honors for this exceptional military operation
go to those who make up . . . the ‘glorious Army of Caxias.’”94 Everyone conceded
that the invasion was not the fault of the entire army but rather of “militarist”
extremists whose paranoid obsession with subversion threatened to distract the
Armed Forces from their true mission.95 The result of this alienation of the military
from the people, Jairo Brum warned, could be “a blood-soaked tragedy,” because
“one day Brazilians will . . . take to the streets with weapons in hand to defend
themselves from the police who . . . threaten us and wound our children.”96 Yet
amid these terrible events Congress was powerless, its leadership shirking its duty
to demand an explanation. Arenista Paulo d’Araújo Freire, who had criticized stu-
dents for supposed acts of violence in March, now exclaimed, “I will by no means
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

give my modest vote to support the government as long as they refuse to punish
these bandits and criminals who want to implant Hitler’s system in Brazil.”97
It was then the turn of Márcio Moreira Alves. No one could have imagined that
his speeches this day and the next would spark a showdown between the military
and the political class. Indeed, the tone of his September 2 speech was much like
those that preceded it. Moreira Alves complained that there were no answers, only
questions, about events at UnB. Who had ordered the invasion? To what extent
were Gama e Silva and the justice ministry responsible? How would the govern-
ment respond? The crescendo came in a series of rhetorical questions:
When will the nation’s hemorrhage be stanched? When will troops stop machine-
gunning the people in the streets? When will a boot kicking in a lab door cease to
be the government’s proposal for university reform? When will we, . . . when we see

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 “The Blood of the Youth Is Flowing”     29

our children leave for school, be sure that they will not return carried on a stretcher,
cudgeled, or machine-gunned? When will we be able to trust those who ought to
execute and carry out the law? When will the police stop being a band of criminals?
When will the Army stop serving as shelter for torturers?98

Mariano Beck broke in to read a letter signed by 175 “Mothers and Wives of
­Brasília,” at least 30 of whom were married to deputies and senators. The letter
decried the “scenes of savagery and indescribable violence that once again have
bloodied the University of Brasília. . . . What we mothers and wives want is only
to see our children and husbands studying and working in peace and security.”99
While the mothers and wives may or may not have had children at UnB (the wife
of the thirty-two-year old Moreira Alves, for example, had neither a husband
young enough nor children old enough to be in college), the discursive kinship
that they invoked illustrates just how much politicians identified with students.
Moreira Alves’s speech the next day added fuel to the fire. This time he pro-
posed that to protest the military’s refusal to investigate its role in the UnB inva-
sion, parents keep their children away from military-sponsored Independence
Day festivities on September 7 and that young women “who dance with the cadets
and date the young officers” withhold sexual favors. Tying his tongue-in-cheek
proposal, which he later dubbed “Operation Lysistrata,” to the manifesto from the
“wives and mothers of Brasília,” he suggested that the boycott could serve as part
of a wider movement of women’s resistance.100 As he pointed out later, his sugges-
tion (which he said he hoped the girlfriends had taken) was a thinly veiled attack
on the military’s manhood: “Here was this spoiled brat, scion of a long line of poli-
ticians[,] . . . not only calling them a gang of torturers, but going to the groin and
attacking their machismo!”101 Questioning the military’s morality and patriotism
was bad; challenging its manhood was worse.
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Moreira Alves came from a Minas Gerais family in
which “politics was lived intensely.” His paternal grandfather had served for nearly
three decades as a federal deputy during the First Republic, a brother of his pater-
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

nal grandmother was foreign relations minister for Vargas, and his father was an
appointed mayor of Petrópolis under Vargas.102 After several years as a political
reporter for the left-leaning Correio da Manhã, where he won the Brazilian equiv-
alent of the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of a shootout in the Alagoas legisla-
tive assembly (written from a hospital bed after being wounded in the melee), he
parlayed his journalistic accomplishments into a successful run for Congress in
1966.103 From the beginning, he was a vociferous opponent of the regime; his 1967
book denouncing torture won him no friends in the military.104 In Brasília, he ini-
tially rented a house on Lake Paranoá with three other left-leaning MDB deputies
that was humorously dubbed the “Socialist Republic on the Lake.” He had been
born into politics, was fluent in English and French, and was married to a French
woman; in many respects he personified the ideal member of the political class.

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 30    Chapter 1

Moreira Alves and twenty to thirty other young deputies comprised a bloc in
Congress notorious for its impassioned speeches reprehending the government
for its attacks on democratic institutions, torture, and insufficiently nationalist
economic policies. São Paulo’s Ivette Vargas derisively dubbed the group the ima-
turos (immature ones). The ideal “public man” (homem público) was assumed (at
least discursively) to be stately and dignified, firm in his convictions but measured
in his reactions, willing to defend his honor but knowing when to turn the other
cheek. The imaturos, with their fiery speeches and brash behavior, were more akin
to impulsive students than homens públicos. As Moreira Alves complained later,
“Every conservative body calls those who represent rebellious forces of change
‘immature,’ ‘hasty,’ ‘insane,’ ‘infantile,’ as if adjectives could stop time.”105 The ima-
turos delighted in interrupting arenistas’ speeches with attacks on the govern-
ment; Moreira Alves later ruefully recalled a time when one of the “little bastards
who tried to make a career of kissing the military’s ass” complained that they had
ruined the speech he had paid someone to write and intended to distribute to his
constituents.106 The imaturos were not well liked, and Moreira Alves attracted little
sympathy. One ARENA deputy described him as “very radical, intolerant in his
ideas, and not very amenable to democratic dialogue. He has an enraged disposi-
tion and is almost always full of resentment.”107
The first speech, taken alone, might not have had further repercussions. After
all, he had gotten away with calling the army a “shelter of bandits” in March—
an expression almost identical to his “shelter of torturers” comment now. Once
Moreira Alves gave the speech, if the Chamber leadership had been more attentive,
the offending phrases might have been stricken before the Diário da Câmara was
published, or the Diário da Câmara could have been withheld from circulation.
Indeed, after he had called the government “bandits and gangsters” on August 29,
the Chamber leadership had censored “bandits,” leaving only “gangsters,” which
he had uttered in English.108 Something similar may have happened on September
3. A comparison of the typed transcript of the second speech with the published
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

version reveals minor edits, made by the Chamber leadership or Moreira Alves
himself, in an effort to soften the harsh language. The version in the typed notes
urged young women who freqüentam young officers to boycott them. Freqüentar,
which translates into English as “to frequent,” can also mean “to have relations
with,” or, euphemistically, “to have sexual relations with.” In the notes, however,
freqüentar is crossed out and replaced with a handwritten namorar, meaning “to
date”; its substitution for the sexually charged freqüentar was likely an attempt to
render the speech less objectionable.109
Another way to limit the fallout would have been for ARENA deputies to give
speeches of their own defending the military. But none did. Their silence indicates
that Jorge Curi, who had urged ARENA vice-leaders to refrain from defending
the government, spoke for many. Even the majority leader, Sátiro, had been tepid
in his defense of the regime. He had remained absent for days, hoping to avoid

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 “The Blood of the Youth Is Flowing”     31

explaining why he had not yet wrangled an explanation for the invasion from
Costa e Silva; he briefly entered during Moreira Alves’s first speech, only to leave
abruptly when he realized its subject. When he finally spoke that afternoon, he
promised that he would offer an explanation once he had one.110
Published on September 3–4 in the Diário da Câmara, the speeches were dis-
tributed in the barracks as an example of the contempt in which the political class
held the military.111 Military critics of Moreira Alves seized on three passages—the
reference to a “shelter for torturers,” the proposal to boycott Independence Day,
and, above all, the suggestion that young women should “boycott” their soldier
companions. On September 5, Army Minister Lyra Tavares requested that Costa e
Silva take measures to prevent more attacks like these and repair the damage done
to the military’s honor.112 The stage was set for an unprecedented showdown.

C O N C LU SIO N S

In 1968, the indignities that had been heaped on politicians since 1964 culmi-
nated in the repression of the student movement. Politicians had watched, even
collaborated, as colleagues were removed, institutional acts were decreed, and a
new ­constitution was imposed. Yet now the military had targeted their children
and their friends, the privileged elite who despite their youthful rebellion would
one day assume their place as leaders of Brazil. These attacks on their children
and their social class were more than many politicians could bear, and they showed
their displeasure by protecting students from arrest, joining their marches, and
blasting the regime for its ham-fisted handling of a situation that, in their eyes,
should have been handled with understanding.
On the surface, this sympathy is surprising. Few politicians, even on the Left,
found much in common ideologically with students who read Marx and Mao,
idolized Fidel and Ché, and dreamed of a revolution to overturn the structures
that facilitated the dominance of the political class (and the students themselves).
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Former leaders of the student movement have emphasized these differences. Stu-
dents would never dream of becoming politicians themselves; for them, politics
were only useful when “directed toward transforming society, not gaining posts
or positions.”113 Scholars have similarly highlighted the divergences between the
students of 1968 and parliamentary politics.114 In part, this is because scholars have
focused on Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where politicians took a less prominent
role than in Brasília. But this oversight is also due to their assimilation of the stu-
dents’ antipolitician rhetoric.
Yet these differences were not enough to overcome ties of family and class.
Indeed, several prominent student leaders were the sons of politicians. Politicians
sympathized with the students because they were their own children, because they
remembered their own days as student activists with nostalgia, or because stu-
dents belonged to their social class. Perhaps they were communists; perhaps they

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
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 32    Chapter 1

were “subversive.” But that was of no account, for they were politicians’ children.
When students were harassed by unlettered soldiers and policemen, it was a fun-
damental violation of the way the political class believed the world should work.
When students appealed for politicians’ assistance, it was because they recog-
nized that they were members of the same class and could expect aid. It is dif-
ficult to imagine many politicians from either party inviting trade unionists or
rural workers to hide in Congress from the police. Despite their Marxist ideology,
student activists were cut from the same cloth as their parents, and many, like
Franklin Martins, São Paulo student leaders José Dirceu, José Serra, and Aloy-
sio Nunes Ferreira Filho, and most notably, student and armed militant Dilma
Rousseff, would go on to have political careers of their own. Time has proven that
Covas was correct when he equated Honestino Guimarães’s leadership of students
with preparation for politics.115
In 1968, however, the military had little patience for leftist students or their
politician parents. Though there are few sources relating the military’s reaction, it
is not difficult to imagine. The “Revolution” had been necessary, in their eyes, to
root out subversion, wherever it might be found. If communist “subversion” came
from the children of Brazil’s political elites, the response should be no different
than if they were rural workers, trade unionists, or leftist priests. But instead of
recognizing the danger and repudiating their children’s errors, politicians, includ-
ing supposed allies, were seeking to shield them. To the military, suspicious of
civilian politicians from the outset, it must have looked as though they tolerated
such behavior because they secretly wished that they too could fight the regime.
Adding insult to injury, out-of-control oppositionists like Moreira Alves were
recasting the military doing its duty as torture, questioning their patriotism, and
challenging their manhood. The time had come to send a message to the political
class once and for all, and the regime resolved to do so by demanding that Con-
gress revoke Moreira Alves’s immunity so that he could be tried for his insults to
military honor. The next chapter turns to the dramatic confrontation that ensued.
Copyright © 2023. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Pitts, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes : Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship, University of
California Press, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/colmex/detail.action?docID=31655159.
Created from colmex on 2024-12-19 01:15:35.