Fernando Alcoforado*
This article aims to demonstrate that the republican period in Brazil that completes 130 years of existence since its proclamation on November 15, 1889 has been deplorable. The Republic succeeded in Brazil the imperial period that reached its peak between 1850 and 1870 and later declined with the development of various events. The end of slave trade and slavery, the introduction of immigrant labor, and the quarrels with the military and religious were fundamental issues that shook the monarchy. The first blunt blow against D. Pedro II occurred in the year 1888, when Princess Isabel authorized the release of all slaves by British imposition. From then on, the government lost the support of slave owners, last pillar that sustained the existence of the imperial power. The following year, the increase in conflict in army-empire relations was sufficient for a military coup to overthrow the monarchy and proclaim the republic in Brazil that was born without the participation of the people in its construction.
The main deplorable fact of the Proclamation of the Republic is that it was not the result of the struggle of the Brazilian people but of an army-sponsored coup d’état with the support of the economic oligarchies that dominated Brazil. The Republic Proclamation repeated what happened with the Independence of Brazil, which did not result from the struggle of the Brazilian people, but rather from the will of Emperor D. Pedro I. The Republic born of the coup maintains the agrarian economic model. exporter who has privileged the interests of the oligarchies since 1500 with the vile latifundia inherited from the colonial period. Also deplorable was the continued subordination of the country to England since 1810. The Republic in Brazil had the following phases: 1) Old Republic from 1889 to 1929; 2) National Developmentalalist Republic from 1930 to 1954; 3) Dependent capitalist republic from 1955 to 1990; and 4) Neoliberal republic from 1990 to the present.
- The Old Republic
The Old Republic is the name given to the period between the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889 and the outbreak of the Revolution of 1930. Usually, the Old Republic is divided into two moments: the Republic of the Sword and the Republic Oligarchic. The Republic of the Sword encompasses the governments of the marshals Deodoro da Fonseca and Floriano Peixoto. It was during the Sword Republic that it was granted the Constitution that would guide the institutional actions during the Old Republic. In addition, this period was marked by economic crises, such as the Encilhamento, and by conflicts such as the Federalist Revolution and the Navy Revolt. The Encilhamento was the name given by which became known the economic policy adopted during the provisional government of Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca with the emission of paper money to face the crisis of the lack of money circulating in the country. The failure of this economic policy provoked the discontent of the sectors related to the agrarian-export sector.
The Oligarchic Republic was marked by the political control exercised over the federal government by the São Paulo coffee oligarchy and by the rural elite of Minas Gerais, in the well-known “coffee latte policy”. It was during this period that colonelism developed more strongly, guaranteeing regional political power to the local elites of the country. This period also marks the rise and fall of the economic power of the farmers of São Paulo based on the production of coffee for export. During this period there were several social conflicts such as the War of Canudos, the Revolt of the Vaccine, the Revolt of the Chibata, the War of the Contestado, the Tenentismo, the Column Prestes and the Cangaço.
The agrarian-exporting economic model that was adopted from the colonial period from 1500 to 1930 had as main interests in its maintenance the class of landowners and agro export sectors. This model was exhausted as a consequence of the world economic crisis of 1929 that affected Brazil’s exports to the international market, the emergence of an industrial bourgeoisie committed to the modernization of the Country and the political crisis resulting from the fraudulent election of the successor of then President Washington Luis which resulted in the so-called Revolution of 30 and the rise to power of Getúlio Vargas. From the colonial period until 1930, Brazil focused its economic activity on the production of primary products for export. During this period, there were three major production cycles in Brazil – that of sugarcane, gold and coffee – which, alongside other less productive production systems, sought, fundamentally, to supply the external market. The crisis of the rural oligarchies and the world economic crisis that deeply affected the coffee production in 1929 led to the fall of the Old Republic. It was the end of the Old Republic and the beginning of the Vargas Age.
The Old Republic was deplorable because it still prevailed in Brazil the agrarian-export model that was structured based on the latifundium since 1500. Also deplorable was the exercise of power in a pseudodemocratic way by the oligarchies that dominated Brazil. Also deplorable was the maintenance of the country’s subordination to England since the Empire from 1810.
- The national developmentalist Republic
It can be affirmed that the maintenance of the agrarian-export model for more than 400 years during the colonial period, the Empire and the Old Republic constituted a gigantic obstacle to the development of Brazil. The agrarian-export model was structured on the basis of latifundium and slave labor until 1888 and based on the latifundium from 1888 to 1930. The agrarian-export model was replaced by the national-developmentalist model from 1930, when Getúlio Vargas rose to power and begins the period of industrialization in Brazil. This economic model promoted the development of Brazil with the import substitution policy, mainly supported by government investments, especially in infrastructure, investments by state-owned enterprises and investments of national private capital.
Vargas based his administration on the precepts of populism, nationalism, and labor. Economic policy began to value the domestic market that favored industrial growth and, consequently, the urbanization process. The Era Vargas marks, therefore, the change of the directions of the Republic, transferring the nucleus of the political power from agriculture to the industry. The Brazilian capitalism that was born with the wages of the coffee economy of the West Paulista in 1880 could only develop necessarily with the integration of the national market. Integrating the national market with the prioritized development of industry was Brazil’s only option not to stagnate. The Vargas government’s economic policy and public investment made it possible for capital to remove the main barriers to national market integration.
The centralism of the Vargas period paved the way for the complete unification of the internal market, which was all the more important as the driving force of the economy became industrial activity. It was thanks to this centralizing impulse that Brazil definitively endowed itself with an integrated internal market capable of generating its own growth. Until 1930, the participation of industry in the Brazilian economy was insignificant. The economic crisis of 1929 and the Revolution of 1930 created the conditions for the beginning of the process of rupture of Brazil with the colonial past and the takeoff of the process of industrialization of the country.
The political forces that assumed power in Brazil in 1930 supported and implemented an industrialization project with the objective of withdrawing it from economic backwardness and pushing it toward progress with the establishment of its own industrial park, in the mold of the European nations and from United States. It was the first time in Brazilian history that a government made such an option. In 1930, the ideology of nationalism became victorious: autonomous development with a strong industrial base. Industrialization developed through the process of import substitution, that is, producing in the country what was formerly imported from abroad. In the first phase of industrialization from 1930 to 1940, the emphasis was on the production of immediate consumer goods (non-durable goods).
It is possible to emphasize some political facts that were remarkable in the decade of 1930. It happened the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932 or Civil War Paulista that was the first great uprising against the administration of Getúlio Vargas. The movement was a response of São Paulo against the Revolution of 1930, which ended with the autonomy of the states guaranteed by the Constitution of 1891. The insurgents demanded of the Vargas government the elaboration of a new Constitution and the convocation of elections for president. The Constitutionalist Revolution broke out on July 9, 1932. The Paulistas, led by their governor, made a great campaign using newspapers and radios, and managed to mobilize a good part of the population. There were more than 200,000 volunteers, 60,000 of whom were combatants. On the other hand, while the movement gained popular support, 100,000 Vargas government soldiers set out to confront the Paulistas. The Paulistas expected the support of Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul. However, both states did not join the cause. In total, there were 87 days of fighting, from July 9 to October 4, 1932 with 934 deaths, although unofficial estimates reported up to 2,100 deceased.
Despite the defeat on the battlefield, politically the Constitutionalist Revolution achieved its objectives because the struggle for the Constitution contributed to the convening of the Constituent Assembly that would make the new Magna Carta of the Country in 1934. However, it would never be implemented by account of the auto coup d´état of Getúlio Vargas that instituted the dictatorship of New State in 1937 after the outbreak of the revolutionary movement led by the communists in 1935, which was crushed by the federal government. The New State was an authoritarian regime that was aligned with other authoritarian regimes in the world, as at that moment Germany and Italy were the two countries that represented the most authoritarianism in Europe. In Brazil, which was also ruled by an authoritarian government, Getúlio Vargas shows sympathy for the fascist regime, so that the new constitution of 1937, called Polish, is directly inspired by the Italian molds of that era.
As the end of World War II became clear, there was growing rejection of Getúlio Vargas’s government, which was forced by local political forces to grant amnesty to political prisoners, to allow freedom of party organization, to call a new Constituent Assembly and set new elections. On October 29, 1945, under pressure from the United States government, soldiers invaded Catete Palace in Rio de Janeiro and forced the resignation of President Vargas. Thus, the fall of the Estado Novo was consolidated.
Following the deposition of Getúlio Vargas, General Eurico Dutra was the first president elected by direct vote. Internally, it had as its first great action, the convening of the National Constituent Assembly that drafted the laws to be integrated into a new Constitution. Officialized in 1946, the new Brazilian Constitution determined the autonomy between the three branches of government and the holding of direct elections for state, municipal and federal executive and legislative positions. In the economy, being a consumer market of great interest, Brazil absorbed a significant quantity of consumer goods, mainly of the United States. In a short time, the country’s foreign exchange reserves slowed, domestic industry slowed and foreign debt started to grow, making the country more and more vulnerable economically.
President Dutra experienced the tensions and problems that marked the development of the Cold War in the international political scene. Not restraining itself to the economic field with the increase of the dependence of Brazil in relation to the United States, the alliance of the Dutra government with the US government also had repercussions on political actions of authoritarian nature in the internal plane. By imposition of the United States, the Communist Party, after receiving a significant amount of votes in the 1946 elections, was put into lawlessness and all civil servants belonging to the same party were exonerated from their positions. Shortly thereafter, the Brazilian government announced the breakup of its diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
Brazil was again governed in the first half of the 1950s by President Getúlio Vargas, who came to power through the electoral process and, by implementing to his government the same populist and nationalist policy adopted from 1930 to 1945, be the target of the US government and its internal allies, who wanted it out of power. The deposition of Getúlio Vargas in 1945 and his suicide in 1954 were consequences of this process. At that time, during the Cold War, it was fundamentally important for the United States, in its confrontation with the former Soviet Union, to keep under its control its areas of influence in Latin America, including Brazil, and in other parts of the world.
In the period 1951/1953, during the Vargas administration, a much more ambitious and complete planning effort was carried out than in the previous period. At that time, there was one of the most complete surveys of the Brazilian economy, as well as proposing a series of infrastructure projects with its execution programs, covering modernization projects for railways, ports, coastal navigation, electricity generation, etc. Measures were adopted to overcome regional disparities in income, that is, to better integrate the Northeast with the rest of the national economy and to achieve monetary stability. Also created were BNDES and Petrobras. By not accepting his deposition by the military in 1954, President Vargas committed suicide, and his attitude represented, also, the final act of the first Brazilian ruler who guided his action in defense of national sovereignty.
In spite of the economic successes in promoting the industrialization of Brazil and in creating governmental institutions that promoted economic and social development and the social advances resulting from new legislation, Era Vargas also had its deplorable aspect represented by the state of exception that was implanted from 1937 to 1945 in which the Vargas government arrested in its prisons and assassinated many of its opponents. It was deplorable, too, the suicide of President Getúlio Vargas to avoid suffering the consequences of the evolving coup d’etat in 1954.
- The dependent capitalist Republic
Brazil adopted the model of dependent capitalist development from the Juscelino Kubitschek government in 1955 and maintained until 1985 by military rulers who came to power with the coup d’état in 1964. This economic model promoted the development of Brazil with the policy of replacing imports, supported by government investments, especially in infrastructure, domestic private equity investments and foreign investment and technology as well as financing from international banks. During the administration of President Juscelino Kubitschek (JK), elected in 1955, the extensive program of public and private investments made between 1956 and 1961, when heavy industry and durable consumer goods were introduced, changed the pattern of market domination national. It reinforced, on the one hand, the industrial concentration that took place in São Paulo and in neighboring regions and, on the other, demanded greater agricultural and industrial complementarity between São Paulo and the rest of the country. In the JK government, it was believed that it would be possible to carry out the country’s development from a single dynamic center (in this case, São Paulo). The policy of centralizing development in São Paulo contributed decisively to widening the existing regional inequalities in Brazil.
The expansion of the Brazilian economy was done with increasing participation of oligopolized foreign capital that realized its investments aiming at the complete conquest of the national market. From the Kubitschek government, the de-nationalization of the national economy with foreign capital has been deepened, taking over the industrialization process of Brazil and the national industry being relegated to its own fate by suffering competition from external groups attracted by official incentives and advantages. In the mid-1950s, Brazilian industrialization took a new turn. Until then, during the Vargas administration, the process of industrialization had advanced under the leadership of the Brazilian company. From the Juscelino Kubitscheck government, foreign capital will gradually assume control of the most dynamic branches of the Brazilian economy.
The Jânio Quadros government, who was elected replacing the Juscelino Kubitschek government, lasted only 7 months. With regard to economic policy, Jânio Quadros carried out a currency reform that favored the export sector and international creditors. Despite adopting a conservative economic policy in line with the interests of the United States, he proposed the resumption of diplomatic and trade relations with countries of the socialist bloc (China and Soviet Union), causing much criticism from the sectors that supported his government. On August 25, 1961, Jânio Quadros resigned the Presidency of the Republic promptly accepted by the National Congress. In the resignation letter, Jânio Quadros said: “terrible forces have risen against me,” intending to provoke a popular reaction against his resignation to remain in power. However, this did not happen, and Vice-President João Goulart assumed the presidency of the Republic, on September 3, 1961, in a parliamentary regime, which was the political solution found before the opposition of the Armed Forces to his possession.
Vice President João Goulart assumed the Presidency of the Republic in 1961 succeeding Jânio Quadros. Faced with the great structural problems experienced by Brazil and to face the economic, political and social crisis that existed in the early 1960s, the João Goulart government sought to implement the so-called Basic Reforms. Under the name of “basic reforms” were initiatives that aimed at banking, tax, urban, administrative, agrarian and university reforms. It also included offering the right to vote for illiterates and the subaltern patents of the Armed Forces. The measures also sought a greater participation of the State in economic matters, regulating foreign investment in Brazil. Among the changes intended by the basic reforms was, first, agrarian reform. The objective was to enable thousands of rural workers to access land in the hands of the latifundium. The law of remittance of profits sought to reduce the very high profit index that the great foreign companies sent from Brazil to their headquarters.
The government’s assault on the implementation of grassroots reforms began on March 13, 1964, through a large rally in Central Brazil Station in Rio de Janeiro. At this rally, President João Goulart announced the signing of the decree that became the property of the government private petroleum refineries and the decree that expropriated unproductive lands located alongside roads and railroads. As the proposals were influenced by left-wing thinking, proponents of capitalism, latifundia, and members of the Brazilian right feared the growth of a possible communist government in the country.
The rally in Central Brazil Station was the decisive moment to determine the organization of the military to begin the coup d´état that was launched on March 31, 1964 establishing a military dictatorship in the country. The Armed Forces were also influenced by the ideological polarization experienced by the Brazilian society in that political conjuncture due to the breakdown of the hierarchy and the discipline due to the upheaval of subaltern sectors. The scholars of the subject affirm that, the breakdown of hierarchy and discipline within the Armed Forces was the main factor that caused the removal of support of the legalistic military to the government of João Goulart, facilitating the coup d´état movement.
After the coup d’état of 1964, the political model adopted was aimed at strengthening executive power and debugging the political environment of leftists or liberals who opposed the dictatorship. Seventeen institutional acts and about a thousand exceptional laws were imposed on Brazilian society. With Institutional Act No. 2, the old political parties were closed and bipartisanship was adopted. Thus emerged: the National Renewal Alliance (Arena), which supported the government and the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), representing opponents, but surrounded by narrow limits of performance. The government set up a strong repressive system with the creation of the National Information Service (SNI). The institutional acts promulgated during the governments of the generals Castello Branco (1964-1967) and Artur da Costa e Silva (1967-1969) ended the rule of law and the democratic institutions of the country. In order to contain the opposition, General Costa e Silva decreed in December 1968, Institutional Act No. 5 that suspended the activities of the Congress and authorized the persecution of opponents.
In October 1969, 240 general officers appointed General Emilio Garrastazu Medici (1969-1974), the former head of the SNI, as President of Republic. In January 1970, a decree-law made previous censorship of the press more rigid. In the fight against leftist groups, the Army created the Department of Internal Operations (DOI) and the Internal Defense Operations Center (CODI). The activity of the repressive organs dismantled the organizations of urban and rural guerrillas, which led to the death of hundreds of militants of the left. On March 15, 1974, Medici was replaced in the presidency by General Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979), who assumed power promising to resume economic growth and reestablish democracy. Even slowly and gradually the political opening began, which allowed the growth of opposition.
Slow, gradual and secure political openness became a necessity for the military regime because it was increasingly difficult to keep the country operating on the basis of repression. In 1975, faced with the MDB’s refusal to approve the reform of the Constitution proposed by the dictatorship, Congress was closed and the president’s term was increased to six years. The opposition began to pressure the government, along with civil society. With increasing pressure, the Congress that was reopened in 1979, approved the repeal of the AI-5. Congress could no longer be closed, nor could the political rights of citizens be annulled. Geisel chose as its successor the general João Batista Figueiredo, indirectly elected. Figueiredo took office on March 15, 1979, with the commitment to deepen the process of political openness. However, the economic crisis continued, with foreign debt reaching more than 100 billion dollars, and inflation reaching 200% a year. The economic crisis and the political crisis together put in question the governability of the country and the military dictatorship.
From 1968 to 1973, Brazil experienced high rates of economic growth, generating a climate of general optimism that was soon christened the “economic miracle,” and industry was the main sector in the development boom begun in 1968. During the military dictatorship, were implemented 3 PNDs – National Development Plan in the governments Garrastazu Médici, Ernesto Geisel and João Figueiredo. It was above all in the Ernesto Geisel government, with the II PND, whose objectives were to complete the Brazilian industrial structure, to replace imports of basic inputs and capital goods, to overcome the exchange problems resulting from the oil crisis, to develop coal projects, non-ferrous metals, sugarcane alcohol, electric energy and oil deployed in the 1970s in various parts of the country and contribute to the deconcentrating of productive activity in Brazil.
The spaces of struggle for the end of the presence of the military in the central power were multiplying. In the last months of 1983, a campaign for the direct elections for president, the “Direct Already”, that united several political leaders. The movement reached its peak in 1984, when the Dante de Oliveira Amendment was voted, which sought to re-establish the direct elections for president. On April 25, the amendment, despite winning the majority of votes, failed to get the 2/3 needed for its approval. Soon after the defeat of April 25, a large part of the opposition forces decided to participate in the indirect elections for president. The PMDB launched Tancredo Neves for president and José Sarney for vice president. When the Electoral College was assembled, the majority of the votes went to Tancredo Neves, who defeated Paulo Maluf of the PDS, candidate of the military dictatorship. Thus ended the military dictatorship. Tancredo Neves passed away before assuming, a fact that caused Vice-President Jose Sarney to occupy the Presidency of the Republic.
With the end of the military dictatorship, a new Constitution was necessary. The National Constituent Assembly began to meet in February 1987 and only had its activities closed in September 1988. In addition to the federal deputies and senators, there was also the presence of “notables”, that is, specialists in various subjects that concerned the citizenship, education, jurisprudence, that is, all matters related to the legal structure of a Federal Constitution. The new Constitution was promulgated on October 5, 1988, and remains to this day as the fundamental law of Brazil, that is, it is the basis of the entire Brazilian legal system.
From 1980 to 1989, during the period of the governments João Figueiredo and José Sarney, there was a profound deterioration of Brazil’s economic and social situation. In the 1980s, Brazil presented a deficit in the balance of payments, which was aggravated by the second “oil shock” and the sharp rise in interest rates in the international market. The development model based on the process of import substitution and dependent on technology and foreign capital, which reached its peak in the 1970s, was exhausted in the early 1980s and nothing has been done in the whole decade to restructure the Brazilian economy on new bases. The 1980s and 1990s marked Brazil’s longest and most serious crisis in its history only overcome by the current crisis that broke out in 2014.
The recession and rising unemployment of the early and late 1980s took on a hitherto unknown dimension. The most characteristic feature of the Brazilian economy is that the sharp fall in the growth rate indicated the depletion of a pattern that gave it impressive dynamism throughout the period of modern industrialization, particularly after the mid-1950s. With the economy claudicating, the return of some exiles who were in charge of reporting the barbarities witnessed or lived in the basements of the dictatorship, and the pro-amnesty campaign winning the streets, Brazilian society was winning the struggle for democracy. Even so, having to give up and negotiate, such as the amnesty for “both sides”, it ended up burying any possibility of punishment for those guilty of crimes of gross human rights violations during the military dictatorship.
It can be seen, therefore, that the developmental experience in Brazil from 1930 to 1985 had in the federal government its main agent and as its main support the process of industrialization. The industrialization process accentuated the regional concentration of economic activities and made it even more difficult to redistribute income. Inspired by ECLAC’s theses, the Brazilian rulers of the 1950s believed that import substitution industrialization would make the economy less caudatory of the central capitalist countries. The hope of gaining a greater degree of economic independence through industrialization has diminished because it has come to the realization that it has brought a new and more complex kind of dependence with the penetration of multinational corporations into the Brazilian market. In addition, the coup d’etat that deposed João Goulart aborted the initiative to return to the national developmentalism initiated by Getúlio Vargas.
The main deplorable facts of this period of Brazilian history were undoubtedly the abandonment of the national development model that aimed to promote autonomous development and combat the economic and technological dependence of the country in relation to the outside, the economic concentration of Brazil in São Paulo that contributed to the deepening of regional inequalities, the failure of the dependent capitalist development model that led to the bankruptcy of the Brazilian state and of large sectors of the Brazilian economy, and the most deplorable fact was the military dictatorship that lasted for 21 years from 1964 to 1985.
- The neoliberal Republic
The neo-liberal economic model was initiated in Brazil under the Fernando Collor government in 1990, when the process of dismantling the institutional apparatus characterizing the national developmentalist model of the Vargas Era and the model of capitalist development dependent on the Kubitschek government and the rulers of the military regime in Brazil. Internal and external factors contributed to changes in this institutional apparatus. Internally, the state financial crisis, which made it unable to act as an investor, the insufficiency of domestic private savings, the cessation of financing of international banks and the reduction of foreign direct investment in Brazil as a result of the foreign debt crisis in the 1980 put in check the model of financially and technologically dependent capitalist development of the exterior until then in force. The neoliberal economic model seeks to promote development supported exclusively by domestic and foreign private investments, including infrastructure that has always been an area reserved for government investments.
Fernando Collor de Mello was the first president of Brazil elected directly by popular vote after the end of the Military Regime of 1964-1985. His government had to face a severe financial crisis, which required drastic measures. The solutions presented by his team of economists, such as the plans Collor I and Collor II, were disastrous, provoking a strong popular rejection. That was not enough, the treasurer of Collor’s presidential campaign, Paulo César (PC) Farias, was accused of being involved in a corruption scandal. This suspicion eventually involved the figure of the president in the scandal, a fact that cost not only his position, but also his political rights.
Adopting the neoliberal adjustment strategy formulated by the Washington Consensus, the Itamar Franco government, which replaced Fernando Collor government, and the Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) government, which replaced the Itamar Franco government, began to fulfill its three stages described below: 1 ) stabilization of the economy (combating inflation); (2) structural reforms (privatization, deregulation of markets, financial and trade liberalization), and (3) resumption of foreign investment to leverage development. The governments Itamar Franco and FHC have processed the fight against inflation with the Real Plan, privatized state enterprises and opened the national economy even more to international capital. The Lula government maintained the same policy as its predecessor FHC, except for the privatization policy. The government Dilma Rousseff continued the governments of FHC and Lula that preceded it, resuming the privatization policy that had the denomination of public-private partnership.
The economic neoliberal model in Brazil brought with it the economic recession that began in 2014, the general bankruptcy of companies, the massive unemployment that reaches 13 million workers, the underutilization of 27 million workers, the deindustrialization of the Country and the the denationalization of what still remains of the public patrimony in Brazil and, consequently, in greater subordination of the Country in relation to the exterior. The recessive economic crisis associated with systemic corruption that was present in several federal government organs caused Dilma Rousseff, who was president of the Federative Republic of Brazil from January 2011 to August 2016 (reelected in the 2014 elections), to suffer rejection of the economically dominant classes, of a large part of the population and of the majority of the National Congress and underwent a process of impeachment that resulted in his removal from office.
The Michel Temer government, which replaced Dilma Rousseff’s government, further aggravated Brazil’s economic and social situation by adopting measures that deepened the recession and made it unfeasible for Brazil to resume its development. The results are there: negative economic growth, external imbalances, deindustrialization of the country, stagnation of productivity, generalized bankruptcy of companies, mass unemployment, high internal debt, fiscal crisis of federal, state and municipal governments, and now regression in the field of social achievements with the adoption of labor reform.
Prospects for the future of Brazil are extremely negative with the Jair Bolsonaro government, which should further radicalize the adoption of the neoliberal model whose consequences will be disastrous for Brazil in the face of the threat it poses to democracy, social rights and Brazil’s independence in relation to major powers and international capital. In the neoliberal era in which we live, there is no room for advancing democracy, social rights and national independence. On the contrary, there is the elimination of democracy and social rights and the deconstruction and denial of the achievements already made by the subaltern classes. The so-called “reforms” of social security, labor laws, privatization of public enterprises, etc. – “reforms” that are currently present on the political agenda of both central and peripheral capitalist countries (now elegantly renamed “emerging” as Brazil) are aimed at the pure and simple restoration of the conditions of a “savage capitalism” which the laws of the market must be vigorously enforced. This is, therefore, the deplorable trajectory of Brazil with the adoption of the neoliberal model.
- Conclusions
Brazil has nothing to celebrate with the Republic established in 1889 through a coup d´état that, throughout its history, has not contributed to social change for the benefit of the people and national independence.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 79, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is author of the books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018, em co-autoria) and Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019).
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