I have been requested to provide more backing to my bold claims that it was not a revolution, but a textbook coup d’état, and it was the single most devastating tragedy of Brazilian history. Such claims are added after the second horizontal bar.It was a coup because, like in 1889’s Republican Declaration, we, the people, were not consulted and, but, in fact, we were repressed when we tried to refuse the change they-who-know-better tried to impose on us.And it was devastatingly bad because it:didn’t solve any of our long-term problems (poverty, illiteracy, lacking infrastructure, weak military)created new problems (military and strategic dependency to the USA, botched educational reform that destroyed the potential of an entire generation, backwards culture policy that destroyed a budding culture movement and created a hideously gross pop culture to replace)made some problems even worse (inequality, urban violence, police violence, corruption)destroyed some solutions we had found (they began tearing down our railroad network and simply destroyed our budding automotive industry, which included Vemag, FNM, Brasinca, Puma and Gurgel, as a part of a war against national initiative and brands, which included closing Panair (our flag-carrier) Tupi TV (our most popular television channel).embittered the Brazilian upper class against progressive ideasscrapped long-term plans of industrial development which had been planned by Kubitschek and Goulart (and would have beet set in place had JK won in 1965 and Goulart in 1970, as they had agreed to alternate support among themselves).Brazil emerged from the dictatorship with our musical market soaked in foreign pop music, our publishing industry based mostly on best-seller translations, no national automotive industry, less than 50% of its railways operational, with a huge foreign debit, inflation over 200% yearly, extreme inequality and most big cities taken by organised crime. We still had 20% of illiterate people (while our greatest educator, Paulo Freire, was in exile) and our educational system was abysmally bad.As a result our national culture began to die out, our economy entered a premature process of de-industrialisation (which continues today), our transportation network became expensive and clogged, our national budget was compromised by foreign debt service and our cities became violent, damaging our tourism economy.As a result of high levels of illiteracy and low interest on culture and education in general (less 30% of the population has ever read a book that is not the Bible) we have many people who believe that the dictatorship was awesome and that it should return.By request of Mariana Rimoli Gz and to better inform Joao Rodrigo Souza Leao, I’ll add more details to my answer. Hope these are helpful to make my claims more believable.Problems the dictatorship didn’t solve:Poverty. Attention to page 3, where you can find historical data on the percentage of poor people in the country. Source: IPEA.Illiteracy. Pay attention to the historical graphs: though there is a slow decline in relative numbers of illiterate people, the absolute numbers keep growing.Infrastructure. This is an article about how many infrastructure works initiated by the regime were never fully built, costed more than expected (much more) and, in many cases, were useless. The article focuses on the Steel Railway, but I can find as many similar cases as you ask (if you ask reasonable numbers).Military weakness. Official US source documenting how Brazil-US partnership was limited in its scope and Brazil was denied the chance of developing its own missile and rocket technology. This article reads even more ominously when you know that 13 years after it was published a mysterious accident at the Alcântara Air Base killed all Brazilian rocket scientists. And it gets even more suspicious as you time it with the election of a left-wing government in Brazil.Problems the dictatorship created:USA-dependence (see 1.a)Educational reform. Compare the LDB approved by Goulart in 1961 (very progressive and oriented towards building an European-style educational system) and the one approved by the dictatorship. Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional. In a nutshell, the dictatorship cancelled the study of subjects like French, Philosophy, Latin and Greek; at the same time reducing class hours for History, Geography and Literature. More on the insidious changes to education in an item of its own, at the end.Pop culture. From 1968 to 1979 many Brazilian musicians and writers were persecuted, forced into exile and censored. Meanwhile the regime promoted pop music as substitute for elaborate, artsy urban music. This is difficult to document in a single link (or even in a few) but it is easy to see when you follow the biographies of the most relevant Brazilian artists in the 1960s and 1970s and compare with the bios of trash-pop icons of the same era. Some artists, like Geraldo Vandré and Ana Cristina César were literally destroyed (he was tortured brutally and never continued his singer-songwriter career and she got depressed and committed suicide).Problems made worse:Urban violence. In all fairness, urban violence had been always a problem in Brazil and it had been made worse two times before, by the haphazard policies of the Old Republic and by the rushed reforms under Vargas, but the dictatorship made it even worse because it didn’t solve the problems that caused violence (inequality, poverty, social violence), instead using more violence against them (death squads, ethnic cleansing of street beggars). One particularly saddening and criminal deed of the dictatorship was to employ criminal kingpins (bicheiros, the dealers of illegal gambling) to persecute and kill extra-judicially whoever the regime suspected a “subversive” but didn’t have enough evidence or, more usually, suspected to be an unimportant pawn or a lone wolf. Illegal gambling was so entwined within the military that former military man like “Capitão Guimarães” became criminal kingpins themselves.Inequality. Most of the reforms planned by Kubitschek and Goulart would have reduced inequality. The dictatorship scrapped the idea of redistributing land and over the 21 years of authoritarianism, depreciated the minimum wage by increasing it always less than the year’s inflation, in a context of reduction of labour rights.Police violence. See 3.a.Corruption. See 3.a and 4.aSolutions destroyedScrapping of railways. Mismanagement of funds and construction of useless works made the Brazilian Railways (RFFSA) an impossibly indebted corporation. In the late 1980s, its budget was 19% of the budget it had in 1970 and all of it was not enough to pay the interests for the debts acquired. In 1963 RFFSA was one of the biggest railway companied in the world. Over the 21 years of dictatorship it was bankrupted.Automotive industry. In 1965 Brazil was home to the following auto makes (those marked with an asterisk were national and those in italics were developing their own technology): Ford, General Motors, Willys Overland, Gordini/Renault, Simca, FNM*, Volkswagen, Vemag* (producing DKW cars in CKD), Brasinca* (still in planning stages, didn’t yet have a production car), Santa Matilde* (also in planning stages) and Puma*. When the dictatorship ended in 1985 Brazil only had Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Fiat, Gurgel and Puma (these last two didn’t make engines or gearboxes, only custom cars). FNM was sold to Alfa-Romeo (the provider of most technology FNM used before 1966 and which technology it had planned to replace in-house) in 1968. Alfa-Romeo later folded and the former FNM factory was scrapped. Vemag had to be sold to Volkswagen when the government created obstacles for the replacement of DKW technology. Brasinca and Santa Matilde were killed off before they even sold a single car.The dictatorship also forced the closing of Panair, our flag-carrying airliner, under the guise of “bankruptcy” only because its owner had been friends with João Goulart. In the 1970s, to open ground for his faithful friend, Roberto Marinho, and his Globo TV, the dictatorship starved the Tupi Television group and, in 1980, caused its demise by forbidding anyone to buy it and pay its debts.Insidious changes to education.Only in 1961, under João Goulart, would the prevailing political forces allow for the approval of a “Law on Bases and Guidelines for National Education”. Before that year, Brazil had no educational system worth the name, because there were no standards to follow, only a strong centralisation of decisions on the Ministry of Education. Despite strong conservative opposition, the 1961 LDB was quite good and progressive, considering the low point of start. The 1971 LDB reversed, changed or neutered the best aspects of the 1961 LDB and introduced antidemocratic aspects to education.The 1961 version gave autonomy to states, catering for regional characteristics and reducing centralisation. The 1971 version reversed that for all practical purposes.The 1961 version mandated that 12% of the national budget and 20% of each state’s budget would be invested on education, which was a good idea, since more than 40% of the population was still illiterate and the people devising the LDB knew that the world was changing fast and good education would be of paramount importance for the future of the country. The 1971 version mandated that 20% of the budget of each municipality would be invested on education, but there would be no such demand for national and state budgets.The 1961 version set “primary education” (four grades) mandatory, with all the rest optional. There was a clear goal to eradicate illiteracy in the shortest term. The 1961 version mandated “fundamental education” with eight grades, with the rest optional. But there was a caveat: while the 1961 version required that students finished the fourth grade, the 1971 version required that students remained enrolled from 7 to 14 years old. Grade retention was used to select the “best” students. It was so big a problem that only about 17% of the students enrolled for the first grade would finish the eighth.The 1961 version made it easier to form teachers for the “primary” grades, by requiring that they must only have finished the eighth grade to work as “lay teachers” or high school (under a special teacher-training course called Ensino Normal) to work as proper teachers. The 1971 version made the requirements for teaching more stringent, which halted the creation of new schools for a while (though this was later corrected). To cater for the demand of higher education for teaching literacy to kids, a number of colleges (faculdades) were created over the country, all private-owned. Only middle or upper-class people would be able to graduate and become teachers. This change helped avoid that people from the lower classes would become teachers in their own communities.The 1961 mandated 180 schooldays every year, unconditionally. The 1971 version established a “goal” of 180 schooldays, but required only half that to consider a school year “finished”. This was introduced to weaken teachers unions: now teacher’s strikes would not threaten the school year and the government was not so pressured to negotiate an end to them. Teachers․ wages were slowly cut down and the government would later teacher’s strikes as a way to worsen education in general.The 1961 made religious education optional even for confessional schools, now the children of atheists would not be forced to attend religion classes and the children from religious minorities would not be submitted to indoctrination if they sought education at a confessional school that was considered good. The 1971 LDB made religious education compulsory again, though the students were not actually required to take exams, only attend classes.The 1971 version also introduced supletivo (“supplementary education”) which was meant to be a quick ’n․ dirty way to give a certificate to a student who had been retained in lower grades. Upon completing 15, any student who had not yet finished the eighth grade could enrol on such courses and get a certificate in less than two years. Such courses used watered-down textbooks, rushed schedules and lay teachers. To add insult to injury, these certificates were, by law, given equal footing to those issued by regular schools. For those students who were not very keen on studying, this meant that they would get away with their laziness when they were 17, all they had to do was to learn how to read and write and do arithmetic while at the regular school system. This situation further devalued the work of teachers and is the the origin of the abysmally low levels of culture and full literacy found among the Brazilians.The 1971 reduced the number of scheduled weekly hours for subjects like literature, history and geography and forbid subjects like philosophy, French language and philology (Greek and Latin). These were replaced by extra maths and grammar classes. New subjects were also introduced: “Moral and Civic Education” (EMC), “Health Programs” (PS), “Physical Education” (EF), “Artistic Education” (EA) and “Social and Political Organisation of Brazil” (OSPB). Lower grades had History and Geography conflated into “Social Studies” (ES), which was mostly restricted to introductory notions to EMC and OSPB. Most children never had a history class before the 5th grade.Supletivo could be studied by mail, without the presence of a teacher too.Teachers․ wages would be paid according to their formation. This created a “rush for diplomas” that further increased the profits of private-owned colleges. Adding a “certificate” to one’s resume could mean a 5% rise, which made paying half a year’s wages for tuition something most considered. Some post-graduate, mastership or even doctorate courses were abysmally bad: overworked teachers would commute over 100 km to a makeshift “college” where they would have compressed and rushed classes for an entire Saturday, every fortnight, for six months, and then, after a test (without even defending a thesis) they would be granted their diplomas.And, on final note of infamy, the 1971 actually meant to phase out public education after the eighth grade in favour of private schools, where the government would send the “best” students selected by the heavily biased “elementary” grades, where up to 87% of first-graders would be eventually retained.In case you want to know more about the two LDB (and about the current),Wikipédia is your friend. It contains links to the actual laws (archived by the Brazilian government) and to comments on those laws.As you have already seen, the dictatorship had a massive plan of divesting on education right when the world was about to kick-start the “third industrial revolution”, that would be based on information technology and would require extraordinary skills and knowledge from the students.The dictatorship, blindly or on purpose, with this educational reform prevented Brazil from taking advantage of the IT boom to develop itself, like South Korea and Taiwan did, among others. Their dictators were surely better than ours…I hope I have provided enough arguments and evidence to support my claim that our dictatorship was an obscurantist government, lead by ignorant morons enemy of progress and culture. That it was our single greatest tragedy and that it didn’t solve any problems, but created others.
