Workers and Dictators: Brazilian Labour History 50 Years after the Military Coup

In 2014, Brazilians solemnly observed the 50th anniversary of the military coup of 1964. The Comissão Nacional da Verdade (National Truth Commission, cnv), entrusted by the government to thoroughly analyze and publicize (but not punish) the massive human rights abuses of the military regime, published a 4,300 page final report in December 2014 that detailed the pervasive attacks on civil, legal, and political rights as well as the illegal imprisonment, torture, and forced exile of tens of thousands and the direct political assassinations of 434 left-wing oppositionists.¹ During emotional events throughout the year, family members, friends, and comrades paid homage to the victims and public monuments were dedicated by state officials and social movements in several cities. The extensive media coverage of the events was accompanied by the publication of a plethora of new scholarly books, memoirs, autobiographies, and journalistic investigations as well as the release of documentaries and display of historical exhibitions to coincide with the anniversary.² All these events constituted a profound experience of national reckoning with the brutal military dictatorship that lasted for over two decades.

As Antonio Luigi Negro, Larissa Rose Corrêa, and Paulo Fontes remind us, the union movement and workers more generally were the central targets of the 1964 military coup itself and the object of the repressive military regime as well as the active subjects of its overthrow.³ The generals, supported by American imperialism in the context of the Cold War, large national and multinational employers, conservative sections of the middle class, and the corporate media, forcibly deposed President João Goulart in 1964 to prevent the further radicalization of working-class struggles that, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, had increasingly threatened capitalist order. It then governed with an iron fist for more than two decades in the interest of key sectors of multinational and national capital. Repressive legal and police measures against strikes and independent union organization, including the firing, arrest, and sometimes murder of union militants, were central planks of the military regime. Indeed, at least one quarter of the 434 direct political assassinations were of workers active in the labour movement. This proportion would increase significantly if we include “worker-students” – that is, university students who were expelled or abandoned their studies to participate in the labour movement and the struggle against the dictatorship. And the weight of workers among the victims of the regime becomes particular impressive if we include the more than 1,500 rural workers killed (with condemnations in only eight cases) during the dictatorship by employers’ thugs under the cover of a repressive political environment.⁴ In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a protracted economic crisis and a wave of strikes and popular mobilizations sealed the fate of the military dictatorship, forcing the generals to relinquish control in 1985.⁵

At first glance, it is thus particularly surprising that the extensive crop of scholarly studies published in 2014 included few specific histories of the role of the working class during the military regime. This reflects in part the newness of Brazilian labour history and the particular institutional and political context in which it emerged. The writing of labour history in Brazil only reemerged in the 1980s after two decades of direct and indirect censorship and fear of persecution during the dictatorship. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, highly influential in the revolution in labour and social history in Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s, was only published in Portuguese for the first time in 1987.⁶ It thus took some time to intellectually and institutionally consolidate a coherent historiographical field: while there were important labour histories published immediately before and after the end of the dictatorship, it is noteworthy that the Brazilian labour history journal, Mundos do Trabalho...