Geisel, Ernesto

(1908–1996)

   Army general and president of Brazil from March 1974 to March 1979. He was the fourth of five military presidents following the 1964 coup that toppled the leftleaning President João Goulart. The military ruled until 1985. Geisel was born in the town of Bento Gonçalves, in Rio Grande do Sul. He began his military career in 1925 as a cadet at the Escola Militar do Realengo, the national military academy in Rio de Janeiro. In 1938 he graduated from the Escola de Armas. In the mid-1940s, he took courses at the United States Army Command and Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, and in 1949 he cofounded the Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG, Higher War College). With his fellow generals Humberto de Alencar Castello Branco and Golbery do Couto e Silva, he was a member of the “Sorbonne group”—a group of moderate officers associated with the ESG. After the coup of 1964, which he helped plan, he held positions under a succession of military presidents: head of the military cabinet under Castello Branco (1964–1967), head of the Supreme Military Court under Artur da Costa e Silva (1967–1969), and president of Petrobras, the state petroleum company, under Emílio Garrastazú Médici (1969–1974). Geisel was sworn in as president on 15 March 1974. Unlike Médici, who had presided over the most repressive period of the “dirty war,” Geisel presided over a period of political liberalization known as distensão (relaxation). He eased censorship, reduced the power of death squads, and laid the foundation for a transition to democratic rule—a transition that would be completed by his successor, General João Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo (1979–1985). Geisel died in Rio de Janeiro on 12 September 1996.