Castello Branco, Humberto de Alencar

(1900–1967)

   Army general and president of Brazil from April 1964 to March 1967. He was the first of five military presidents following the coup that toppled the left-leaning President João Goulart. The military ruled until 1985.

   Castello Branco was born in Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceará, in Brazil’s northeast. The son of a brigadier general, he graduated from a preparatory military academy in Porto Alegre and then began his military career, at age 18, as a cadet at the Escola Militar do Realengo, the national military academy in Rio de Janeiro. His subsequent training included courses at Brazil’s Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG, Higher War College), France’s national war college, and the United States Army Command and Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. He also fought in Italy in 1944 and 1945 as part of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force.

   Castello Branco was a noted intellectual, reading widely in four languages. He was the leader of the “Sorbonne group”—a group of officers, like generals Ernesto Geisel and Golbery do Couto e Silva, who were moderate compared with the hard-liners. Though largely believing in democracy, they saw the need for short-term authoritarian government. They also were strongly associated with the ESG, where, after the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Brazilian military adopted the concept of “internal war.” The concept identified the greater threat to the country as coming not from outside invasion but from internal, left-wing subversion. In 1963, convinced that Goulart was trying to turn the country into a socialist state, Castello Branco, the army chief of staff, led a conspiracy to overthrow him. The coup took place on 31 March and 1 April 1964. On 15 April, Castello Branco was inaugurated president.

   Within the first two weeks of the coup, the military waged a “dirty war” against its political enemies. Thousands were arrested, and many were tortured. But after the Correio da Manhã, a Rio de Janeiro newspaper, published reports on torture (the press was still relatively free), Castello Branco asked Geisel to investigate, and the systematic use of torture stopped—at least for this first phase of military rule. Castello Branco’s government was characterized less by torture than by political purges, especially of leftists. Under Article 10 of the government’s first Ato Institucional (AI, Institutional Act), AI-1, he had the power to suspend any citizen’s political rights for 10 years and to remove legislators from office at the national, state, and municipal levels. By 15 June 1964, when Article 10 expired, more than 400 Brazilians had lost their political rights or been removed from office. Among them were former presidents and members of Congress, as well as diplomats, intellectuals, and trade unionists. Also purged were civil servants and those military officers who had opposed the coup. Having subdued his opponents, Castello Branco carried out an economic-stabilization plan that lowered inflation and raised the GDP but that also entailed sacrifices, especially among workers. In October 1965, after opposition candidates won two state governorships, he issued AI-2, one of whose provisions abolished all existing political parties. They were replaced with a two-party system under military control.

   On 15 March 1967, Castello Branco was succeeded in office by General Artur da Costa e Silva, a hard-liner. On 18 July, Castello Branco died in a plane accident.