Outcast Officers: Political Persecution in the Brazilian Armed Forces in the Wake of the Military Coup, 1964–66

This paper focuses on the first two years of military rule in Brazil (1964-1966), during which hundreds of armed forces officers were expelled from their ranks for opposing authoritarianism. Soon after the 1964 coup, the generals who took national power identified “constitutionalist” or “legalist” officers – and particularly those affiliated with ousted President João Goulart – as “communists” and purged them from the armed forces. This operation had the purpose of cleaning the military of any sort of criticism about the newly installed regime. Although the armed forces were, proportionally, the group that faced greatest political persecution by the dictatorship, their history has been largely unexamined by scholars of Brazil’s cycle of authoritarianism. This paper explores both how these purges occurred and how the expelled officers remembered their experience with the Brazilian dictatorship. Although their experiences varied drastically – from dealing with unemployment to joining guerrilla groups – all the expelled officers resented the armed forces for becoming a repressive apparatus that persecuted its own members. The paper analysis relies on interviews conducted throughout Brazil and collected at Rio de Janeiro’s Center of Research and Documentation of Contemporary History (CPDOC), and on lawsuits filed in the 1990s by former officers and their families in demand of financial reparations. In addition, governmental records and intelligence reports retrieved from Brazil’s National Archive, and state archives in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro provide context for the imprisonment of officers and surveillance after they were expelled from the forces. These sources show that the restructuring of the Brazilian armed forces as an institution depended on the expulsion of thousands of officers. A focus on these officers’ memories decenters opposition to authoritarianism, showing that before civilians started resisting military rule, political battles had already started within the military barracks.