58 Facts About Leonel Brizola

Leonel de Moura Brizola was a Brazilian politician.

Three years later, facing the 1964 Brazilian coup d'etat that went on to install the Brazilian military dictatorship, Leonel Brizola called on the democratic forces to resist, but Goulart did not want to risk a civil war, and Leonel Brizola was exiled in Uruguay.

One of the few Brazilian major political figures able to overcome the dictatorship's twenty-years ban on his political activity, Leonel Brizola returned to Brazil in 1979, but failed in his bid to take control of the reemerging Brazilian Labour Party as the military government instead conceded it to Ivete Vargas.

Leonel Brizola founded the Democratic Labour Party on a democratic socialist, nationalist and populist platform descended from Getulio Vargas' own labour legacy, promoted as an ideology he called socialismo moreno, a non-Marxist, Christian and markedly Brazilian left-wing political agenda for a post-Cold War setting.

In 1982 and 1990 Leonel Brizola was elected governor of Rio de Janeiro, after a failed 1989 bid for the presidency, in which he narrowly finished third, after Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Leonel Brizola was vice-president of the Socialist International and served as Honorary President of that organization from October 2003 until his death in June 2004.

Leonel Brizola's father Jose Leonel Brizola was a small-scale farmer who was killed when fighting as a volunteer in 1923 in a local civil war for the rebel leader Assis Brasil against Rio Grande do Sul's governor Borges de Medeiros.

Leonel Brizola left his mother's house at the age of eleven; he worked in Passo Fundo and Carazinho as a newspaper deliverer, shoeshiner and at other occasional jobs.

Leonel Brizola graduated with a degree in engineering but never worked in that trade.

In quick succession, Leonel Brizola filled various positions, being a member of the Rio Grande State Legislature for two terms, State Secretary for Public Works, Federal Congressman for Rio Grande in 1955 and Mayor of Porto Alegre from 1956 to 1958.

Leonel Brizola supported policies directed towards improving the conditions of small-scale, autonomous farmers and landless rural workers, and the sponsorship of the creation of the corporation MASTER.

Leonel Brizola gained nationwide attention by acting in defense of democracy and Goulart's rights as president.

Leonel Brizola surrendered the State Police Force to the regional army command and began organizing paramilitary Committees of Democratic Resistance, and considered handing out firearms to civilians.

The Brizola nationalizations became headline news in the American press when the John F Kennedy administration was trying to counter the "Communist infiltration" in Brazil by striking a deal with Goulart that included US financial aid to the Brazilian federal government.

Between 1961 and 1964, Leonel Brizola acted as the radical wing of the independent left, where he pressured the office for an agenda of radical social and political reforms and for a change in the electoral legislation that allowed for his presidential candidacy in 1965.

Leonel Brizola was seen as personally authoritarian and quarrelsome, and capable of dealing with his enemies using physical aggression; for example he hit rightwing journalist David Nasser at Rio de Janeiro airport.

Leonel Brizola acted as an adventurer in the political game around the Goulart government, being feared and hated by the political moderate Left and Right.

Leonel Brizola's using of metaphors from the world of soccer was one of the instances of his apt rhetoric, that rendered him at the time a master of the broadcasts.

Leonel Brizola's posturing and rhetoric seemed to justify the classification developed by Goulart's Foreign Minister and leader of the moderate left, San Tiago Dantas: Leonel Brizola was a paragon of a "negative left" which, in its uncompromising, ideological defense of social reform, forsook any compromise with democratic institutions.

Dantas' aversion to Leonel Brizola was reciprocated: Dantas and Goulart's War Minister General Amaury Kruel and Commerce Minister Antonio Balbino formed an "anti-reformist tripod" of "traitors to the national interests".

Notwithstanding his alleged radicalism, Leonel Brizola was not an ideologue or doctrinaire.

Generally, he stood for an extreme Left Nationalism; land reform, extension of the franchise for illiterates and NCOs; and for tight controls over foreign investment that caused the American ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, to dislike Leonel Brizola and compare his propaganda techniques with those of Joseph Goebbels; a mood mirrored by most of contemporary American media.

In late 1963, after the failure of a conservative plan of economic adjustment devised by the Ministry of Planning Celso Furtado, Leonel Brizola involved himself in a bid for power by toppling Goulart's economically conservative Minister of Finance Carvalho Pinto to take the post himself.

Leonel Brizola wanted to foster his radical agenda, saying, "if we want to make a revolution, we must have the key to the safe".

Some say Brizola's reasons for this were egotistical; according to Rose, "Leonel Brizola was concerned only with Leonel Brizola".

Leonel Brizola was the only political leader to support for the president, sheltering him in Porto Alegre and hoping a bid to rouse the local army units towards the restoration of the toppled regime could be made.

Leonel Brizola engaged himself in schemes to confront the military putschists, including giving a fiery public speech at the Porto Alegre City Hall, exhorting army NCOs to "occupy barracks and arrest the generals", which earned him the lasting hatred of the dictatorship's military commanders.

Except for this episode, Leonel Brizola spent the first ten years of the Brazilian military dictatorship mostly alone in Uruguay, where he managed his wife's landed property and kept abreast of domestic news from various opposition movements in Brazil.

Leonel Brizola rejected attempts at being recruited into the Frente Ampla, a mid-1960s informal caucus of pre-dictatorship leaders intent on pressuring for re-democratization, which included Carlos Lacerda and Juscelino Kubitschek.

Leonel Brizola broke the few remaining ties with his brother-in-law and fellow exile, Joao Goulart, over the attempted recruitment.

Since the beginning of his exile, Leonel Brizola had been closely watched by Brazilian intelligence, who pressured the Uruguayan government on a regular basis.

Between late 1976 and early 1977, the fact that all three most prominent members of the Frente Ampla - Juscelino Kubitscheck, Joao Goulart himself and Carlos Lacerda - had all died in succession and in somewhat mysterious circumstances, made Leonel Brizola feel increasingly threatened in Uruguay.

Shortly after arriving in New York, Leonel Brizola met with US Senator Edward Kennedy, who helped gain Leonel Brizola permission to stay in the US for six months.

From a suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, Leonel Brizola profited from his American stay by organizing a network of contacts with Brazilian exiles and American academics interested in ending military rule in Brazil.

Later, Leonel Brizola moved to Portugal, where, through Mario Soares, he approached the Socialist International leadership and sided with a Social-Democratic, reformist plan for post-dictatorship Brazil.

That was a break with the usual introspection of Brazilian party politics, although Leonel Brizola remained attached to the "quintessentially Brazilian" Vargoist tradition.

Leonel Brizola returned to Brazil with the intention of restoring the Brazilian Labour Party as a radical, nationalist, left-wing, mass movement and as a confederacy of historical Getulist leaders.

Leonel Brizola was hampered in this by the emergence of new grassroots movements, such as the new trade unionism centered around the Sao Paulo metalworkers and their leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and the Catholic grassroots organizations of the rural poor spawned by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Leonel Brizola quickly restored his political prominence in Rio Grande do Sul and gained political pre-eminence in the State of Rio de Janeiro, where he sought a new basis of political support.

In 1982, Leonel Brizola stood for governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro in the first free, direct, gubernatorial elections in that state since 1965.

Leonel Brizola ran a ticket of candidates for Congress that tried to compensate for his party's lack of cadres by offering a roster of people with no previous ties to professional politics, such as the Native Brazilian leader Mario Juruna, the singer Agnaldo Timoteo, and a sizeable number of Afro-Brazilian activists.

Leonel Brizola was aware that this last foray into race politics contradicted his previous, more conventionally radical policies.

Leonel Brizola nicknamed his ideology Socialismo Moreno.

Leonel Brizola centered his personal campaign on issues such as education and public security, offering a candidacy that had clear, oppositional overtones and proposed to upheld the Vargoist legacy.

Leonel Brizola then proceeded to keep and expanded his nationwide political visibility during his controversial first term as governor of Rio.

Leonel Brizola developed his early education policies on a grander scale with an ambitious programme of construction of large high-school buildings, the so-called CIEPs whose architect was Oscar Niemeyer.

Leonel Brizola developed policies for providing public services and recognized housing property for dwellers in shanty towns.

Leonel Brizola adopted a radical new policy for police action in the poor suburbs and favelas in the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area.

Leonel Brizola's policies included porkbarrel, poor management, personalism, wild spending of public funds, and displaying a tendency at opportunistic, short term solutions.

Lula used his stronghold in the most industrialized areas of the Southeast as a springboard and gathered new voters in the Northeast, where Leonel Brizola was practically a no-show candidate.

Leonel Brizola was charged with collaborating with the embezzlement schemes that led to Collor's 1992 impeachment.

The 1994 presidential elections were a failure for Leonel Brizola, who scored fifth place.

When Cardoso ran for re-election four years later, Leonel Brizola contented himself with a vice presidential candidacy on Lula's ticket, and both lost to Cardoso.

Gomes finished third, Lula was elected president, and Leonel Brizola lost his bid for the Senate, bringing an end to his regional force.

Leonel Brizola supported Lula in the second round of the 2002 election, therefore qualifying for joining with other pre-eminent political figures.

Leonel Brizola came to be regarded as a veteran of leftist popularism and a secondary character in his last two years.

Leonel Brizola died on 21 June 2004, after a heart attack.

Leonel Brizola planned to run for the presidency in 2006 and, although ailing, had just received his former associate Anthony Garotinho and his wife Rosinha Garotinho the day before.