With the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état, on April 2 the National Congress of Brazil declared the presidency of the Republic occupied by João Goulart vacant. Since the vacancy was foreseen for the president's departure from the country without the authorization of Congress, which was not the case, the act had no constitutional support. However, it formalized the coup, transferring the position to the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Ranieri Mazzilli, until the indirect election of General Castelo Branco, the first military president of the dictatorship (1964-1985), days later.
The and branches had clashed in Goulart's government, which failed to pass its in Congress and in its final stages governed without a parliamentary majority. Some congressmen participated in the conspiracy against his government, such as Auro de Moura Andrade, president of the Federal Senate. With the beginning of the coup, General Nicolau Fico, the army commander in Brasília, had to choose between garrisoning Congress and policing the city, as Auro wished, or not offering this support, as Goulart and Darcy Ribeiro, the head of the President's Civil Cabinet, wanted. The president was in the city on the 1st, but in the evening he went to Porto Alegre, in Rio Grande do Sul.
When he left, General Fico had sided with the President of the Senate and Congress had been summoned to a joint session. The 1946 Brazilian Constitution defined three forms of removal of the President of the Republic: resignation, which did not occur, impeachment, for which the opposition would not have the votes, and vacancy after unauthorized departure from the country. Although Goulart's whereabouts were communicated to the parliamentarians, Auro de Moura Andrade declared the presidency vacant and quickly closed the tumultuous early morning session. With the acquiescence of the Judiciary, Ranieri Mazzilli was sworn in at 03:45 am. His inauguration and a subsequent indirect election were provided for by law, but not the vacancy under those conditions. Meanwhile, on April 2 Goulart still had some power in Porto Alegre, which could even lead to duality of government, but he did not want the conflict and went to the interior of the state. Only on April 4 did he leave the country, heading for Uruguay.
The declaration of the vacancy occurred as Goulart's government collapsed with the coup and it was the participation of Congress that was important in its outcome to confer legitimacy on it, but in the new balance of power Congress fell short of the military. In 2013 Congress symbolically annulled the session.
Goulart's relationship with Congress
The political system in the Populist Republic was dominated by three parties, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the National Democratic Union (UDN) and the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB). PSD and PTB were allied for most of this period. President Goulart was from the PTB, which had 28.4% of the seats in the Chamber in the 1962 legislative elections, and thus depended on the PSD, with 28.9%; however, he ended up governing without a majority, just like his predecessor, Jânio Quadros, who also did not make it to the end of his term. The PSD, a mediating force located in the center, destabilized the system when it ceased to balance it: from 1963 on, he was on the side of the UDN opposition, being "faithful of the balance" in the fall of the president.
Goulart's government was marked by conflicts between the Executive and Legislative branches. Due to the great polarization, few projects were approved in the Legislative, including proposals from the Executive. The number of actors with veto power, including the two parliamentary fronts (Nationalist Parliamentary Front and Parliamentary Democratic Action), was high, preventing changes from taking place.
The president got legislative support to bring forward the referendum on presidentialism, regaining the powers lost to the , but Congress overturned a constitutional amendment for land reform in May 1963. Land reform would be one of the basic reforms, the PTB's ambition. With the loss of support for the president in Congress and the PSD's swing to the right, it became difficult to carry out the reforms through it. This is attributed both to the president's political incapacity, as done by politicians at the time and later authors (Elio Gaspari and Marco Antonio Villa), and, conversely, to the social conflict of the moment making it impossible to build support in Congress. The basic reforms are also accused, as by , of being, except for the agrarian one, obscure and unclear, only exposed in the presidential message to Congress in 1964, with little initiative taken by the president. However, they had been discussed in society since before Goulart's government. The controversy was that they benefited and harmed certain sectors of society.
Candidates opposed to the reforms advocated by the left were financed by the Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action, with foreign financial involvement, in the 1962 elections. Members of the UDN and PSD participated in the conspiracies that would lead to the coup of 1964. The request for a state of siege in November 1963 was rejected by the left and right and defeated by the parliamentarians, demonstrating the president's isolation. In the last moments of his government, as in the Central Rally, the president, as desired by the left, abandoned conciliation and sought to mobilize popular pressure to get the reforms from Congress, thus alarming conservative congressmen.
Brasília during the coup d'état
Military situation in the Central Plateau On March 31, 1964, the , in Minas Gerais, went into revolt against the government and started an offensive towards the former capital in Guanabara. At midnight the Second Army, from São Paulo, joined the coup and also advanced against Rio de Janeiro. Both the Second Army and the 4th Military Region also ordered operations against the new capital. The 16th Light Infantry Battalion, a Second Army unit based in Cuiabá, entered Goiás by road and air transport. In Brasília the Military Command and the , headed by General Nicolau Fico, were in a confused situation, with many officers rejecting the government's authority. The 4th Company of the Presidential Guard Battalion (BGP) left Brasília to defend the Goiás/Minas border., Tomo 15, p. 261-266, Tomo 5, p. 287-293, e Tomo 7, p. 213-217. As the border was still unoccupied, the 10th Battalion of the Military Police of Minas Gerais was hurriedly transferred to prevent the BGP from entering Minas Gerais territory. Later on April 1, knowing that the First Army, in Rio de Janeiro, had joined the coup, the BGP retreated. Subsequently, and Army converged on Brasília.
Congress status Auro de Moura Andrade published a manifesto breaking the Senate from the government and calling for the Armed Forces to intervene in the political process. However, on the night of the 31st he protested in the plenary: the coming and going of parliamentarians was impossible with the blocking of the airport and highways. Radio and television were under censorship and he could not address the nation: the chief of police in the Federal District had seized the videotape of his speech. The transfer of the Congress to another city was under consideration: , governor of Goiás, offered Goiânia, and on the 30th Deputy had talked about a transfer to São Paulo or Belo Horizonte. In Congress, "the stage for harsh, vehement dialogues, congressmen anxiously followed the news of the adhesion of General Amaury Kruel, commander of the Second Army. Congressman Francisco Julião claimed to have 60,000 armed men from the Peasant Leagues willing to defend the government, which was nothing but bravado, but it intimidated the congressmen.
Auro's greatest fear was about the agglomeration at the Teatro Experimental de Brasília, which, it was said, would attack the deputies' apartments. So he requested an army presence around the Congress and in the city, but he was not granted. In the Theater, Darcy Ribeiro, head of Goulart's Civil Cabinet, had organized about a thousand on the morning of the 1st to, according to him, peacefully occupy the Chamber and Senate on the following day. Elio Gaspari also registers the participation of the in the organization and that they could be the starting point for a popular militia; they informed name, address and profession, were registered by the Civil Servants Union and were to receive on the following day, in a rural colonization nucleus, weapons and instructions. In another moment, the head of the Civil Cabinet handed weapons and a list of politicians to be arrested or executed (depending on the version), among them the presidents of the Supreme Court (STF) and Senate, to two leaders of the . They refused the act, considering it terrorism.
Goulart arrived in Brasília on the 1st from Rio de Janeiro, but flew to Porto Alegre at night. In Brasília he was isolated and under military risk. General Fico swore loyalty, although it was doubtful. The president's allies predicted an impeachment attempt in Congress; congressman Tancredo Neves imagined a situation equivalent to that of presidents Café Filho and Carlos Luz. They considered it essential, in order to avoid it, that the security of Congress should remain with the police, without the Army going out into the streets; the Army's presence would stimulate Congress to act against the President of the Republic. Thus, General Fico was supposed to collaborate. However, on their way back from the airport they found the Esplanade of the Ministries occupied by the Army, which had ignored Jango's wishes and started carrying out the order of the Senate President. Congress was illuminated: "The process of parliamentary struggle had begun."
The statement at the Congress Legal aspects
Under the 1946 Constitution, there were three ways to remove the president of the Republic: impeachment, resignation or, according to art. 85,
Goulart did not resign and the opposition knew it did not have the votes necessary for an impeachment. PTB was prepared for impeachment and could prevent or delay it within the Rules of Procedure, if necessary for lack of a quorum. Likewise, during the Congress session in the early morning of the 2nd, a communiqué was read informing of the president's presence in Porto Alegre (in reality he was flying from Brasília to Porto Alegre). After Goulart left Porto Alegre, Mayor declared in the afternoon that he had left the country, but Goulart was on his farms in Rio Grande do Sul until April 4, and only then did he go into exile in Uruguay. The congressmen had no patience to wait for the president to leave the country, and so the vacancy was declared without constitutional basis: Goulart not only remained on national territory, but also informed Congress of this fact.
The line of presidential succession was the president of the Republic, vice-president and president of the Chamber of Deputies. The president of the Republic elected in 1960, Jânio Quadros, had resigned in 1961. Goulart was the vice-president of the 1960 election and was sworn in after the Legality Campaign. The president of the Chamber was Ranieri Mazzilli. Thus, once the vacancy was declared, power was transferred to Mazzilli, obeying the line of succession defined in article 79. The pro-coup press praised the constitutionality of the succession, but did not consider the conditions under which the vacancy was declared, taking it for granted.
Joint session