These two small volumes comprise an important addition to the growing shelf of documents on the origins of the Brazilian revolution of 1964. The author, whose daily “Colima do Castello” has appeared regularly since July 1962, is the most respected and widely-read political columnist in Brazil. His reputation rests on his ability to assess dispassionately the machinations and motivations behind political developments reported elsewhere in the press. From the beginning his assignment has been the capital, with particular attention to the Congress and its relations with the Executive, the political parties, and other forces that affect the exercise of power at the national level. Thus, Carlos Castello Branco was an unusually well-informed observer of the successive crises that marked the adminstration of President João Goulart. In Introdução à revolução de 1964 he has reproduced substantial portions of his first 450 columns, covering the final twenty months of that administration and relating in detail the dramatic and ultimately unsuccessful search for a formula to alter an untenable status quo without going to the extremes of dictatorship or revolution. Even though some of his analyses have not withstood the test of time, the author has resisted the temptation to revise his original text, in order that future historians may have an authentic daily chronicle and contemporary interpretation of the disintegration of the political system based on the constitution of 1946.
Introdução à revolução de 1964 has a decidedly civilian focus, and by its very nature is limited to political operations in the public view. The reader will find only occasional allusion to subversive activities on the right and the left, and no account of the military conspiracy until the final entry of April 3, 1964. Castello Branco’s text is supplemented by twenty-nine “notes”—including lengthy speeches and interviews by President Goulart, as well as interviews, manifestoes, and programs of his supporters and opponents—taken verbatim from the newspapers of the day. Most of these documents have not previously been republished. The absence of an index or explanatory footnotes to identify the myriad personalities and organizations mentioned in text and notes tends to restrict the usefulness of this work to specialists already familiar with the characters and chronology of events leading to the revolution of 1964. These readers will find that Castello Branco adds a refreshingly non-partisan perspective to the story.
