Ruzinha, 1922 – Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), 2004
By Carlos Eduardo Martins
Born to a poor family in rural Rio Grande do Sul, Leonel de Moura Brizola emerged as one of Brazil’s most prominent political leaders of the 20th century. Representing the most radical expression of Getúlio Vargas’s labor movement, he was almost always aligned with social movements, the so-called “basic reforms” of the pre-1964 coup period, and a socialist perspective.
Orphaned as a child, he completed primary schooling with the support of the Lutheran Church. He moved to Porto Alegre, where he held various low-wage jobs, yet managed to finish his secondary education, later becoming a rural technician and, at 27, an engineer. In 1945, he joined the first nucleus of the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB) in Rio Grande do Sul with other trade unionists. He was elected state deputy in 1947 and married Neusa Goulart, sister of João Goulart, in 1950, with Getúlio Vargas as his wedding sponsor.
In 1952, he was appointed Secretary of Public Works of Rio Grande do Sul, and in 1954, he was elected federal deputy. As mayor of Porto Alegre in 1955, he prioritized public education, sanitation, and transportation, earning broad popular support, which helped him become governor of Rio Grande do Sul in 1958 with 55% of the vote.
In office, he criticized the dependency-based political-economic model established by Juscelino Kubitschek and advocated for an industrializing development model based on an alliance between workers, the state, and national businesses aimed at the domestic market. During his term, he created the State Savings Bank, acquired majority control of the Bank of Rio Grande do Sul, and developed the production sector. He founded the mixed company Aços Finos Piratini, facilitated the establishment of the Alberto Pasqualini Petroleum Refinery, and nationalized the Riograndense Telecommunications Company (CRT), a subsidiary of the American International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), and the Riograndense Electric Power Company, a branch of the American and Foreign Power Company.
In 1961, following Jânio Quadros’s resignation, he organized resistance to the military ministers’ veto of laborist Vice President João Goulart’s ascension to the presidency. He launched the “Chain of Legality” and used Radio Guaíba to call on the people to resist the attempt to block Goulart’s inauguration. His efforts resonated within the military, particularly with the Third Army, whose hesitant command eventually joined the resistance, ending the coup attempt and plans to bomb the Piratini Palace, from where Brizola led the mobilizations.
In 1962, he was elected federal deputy for Rio de Janeiro, receiving one of the highest proportional votes in Brazilian history. He organized the Popular Mobilization Front, consisting of trade unionists, students, nationalist military personnel, and legislators, to push for basic reforms, including agrarian reform, restrictions on profit remittances, real estate speculation control, and university reform.
He called on the population to form groups of eleven to defend the reforms, and in a speech at the Central do Brasil rally on March 13, 1964, he advocated for dissolving Congress, which he saw as reactionary and coup-supporting due to its opposition to Goulart in 1961 and its resistance to reforms. He supported convening a constitutional assembly made up of workers, peasants, sergeants, and genuinely popular figures. In response to the 1964 military coup, he once again mobilized the Third Army, but Goulart declined resistance, weakening the legalist appeal among officials.
During his exile, he lived in Uruguay, the United States, and Portugal. He returned to Brazil in 1979 to re-establish the PTB, but his right to the party name was denied by the last military government, which awarded it to Ivete Vargas. He then founded the Democratic Labor Party (PDT), through which he promoted the socialismo moreno – a model intended to include the social and political rights of Black and Indigenous people. He served as governor of Rio de Janeiro from 1982 to 1986 and from 1990 to 1994, continuing his critique of the dependent and associated model, which he attributed to the social ills imposed on Brazilian society by foreign capital.
He ran for the presidency in 1989, receiving 50.5% and 60.9% of the votes in Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul, respectively, where he had governed. He lost to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by just 0.5% of the national vote, missing the opportunity to face Fernando Collor de Mello in the runoff (he received only 1.4% support from São Paulo’s electorate). He supported Lula on that occasion but did not refuse to draw closer to Collor during his second term as governor of Rio de Janeiro. In exchange for this alignment, which contributed to the erosion of his administration, he was able to construct the Linha Vermelha, a major highway project in Greater Rio.
He actively opposed the privatizations carried out during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration (1995-2002). Although he failed in further election bids, he remained an influential voice in major political discussions. He was Lula’s vice-presidential candidate in the 1998 elections. As the last laborist politician of the nationalist Brazilian cycle, he passed away from a heart attack in Rio de Janeiro, having begun to criticize Lula’s economic policies, which the PDT had supported in 2002.
