The institutional rupture of 1964 and the meaning of democracy

Abstract

The meaning of the word democracy has always been in dispute in Brazil, as well as throughout the Western world. When the habit of saying that in 1945 Brazil was witnessing its 're-democratization' it was implicit that in precedence, perhaps before 1930, there had been a democratic Brazil. Here an attempt was made to confuse the liberal clothing of oligarchic domination with democracy, even to legitimize the persistence of oligarchic power, under the new conditions of the bourgeois revolution in progress, in the liberal-corporate institutionality that was implemented with the 1946 Constitution.