What is military intervention?
Military intervention is an action carried out by military forces, whether within the country itself or against another territory. In the domestic case, military intervention occurs when the Armed Forces unite to intervene in the State, overthrowing the established authority and taking control of the country (as happened in the Coup de 1964). In the external case, military intervention occurs when a nation, in order to serve its own interests, orders that its Armed Forces invade the territory of another sovereign nation (as the United States did with Iraq in 2003).
In countries where the Democratic state, something like a “interventionmilitary" where the use of the power of the Armed forces (Army, Navy and Air Force) can only occur under the order of the constituted powers, that is, the councils formed by members of the Executive power It's from Legislative power and with the proper supervision of the Judicial power. In Brazil, military interventions, according to
Brazilian Constitution of 1988, can only be legally effective in three specific cases: 1) Federal intervention; 2)State of Defense;3)State of siege.Read too:What is a coup d'état?
Institutional stability, public order and social peace
The three cases we cited above are defined in the part of the 1988 Constitution that deals with “Defense of the State and Democratic Institutions, the State of Defense and the State of Siege”. This part is in the Title V, Chapter I, Sections I and II of the aforementioned document, which seeks to outline measures to guarantee institutional stability, which maintains public order and social peace in the country. In Section I, we have the article 136 that defines the State of Defense:
Art. 136. The President of the Republic may, after hearing the Council of the Republic it's the National Defense Council, decree a state of defense to preserve or promptly re-establish, in restricted and determined places, public order or social peace threatened by serious and imminent institutional instability or affected by calamities of great proportions in nature.
The councils highlighted above are formed by the presidents of the Chamber and of the Federal Senate, by the leaders of the majority and minority of the Federal Chamber and Senate, by the Vice President of the Republic and by the Minister of Justice. It is from the agreement between the members of these councils that circumstantial military intervention can occur in some municipality or state of the federation. This type of intervention is correctly called interventionfederal.
For more serious cases, the Constitution in Chapter I of Title V, in Section II, deals with the State of Siege, whose circumstances for its decree are defined in article 137:
Art. 137. The President of the Republic may, after hearing the Council of the Republic it's the National Defense Council, request authorization from the National Congress to decree a state of siege in cases of:
I - serious commotion of national repercussion or occurrence of facts that prove the ineffectiveness of the measure taken during the state of defense;
II - declaration of a state of war or response to foreign armed aggression.
As can be seen, the State of Siege is the most extreme resource that a democratic regime can take, but it still remains within the foreseen constitutional provisions. The Federal Constitution of 1988, still within Title V, in its chapter II, emphasizes, after the definition of the States of Defense and of Site, what they are and what is the role of the Armed Forces so that there are no shadows of doubt about their place in the environment democratic:
Art. 142. The Armed Forces, made up of the Navy, the Army and the Air Force, are permanent and regular national institutions, organized on the basis of hierarchy and discipline, under the supreme authority of the President of the Republic, and are intended for the defense of the Homeland, the guarantee of constitutional powers and, on the initiative of any of these, of the law and order.
Read too:What is military dictatorship?
The 1964 case: intervention, revolution or coup?
There was, in the last decades of the 20th century, and there is still a lot of discussion in the political, journalistic and on how to qualify the facts that took place between March 31 and April 9, 1964. What happened these days was a constitutional military intervention? Certainly not. Two military fronts mobilized at dawn on March 31: one, in Rio de Janeiro, led by the general Costa e Silva; and another, in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, led by the general Olímpio Mourão Filho.
None of these movements were supported by the Constitution of 1946, then in force at the time. They resulted from political convictions and personal perception of the circumstances Brazil was going through at that time. There was no formal request by the National Congress, on March 31, for the military to intervene against President João Goulart – although there could be suspicions of orchestrating a leftist coup in the Brazil.
Read too: Difference between Right and Left
The National Congress only spoke about the circumstances on April 2, when it was not known whether João Goulart was in the country or whether he had already opted for exile, given the movements of the generals. On April 2, the seat of the Presidency of the Republic was declared vacant by the parliamentarians, and Ranieri Mazzilli, President of Congress, has temporarily assumed the post of Head of State.
The fact is that Brazil was at an impasse: Congress had the constitutional legitimacy to reorganize politics in the country, given the emptiness of the president's seat. However, the real power was not in Congress, it was in the so-called Revolutionary Supreme Command, in Rio de Janeiro, led by General Costa e Silva, Brigadier Francisco de Mello and Admiral Augusto Rademaker. It was this Supreme Revolutionary Command that started to dictate the political rules, especially from the Institutional Act of April 9, 1964, which became known as AI-1.
This institutional act, which had the participation of the authoritarian thinker FranciscoFields – the same who wrote the 1937 Constitution, who instituted the dictatorship of the new state – it was accompanied by a preamble that defended the revolutionary character of the military's action in that circumstance. To do so, it presented the argument that there was political legitimacy in those actions, even if there was no direct approval by Congress.
In addition, AI-I modified the precepts of the 1946 Constitution itself and imposed guidelines to be followed by Congress. It was a kind of extraconstitutional control of the Constitution itself, as can be seen in the excerpt below:
To demonstrate that we do not intend to radicalize the revolutionary process, we decided to keep the 1946 Constitution, limiting ourselves to modifying it only in the part relating to the powers of the President of the Republic, so that he may fulfill the mission of restoring the economic and financial order in Brazil and taking over the urgent measures aimed at draining the communist pocket, whose purulence had already infiltrated not only the top government, but also its dependencies. administrative. To further reduce the full powers that the victorious revolution is invested with, we have also resolved maintain the National Congress, with the reservations relating to its powers, contained in this Institutional Act.
Therefore, we reinforce: what happened, in March and April 1964, was not a constitutionally foreseen military intervention, but an action motivated by the political convictions of the military themselves. If such convictions made up a revolution or one coupof state, is a matter for debates that will go on for decades. But the fact is that the actions of the military subverted and subordinated the Constitution and institutions, such as the National Congress, to a Supreme Revolutionary Command through a document: the Institutional Act of 9th of April.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
Daniel Neves
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/o-que-e/historia/o-que-e-intervencao-militar.htm
