Leonel Brizola

Leonel de Moura Brizola (Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation: [leoˈnɛl dʒi ˈmowɾɐ bɾiˈzɔlɐ]; 22 January 1922 – 21 June 2004) was a Brazilian politician. Launched into politics by Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas in the 1930–1950s, Brizola was the only politician to serve as elected governor of two Brazilian states. An engineer by training, Brizola organized the youth wing of the Brazilian Labour Party and served as state representative for Rio Grande do Sul and mayor of its capital, Porto Alegre. In 1958 he was elected governor of Rio Grande do Sul and subsequently played a major role in thwarting a first coup attempt by sectors of the armed forces, who wished to prevent João Goulart from assuming the presidency following the resignation of Jânio Quadros in August 1961, under allegations of communist ties. Three years later, facing the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état that went on to install the Brazilian military dictatorship, Brizola called on the democratic forces to resist, but Goulart did not want to risk a civil war, and Brizola was exiled in Uruguay. One of the few Brazilian major political figures able to overcome the dictatorship's twenty-years ban on his political activity, Brizola returned to Brazil in 1979, but failed in his bid to take control of the reemerging Brazilian Labour Party as the military government instead conceded it to Ivete Vargas. Brizola founded the Democratic Labour Party on a democratic socialist, nationalist and populist platform descended from Getúlio Vargas' own labour legacy, promoted as an ideology he called socialismo moreno ("tanned socialism"), a non-Marxist, Christian and markedly Brazilian left-wing political agenda for a post-Cold War setting. In 1982 and 1990 Brizola was elected governor of Rio de Janeiro, after a failed 1989 bid for the presidency, in which he narrowly finished third, after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In...