Yesterday the book “Explod a New Brazil – Diary of the Campaign of the Diretas”, by reporter Ricardo Kotscho, who covered for the S.Paulo Folha The largest popular campaign of. She began in March 1983, when Deputy Dante de Oliveira (PMDB-MT) presented a constitutional amendment project restoring direct elections to the Presidency of the Republic, and ended in April 1984, when the proposal went to the archive because 20 votes were missing.
Reading Kotscho’s Diary allows you to revisit the explosion of political demonstrations of a cheerful Brazil, thrown into paradox sweets. In the first, the direct campaign was defeated, but Tancredo Neves was indirectly elected marking the end of. In the second, elected, Tancredo died without taking over. , his deputy, out of the government party, led the transition to democracy and, in 1989, presided over the first direct election since 1960.
Kotscho’s diary runs from November 1983 to April 1984 and is a trip to a time that is gone. After more than 40 years, there were big names of this campaign: Ulysses Guimarães, Franco Montoro, Leonel Brizola and Mário Covas. Lula left, and Paulo Maluf. Government candidate Maluf announced on November 1: “The game is closed.” In his accounts he was elected.
Kotscho tells how the campaign began, badly, at a PT promotion party, supported by 70 civil society entities. After that, Franco Montoro, governor of Sao Paulo, and Ulysses Guimarães, national president of the PMDB, played the party in the campaign.
The emotion of the Kotscho reporter telling these manifestations is the soul of his book.
On January 25, the great rally of Praça da Sé was held in São Paulo, with all the notables of the campaign, 200 thousand people, Gilberto Gil, Fafá de Belém and Regina Duarte.
In February, 25,000 Brazilians gathered in Teresina. This was 30% of the population. Another 25 thousand in São Luís and 50 thousand in Curitiba.
At the end of February, about one million people took to the streets in almost every major cities in the country.
The hymns of independence, the national and “despite you”, or “walking”, by Geraldo Vandré. Yellow t-shirts were wore, and the rally days were partying.
No political mobilization of history had the grandeur and joy of the Diretas campaign. Kotscho shows this with the look in a humor that, for now, is gone.
Kotscho tells the great nights of the Candelária rallies in Rio, and Anhangabaú, in São Paulo.
After that, he suffers narrating the defeat of the amendment Dante de Oliveira. It is rare the appearance of such a valuable book, so many years later.
Kotscho’s “Diary”, abundantly illustrated, is for sale on the Senate Bookstore website. There, in the digital library, its electronic (and complete) version can be downloaded for free.
It is worth noting that the Senate Digital Library offers, always for free, hundreds of books by great authors about the history of Brazil, from the collection of the founders of the Empire, by Otávio Tarquínio de Sousa, to John Armitage’s “History of Brazil”. A treasure.
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