After electoral authorities declared the far-left candidate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the winner of Brazil’s presidential elections, millions of concerned citizens gathered outside the Army headquarters in Brasília and military barracks in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Curitiba to protest.
Unfortunately, however, those concerned citizens might have sought the assistance of a historically unreliable political ally. After all, the military in Brazil has developed over the years an unequivocal tradition of authoritarian interference in the nation’s political affairs.
They have done so by often assuming for themselves the task of salvadores da pátria (saviours of the fatherland) from “bad” and “corrupt” politicians.
One of the primary reasons proffered by military leaders for ousting President João Goulart on March 31, 1964, was the necessity to end corruption. However, two decades after their military coup, corruption seemed to have even increased during their watch.
Those army officers had taken power, promising to eliminate corruption but were forced 20 years later to leave it due to, among other things, increased levels of corruption and the erosion of the Armed Forces’ institutional prestige.
The military interference in political affairs in Brazil dates back to the 1870s when the end of the bloody war against Paraguay’s dictator Solano Lopez brought about a huge politicization of the Brazilian Army.
A few decades later, in November 1889, Army leaders organized their first coup by replacing the constitutional monarchy with a republican dictatorship.
Accordingly, an official letter written in 1890 on behalf of the Navy to a civilian authority in the new republican government stated (pdf):
“We hope you will use your intelligence for the installation of a type of republican government which will concentrate all the power in the hands of one single person … To establish a felicitous, stable and prosperous republic, the government of this country needs to become dictatorial and not parliamentary.”
How the Army Helped Establish Past Authoritarian Regimes
The first president of Brazil, Field Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca, harshly persecuted constitutional monarchists and nominated Army generals for the administration of all the old provinces.
However, a civil war broke out in 1892 after he attempted to dissolve the Parliament. Deodoro was then forced to step down by another Army officer, Floriano Peixoto, who, unfortunately, was as authoritarian as him, mercilessly crushing the Navy’s uprising as well as civilian opposition.
But Floriano, at the very least, left office to an elected civilian after the completion of his controversial mandate.
Other military uprisings took place in 1922 and 1924, when ultra-nationalist officers carried out unsuccessful rebellions in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, respectively.
The 1922 uprising pitched 5,000 Army rebels under the leadership of General Isidro Diaz Lopez against a federal force of over 20,000 men.
Daniel Zirker, a political-science professor commenting on the military uprising of 1924, said it had “deeply influenced” a generation of soldiers and their perceptions of the role of the military as a political proponent.
Although these military rebellions in the 1920s were effectively suppressed, another such coup in 1930 was far more successful, thus preventing an elected president from taking office.
It substituted in his place the defeated candidate Getúlio Vargas who, with the support of several oligarchies, received the presidency from a military junta that had only a few days earlier deposed President Washington Luís.
The collaboration between Vargas and the Brazilian Army was sustained by the belief that the country needed to be ruled by authoritarian means.
Upon taking office, Vargas placed military leaders at the centre of political decision-making. His government was a military regime, in essence, despite the civilian status of the president and many of his ministers.
The Military After WWII
With the defeat of Nazism-Fascism in World War II, it was a contradiction to be governed by a regime bearing so many similarities to those the Brazilians also helped defeat in Europe.
Consequently, in 1945, Vargas was forced to resign by the military leadership. Although the dictator attributed his demise to the liberal constitutionalists hoping for the restoration of the “old liberal democracy,” in reality, the dictator was sent from office by the decision of the Army Command.
The end of Vargas’s dictatorship promised a new era of democratic government. In having no direct links with him, the 1960 election of Jânio Quadros was seen as signalling a possible rupture within his authoritarian legacy.
On Aug. 25, 1961, however, Quadros stunned the nation by offering his letter of resignation. Apparently, he did so to provoke a political crisis which he calculated would cause people to demand his return to the office, this time as a dictator. His artifice proved a total failure, and he never returned to power.
When Quadros offered his resignation, his vice-president, João Goulart, was serving on a diplomatic mission in China. Goulart had been Vargas’ labour minister in 1953, and was a close friend of Argentina’s leader Juan Domingo Perón, whose regime relied on trade-union support.
Elected as vice president with no more than 34 percent of votes, he sought to create close ties with China, Cuba, and Soviet Russia. Relying on the advice of his Army staff, especially the head of the Military Household, General Assis Brazil, Goulart started to promise communist-style policies that could not be put into practice without a constitutional amendment.
He also encouraged the political aspirations of low-ranking military officers, even though they were barred by law from elected public office.
On March 26, 1964, Goulart refused to punish a Navy mutiny carried out by left-wing marines who refused to cease illegal political activities and return to their duties. The mutiny brought about an agreement between the otherwise politically divided military leadership that now Goulart, indeed, had gone too far.
Therefore, it was the president’s sanctioning of military indiscipline, and not the opposition to his communist policies, that eventually forced the military leadership to do something.
The End of the Military’s Time in Power
The military coup that deposed Goulart began on March 31, 1964, with a radio proclamation by General Olimpio Mourão, the commander of the Fourth Military Region in Minas Gerais.
The military leaders of this coup were divided between hard-line and soft-line factions. While soft-liners wished for a quick restoration of democracy, hard-liners were instead planning a more permanent, authoritarian regime. The hard-line faction eventually prevailed over the moderates, particularly after terrorist groups of the Far Left initiated their rural and urban guerrilla warfare in 1968.
In the late 1970s, a severe economic crisis stroke Brazil that served at least to engender widespread discontentment with the military regime. Consequently, a slow process of re-democratization was initiated, and General João Batista de Oliveira Figueiredo, the last military president, successfully made the step towards finally ending it.
During their 20-year reign in power, the military leaders in Brazil seemed to have sometimes behaved in a similar way as an occupying force rather than the putative protectors of law and order.
They left power demoralized, not only as a result of their disastrous economic policies but also because of widespread corruption in the public agencies and the approximately 600 state-owned companies directly owned by the military regime.
For the reasons above explained, the Brazilian protesters have looked towards the wrong authorities in the hopes of restoring their democratic rights and freedoms.
On the contrary, there is a real chance that, due to their authoritarian tradition of intervention in the nation’s political affairs, one should not even be surprised if the military leadership eventually assist in the implementation of policies by the new Lula administration.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.