Emilio Garrastazu Medici
Emilio Garrastazu Medici presided over the most popular years of the dictatorship and the worst of its torture, at the same time and by the same design. He had run the national intelligence service and was chosen by the service ministers after Costa e Silva's stroke. His five years are remembered in Brazil as the years of the economic miracle. Growth ran above ten per cent a year. The Trans-Amazonian highway was begun, the Rio-Niteroi bridge built, colour television arrived, and the national team won the World Cup in Mexico in 1970 with a government slogan printed beside the players. The propaganda was deliberate and it worked. A new agency coordinated official publicity, censors sat in newsrooms, and the phrase Brazil, love it or leave it went up on billboards. Medici himself was a remote figure who gave few interviews and was presented as a football supporter. Underneath it the repression reached its peak. Institutional Act Number Five remained in force throughout. Joint army and police units run out of Sao Paulo and Rio hunted the urban guerrilla groups and destroyed them within three years. Torture was routine and had a bureaucracy. The military campaign in the Araguaia region wiped out a rural guerrilla column and left dozens of the dead unaccounted for, their fate concealed for thirty years. The growth was also unequal by intention. Wage policy held earnings down while profits rose, and Medici's own planning minister said the economy was doing well while the people were not. The miracle was financed by borrowing abroad, and when oil prices quadrupled in 1973 the debt became the problem his successors inherited. He handed over in 1974 and lived eleven more years without ever explaining himself.
- Lived: 1905 CE – 1985 CE
- Nationality: Brazilian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
