Janio Quadros

Janio Quadros was elected president of Brazil by the largest margin in its history and resigned after seven months, apparently expecting to be begged to return. He was a schoolteacher and lawyer from Sao Paulo who built a career on personal eccentricity and an anti-corruption message, campaigning with a broom to sweep the thieves out, and rose from city councillor to mayor to governor to president in eleven years without ever belonging to a serious party machine. He took office in January 1961 with an inflation crisis and a foreign debt to manage, and his answers satisfied nobody: austerity and devaluation that angered the left, and an independent foreign policy - relations with the Soviet bloc, opposition to sanctions on Cuba, and a decoration pinned on Che Guevara in Brasilia - that outraged the right and the military. He also issued a stream of small decrees regulating bikinis, cockfighting and the length of speeches, which made him look unserious at the moment he needed authority. On 25 August 1961 he resigned in a letter blaming terrible forces, and withdrew to Sao Paulo. The most common reading is that he expected congress to refuse and hand him emergency powers. Congress accepted. The vice-president Joao Goulart was in China, the military ministers tried to bar him from taking office, and the compromise was a hastily invented parliamentary system that lasted until 1963 - the instability that ended in the coup of 1964. Quadros returned to public life much later as mayor of Sao Paulo from 1986. His resignation letter has never been fully explained by anyone, including him. He was stripped of his political rights for ten years by the military government that followed. Brazil's 1961 crisis is the direct hinge between his seven months in office and the dictatorship that lasted until 1985.

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