ABSTRACT
On January 15, 1985, Brazil elected a new president, seventy-four-year-old Tancredo Neves, a moderate career politician who had been one of the important leaders of the opposition to the military regime that took power in 1964. Arguably, the transition in Brazil is the most important of the recent transitions in South America because of the country's size, population, and influence and because Tancredo's election marked the end of the most successful and long-lived bureaucratic authoritarian regime in the region. The regime opted to liberalize not because of its weakness but because of its strength. In this sense, political liberalization in Brazil differed radically from that in Argentina and Bolivia in the early 1970s, where an active and powerful opposition mobilized to topped military governments. The nature of the transition to democracy also contributed to the clientelistic division of the state bureaucracy.
