Laying the Ground Rules

Brazil's doughty President Humberto Castello Branco has scheduled gubernatorial elections for October of this year and a presidential election for October 1966. Last week he sent Congress his long-awaited bill establishing the ground rules for who can and who cannot run in the elections. It was, as expected, a tough bill.

Under the rules, no candidate may run whose platform is "contrary to democratic principles" or whose party is linked to foreign governments. Thus all Communists and Castroites are excluded. There is no room on the ballot for anyone whose political rights were suspended in the early days of the revolution, thereby blocking the comeback of former Presidents Janio Quadros and Juscelino Kubitschek, whose voting privileges were lifted for ten years. Also excluded is any person who served as a Cabinet minister under deposed Joao Goulart, the demagogic President whose purposeful drift to the left sparked last year's revolution. Finally, the bill rules out anyone who "has engaged in acts of corruption, abuse of economic power, or who might compromise the good faith of the elections." Brazil's electoral courts will rule on any disputed candidacies. Those found ineligible will be kept off the ballot for four years, dating from the time of the original incident.

Brazil's Congress is expected to pass the bill after considerable debate--and possibly some softening amendments. To no one's surprise, Carlos Lacerda, the mercurial Guanabara (Rio) Governor who has been attacking the government for just about everything (TIME, June 11), denounced the bill as "bad, narrow, hypocritical, juridically wrong, politically wrong, morally wrong--another error of the revolution." Equally unhappy is the tight little group of army officers who call themselves the linha dura (the hard line) and are opposed to any elections. One of their leaders, Colonel Osnelli Martinelli, 43, publicly denounced Castello Branco for betraying the revolution--and found himself slapped into a military prison for insubordination.

Across Brazil, the general reaction among liberals and middle-roaders was somewhat milder than the critics had anticipated. Many politicians felt that the ineligibilities bill was a relatively small price to pay for prompt elections, particularly since only a few major-party candidates were likely to be affected. In fact, the reaction seemed to be exactly what Castello Branco had hoped for--a backing away from unsavory candidates who might run afoul of the bill.

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