People & Histories
5 October 1988

The Citizen Constitution of 1988

After two years of debate shaped by an unprecedented flood of popular proposals, Brazil adopts a democratic constitution that guarantees universal health care, Indigenous land rights and makes racism a crime.

  • Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil de 1988 — Assembleia Nacional Constituinte (1988)
  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)
  • A Concise History of Brazil — Boris Fausto and Sergio Fausto, Cambridge University Press (2014)
  • Brazil: Five Centuries of Change — Thomas E. Skidmore, Oxford University Press (2010)

Well established democracystatehoodindigenousrights

A Constituent Assembly elected in 1986 worked for twenty months, receiving tens of thousands of suggestions and organised popular amendments from unions, churches, Black and Indigenous movements and women’s groups. Its president, Ulysses Guimarães, called the result the “Citizen Constitution” and declared his “hatred and disgust” for dictatorship as he promulgated it on 5 October 1988.

  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)
  • A Concise History of Brazil — Boris Fausto and Sergio Fausto, Cambridge University Press (2014)

It is one of the world’s longest constitutions. It restored direct elections and civil liberties, extended the vote to illiterate people and made it optional from age sixteen, created the Unified Health System (SUS) with health as “a right of all and a duty of the state”, made racism a crime with no statute of limitations or bail, and recognised Indigenous peoples’ “original rights” to the lands they traditionally occupy, along with land titles for quilombo communities.

Critics say it promised more than the state could pay for and made Brazil hard to govern. Supporters say it made Brazil’s democracy durable: it has survived two presidential impeachments, in 1992 and 2016, and an attack on the seats of government in Brasília on 8 January 2023.
  • Brazil: Five Centuries of Change — Thomas E. Skidmore, Oxford University Press (2010)
  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)

Why it matters today

Brazil

The 1988 constitution is the framework of Brazilian democracy and of daily life, from the free public health system (SUS) to the right to vote at sixteen. When Brazilians argue about the Supreme Court, Indigenous land or social spending, they are usually arguing about what this long and ambitious document promised.