Leonel Brizola

Leonel de Moura Brizola (January 22, 1922 – June 21, 2004) was a Brazilian politician. Launched in politics by Getúlio Vargas, Brizola was the only politician to serve as elected governor of two Brazilian states, before and after the 1964-1985 military dictatorship. In 1958 he was elected governor of Rio Grande do Sul, and in 1982 and 1990 he was elected governor of Rio de Janeiro. He was also vice-president of the Socialist International and served as Honorary President of that organization from October 2003 until his death in June 2004. One of the few Brazilian major political figures able to overcome the dictatorship's twenty-years ban on his political activity, Brizola was a non-marxist Left nationalist who successfully recycled his political agenda to cope with a post-Cold War setting, his later party, the Democratic Labour Party, practising a form of social democratic, left-wing politics that mixed nationalism with race, empowerment of the destitute and general identity politics .