Getúlio Dornelles Vargas ( ;
April 19, 1882–August 24, 1954) served as president of Brazil
from 1930 to
1945 and from 1951 until his suicide in 1954.
Background
Vargas was born in
São Borja,
Rio Grande do Sul, on April 19,
1882, to Manuel do Nascimento Vargas and Cândida Dornelles Vargas.
The son of a traditional family of "
gaúchos",
he embarked on a military career at first, then turned to the study
of law. Entering Republican politics, he was elected to the Rio
Grande do Sul state legislature and later to the federal
Chamber of Deputies, where he
became the floor leader for his state's delegation in Congress. He
served briefly as Secretary of the Treasury under President
Washington
Luís from which post he resigned to enter the gubernatorial
race in his home state. Once elected Governor of
Rio Grande do Sul, he became a leading
figure in the opposition, urging the end of electoral corruption
through the adoption of the universal and secret ballot.
He and his wife Darcy Lima Sarmanho, whom he married in March 1911,
had five children.
Vargas and the Revolution of 1930
Between the two World Wars, Brazil was a rapidly industrializing
nation popularly regarded as "the sleeping giant of the Americas"
and a potential world power. However, the oligarchic and
decentralized confederation of the Old Republic, dominated by
landed interests, in effect, showed
little concern for promoting
industrialization,
urbanization, and other broad interests of the
new middle class.
Bourgeois and military discontent, heightened by the Great
Depression's impact on the Brazilian economy, led to a bloodless
coup d'état on October 24, 1930 that ousted President
Washington Luís and
his heir-apparent
Júlio Prestes.
Júlio Prestes at this point was the newly elected president.
However, the whole process was questioned and denounced as
fraudulent. Revolutionary activity began before the new president
took office. Regional leaderships in several states dissatisfied
with the state of São Paulo's political dominance joined together
in opposition. Anticlimactic as it was, this was a watershed in
Brazilian history — a liberal, bourgeois revolution that ushered
out the political preeminence of the paulista coffee oligarchs. The
military, traditionally active in Brazilian politics, installed
Vargas as "provisional president." A populist governor of
Rio Grande do Sul and the former
presidential candidate of the Liberal Alliance, Vargas had been
"defeated" by Prestes in the disputed election earlier that
year.
Vargas was a wealthy pro-industrial nationalist and anti-communist
who favored capitalist development and liberal reforms, but
actually posed a serious threat to the elite Paulista gentry. This
opposition would later be radicalized in the 1932 movement that was
initially aimed at the establishment of a new constitution.
Vargas's Liberal Alliance drew support from wide ranges of Brazil's
burgeoning urban middle class and a group of
tenentes, who had grown frustrated to some
extent with the politics of
coronelismo
and
café com leite.
Vargas from within the partisan elite ran on a populist and
protectionist platform during his unsuccessful 1930 campaign. The
coup d'état laid the foundations of a modern Brazil that is highly
industrialized, but still considered a part of the
Third World.
However moderate these aims were, opposition arose among the
powerful Paulista coffee oligarchs who had grown accustomed to
their domination of Brazilian politics. This opposition ignited the
military movement of 1932 when the Paulista elite was defeated, a
situation that marked the definitive transition from the Brazilian
"old republic" and its entry into a new economic cycle no longer
focused on coffee and other commodity production, but on
stimulating industrial development. His tenuous coalition also
lacked a coherent program, being committed to a broad vision of
modernization, but little more specific. Vargas' long career
(including his eventual dictatorship, modelled, surprisingly
considering the liberal roots of his regime, almost along the lines
of European
Fascism), may be explained by
his balancing the conflicting ideological constituencies,
regionalism and economic interests within the vast, diverse and
socio-economically varied nation.
Vargas, in effect, sought to forge a
corporatist, centralized state along
almost-Fascist lines to mitigate disparate class interests and to
quell disorder.
Interim Presidency
Vargas
would develop in response a sort of legal hybrid between the
regimes of Benito Mussolini's
Italy
and Salazar's Portuguese
Estado Novo, copied and developed some
repressive fascist tactics, and conveyed their same rejection of
liberal capitalism, but attained power bearing few indications of
his future quasi-fascist policies. As a candidate in 1930
Vargas utilized populist rhetoric to promote bourgeois concerns,
thus opposing the primacy — but not the legitimacy — of the
Paulista
coffee
oligarchy and the landed elites, who had little interest in
protecting and promoting industry. Vargas during this period
sought to bring Brazil out of the
Great
Depression through orthodox policies.
Like
Franklin Roosevelt in the
U.S., his first steps focused on economic stimulus. A state
interventionist policy utilizing tax breaks, lowered duties, and
import quotas allowed Vargas to expand the domestic industrial
base. Vargas linked his pro-industrial policies to nationalism,
advocating heavy tariffs to "perfect our manufacturers to the point
where it will become unpatriotic to feed or clothe ourselves with
imported goods." In his early years, Vargas also relied on the
support of the
tenentes,
junior military officers, who had long been active against the
ruling coffee oligarchy, staging their own failed revolt in 1922.
Vargas also quelled a Paulista female workers' strike by co-opting
much of their platform and requiring their "factory commissions" to
use government mediation in the future. Vargas, reflecting the
influence of the
tenentes, even advocated a program of
social welfare and reform similar to the
New
Deal.
Constitution of 1934
The parallels between Vargas and the European
police states began to appear by 1934, when a
new constitution was enacted with some direct almost-fascist
influences.
Brazil's 1934 constitution, passed on July 16, contained provisions
that resembled Italian corporatism, which had the enthusiastic
support of the pro-fascist wing of the disparate
tenente
movement and industrialists, who were attracted to Mussolini's
co-optation of unions through state-run, sham syndicates.
As in
Italy, and later Spain
and Germany
,
Fascist-style programs would serve two important aims, stimulating
industrial growth (under the guise of nationalism) and suppressing
the left. Its stated purpose, however, as in Italy, was
uniting all classes in mutual interests. The constitution
established a new Chamber of Deputies that placed government
authority over the private economy, which established a system of
state-guided capitalism aimed at industrialization and reducing
foreign dependency.
After 1934, the regime designated corporate representatives
according to class and profession, but maintained private ownership
of Brazilian-owned business. Based on a façade of increased labor
rights and social investment, Brazilian corporatism, like that in
Italy, was actually a strategy to increase industrial output
utilizing a strong nationalist appeal.
Vargas, and later
Juan Perón in neighboring Argentina
, another quasi-fascist, kind of emulated some
Mussolini's strategy of mediating class disputes and co-opting
workers' demands under the banner of nationalism. Under the
guise of workers' rights also, he greatly expanded labor
regulations with the consent of industry, pacified by strong
industrial growth. While simultaneously expanding the mandated
rights of workers, Vargas, like Mussolini, decimated unions
independent of his state syndicates. The new constitution, drafted
by Vargas allies, expanded social programs and set a minimum wage
but also denied illiterates (largely the
underclass) the right to vote and placed
stringent limits on union organizing and "unauthorized"
strikes.
Beyond corporatism, the 1934 constitution also heightened efforts
to reduce provincial autonomy in the traditionally devolved,
sprawling nation. Centralization allowed Vargas to curb the
oligarchic power of the landed paulista elites, who obstructed
modernization through the regionalism,
machine politics, and façade democracy of the Old Republic.
Vargas, the Integralists and the suppression of the Left
Threatened by pro-Communist elements in labor critical of the rural
latifundios, Vargas reined in his shaky
alliance with labor and began formally co-opting the less
intimidating fascist movement.
As he moved to the right after 1934, his ideological character and
association with a global ideological orbit, however, remained
ambiguous — reminiscent of the early phases of leftist leaders
Fidel Castro and
Daniel Ortega. To fill this ideological void
and promote his new rightist policies, Vargas began moving against
the
tenentes while encouraging the growth of fascist
paramilitaries. "
Integralism",
founded and led by
Plínio
Salgado, who adopted Fascist and Nazi symbolism and salutes,
offered Vargas a new political base. A green-shirted paramilitary
organization directly financed by
Mussolini and
Hitler, Integralism's propaganda campaigns were
borrowed directly from Nazi models — excoriations of
Marxism,
liberalism and
Jews, that espoused fanatical nationalism and
"Christian virtues".
Vargas tolerated this rise of
anti-Semitism, even not being anti-semitic at
all, and may have acted upon the Integralists’ popularization of
anti-Semitism. One example of his alleged and false "anti-Semitism"
was the deportation of the pregnant, German-born Jewish wife of
Luís Carlos Prestes,
Olga Benário Prestes, convicted of
being a spy working for the USSR and an illegal immigrant, to Nazi
Germany, where she would die in a concentration camp. Today is
known that Vargas did not give that order himself, nor knew the
fate of those who were sent to Nazi Germany. Vargas's
"anti-Communism" and increasing conservatism also encouraged an
alliance between the government and the Catholic Church, similar to
Mussolini's arrangement following the
Lateran Pacts.
Vargas forced Congress to respond to the growth of the Aliança
Nacional Libertadora (ANL), a leftist coalition led by the
Communist Party and
Luís Carlos
Prestes. A revolutionary forerunner of
Che Guevara, Prestes led the legendary but
futile "Long March" through the rural Brazilian interior following
his participation in the failed 1922
tenente rebellion
against the coffee oligarchs. This experience, however, left
Prestes and some of his followers sceptical of armed conflict.
Nonetheless, Congress branded all leftist opposition as
"subversive" under a March 1935 National Security Act that allowed
the President to ban the ANL, which was forced — reluctantly — to
begin another armed insurrection in November. The authoritarian
regime responded by imprisoning and torturing Prestes and violently
crushing the Communist movement through state terror like that of
the European police states.
Although "the father of the poor" expanded the electorate, granted
women's suffrage, enacted social security reforms, legalized labor
unions as a populist, Vargas also whittled down the autonomy of
labor and crushed a series of guerilla violence (among peasants)
revolts known as the
cangaço.
The New State
Like some of the European Fascists, Vargas utilized fears over
communism to justify personal
dictatorship.
The fascist "Estado Novo" dictatorship, modeled
similarly after Salazar's regime of the
same name
in Brazil's mother country, finally materialized in
1937, when Vargas was forced to step down as president by January
1938 because his own 1934 constitution prohibited the president
from succeeding himself. On 29 September 1937, Gen. Dutra,
his rightist collaborator, presented "the Cohen Plan" that
established a detailed plan for a Communist revolution. The Cohen
Plan was a mere forgery concocted by the Integralists, but Vargas
exploited it to have Dutra publicly demand
a state of siege in a chain of events
redolent of the
Reichstag fire, which
Hitler presented as a Communist conspiracy to justify a
dictatorship. On November 10, Vargas, ruling by decree, then made a
broadcast in which he stated his plans to assume dictatorial powers
under a new constitution derived from European fascist models,
thereby curtailing presidential elections (his ultimate objective)
and dissolving congress.
Vargas,
like Hitler in the Weimar Republic
and Mussolini in the postwar Kingdom of Italy,
consolidated dictatorial powers by acting within the established
political system, not in a single coup
d'état or revolution.
Under the Estado Novo, Vargas abolished opposition political
parties, imposed rigid
censorship,
established a centralized police force, and filled prisons with
political dissidents, while evoking a sense of nationalism that
transcended class and bound the masses to the state. He ended up
repressing the "
Integralism"
as well, once the communists were already defeated.
Vargas and the Axis Powers
The resemblance between the Estado Novo and the European police
states suggested to some interwar observers that Vargas' regime was
simply a "variant of the European
Fascist"
model. Brazil appeared to be entering the Axis orbit — even before
the 1937 declaration of the overtly fascist Estado Novo. Between
1933 and 1938 Germany became the principal market for Brazilian
cotton, and its second largest importer of Brazilian
coffee and
cacao. The German
Bank for South America even established three hundred branches in
Vargas' Brazil.
In May 1941, after the invasions of Poland
, France
, Czechoslovakia
and Norway
, Vargas sent
a birthday telegram to Hitler, using it as opportunity to convey
Brazilian ambiguity, playing both sides against each other.
It said, "best wishes for your personal happiness and the
prosperity of the German nation".
Of course, it did not mean anything, since
even in the US
there were
many people who had sympathy for Hitler.Such periodic overtures to the Axis Powers, along with rapid increase in
civilian and military trade between Brazil and Nazi Germany gave
US officials
reason to wonder about Vargas' international
alignment.
Then the
US started to
reach out to Brazilians, with the "Good Neighbor Policy".
Carmen Miranda became a Hollywood
star and even Donald
Duck "visited" Brazil, to bring
Brazil into the war.
Vargas eventually sided with the
Allies,
declared war on the Axis and
liberalized his regime. The shrewd, low-key, and reasoned
pragmatist sided with the antifascist Allies after a period of
ambiguity for economic reasons, since the Allies were more viable
trading partners and helped with money, and liberalized his regime
because of complications arising from this alliance. In siding with
the Allies, one agreement that Vargas made was to help the Allies
with rubber production in order to receive loans and credit from
the US.
This siding with the antifascist Allies created a paradox at home
not unnoticed by Brazil's middle class (of a fascist-like regime
joining the antifascist Allies) that
Salazar and
Franco avoided by maintaining nominal
neutrality, allowing them to avoid both antifascist sentiment at
home arising from siding with the Allies or annihilation by the
Allies.
Vargas thus astutely responded to the newly liberal sentiments of a
middle class that was no longer fearful of disorder and proletarian
discontent by moving away from fascist repression — promising "a
new postwar era of liberty" that included amnesty for political
prisoners, presidential elections, and the legalization of
opposition parties — including the moderated and irreparably
weakened Communist Party. Historian
Benjamin Keen believes that such political
liberalization contributed to the downfall of the Estado Novo,
being substantial enough to provoke a 1945 military coup d'état led
by
Dutra and Monteiro, who were
alarmed with Vargas' growing ties with labor and the working
classes.
The Shortcomings of Labor Legislation
Despite the passage of many labor laws that significantly improved
the lives of laborers (such as paid vacation, minimum wage, and
maternity leave), there were still many shortcomings in the
enforcement and implementation of labor legislation. While it was
impossible for the minimum wage laws to be evaded by large
businesses or in large towns, the minimum rural salary of 1943 was,
in many cases, simply not abided by employers. In fact, many social
policies never extended to rural areas. While each state varied,
social legislation was enforced less by the government and more by
the good will of employers and officials in the remote regions of
Brazil. Furthermore, Vargas' legislation did more for the
industrial workers than the more numerous agricultural workers,
despite the fact that few industrial workers joined the unions that
the government encouraged. Additionally, while Vargas labor laws
had positive effects and were met with praise, social institutions
Vargas created were much less successful. The state-run social
security system was inefficient and the Institute for Retirement
and Social Welfare produced few results. The popular backlash due
to these shortcomings was evidenced by the rising popularity of the
National Liberation Alliance.
Second Presidency
Vargas returned to politics in 1951 and through a free and secret
ballot was re-elected President of the Republic. Hampered by an
economic crisis, Vargas pursued a nationalist policy; turning to
the country's natural resources and away from foreign dependency.
As part of this policy, he founded
Petrobrás (Brazilian oil).
His political adversaries initiated a crisis which culminated in
the "
Rua Tonelero", where Major Rubens
Vaz was killed during an attempt on the life of Vargas' main
adversary,
Carlos Lacerda. Lieutenant
Gregório Fortunato, chief of Vargas' personal guard, was accused of
masterminding the assassination attempt. This aroused a reaction in
the military against Vargas and the generals demanded his
resignation. In a last ditch effort Vargas called a special cabinet
meeting on the eve of August 24, but rumors spread that the armed
forces officers were implacable.
Feeling
the situation beyond his control, Vargas shot himself in the chest
on August 24, 1954 in the Catete Palace
. He wrote a letter to the Brazilian people
known as his "
carta
testamento."
The famous last lines read,
"Serenely, I take my first step on
the road to eternity and I leave life to enter history."
On exhibit in the Palace is his nightshirt with a bullet hole in
the breast.
The popular commotion that his suicide
caused was so huge, that it destroyed the ambitions of his enemies
for many years, among them rightists anti-nationalists and
pro-US.
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas is interred in his native
São Borja, in Rio Grande do Sul.
Trivia
The
trademark chimarrão consumed by Getúlio Vargas was
manufactured by
Theodoro Manzorli and Company
Ltd., of
Bento
Gonçalves,
Rio Grande do Sul,
Brazil. Getúlio Vargas bought this matte in bulk. The herb was
selected with much care and burnt in a barbacuá. It was packed by
thick, fine
leaves so as not to block the
sucking-tube. From there, it was taken directly to the president in
São Borja by a mule of the Theodoro
Manzorli Company and unloaded in the his hometown farm. He
frequently gave his best friends packets of this herb.
The music
"Dr.Getúlio", lyrics by Chico Buarque,
describe the life of Getulio Vargas and his fight for poor people
and against international interests in Brazil.
See also
References
- Loewenstein, Karl. Brazil Under Vargas. New York: Russell &
Russell, 1973. Pg 348
- Loewenstein, Karl. Brazil Under Vargas. New York: Russell &
Russell, 1973. Pg 347
- Bourne, Richard. Getulio Vargas of Brazil, 1883-1954 Sphinx of
the Pampas. London: C. Knight, 1974. Pg 155
- Levine, Robert M. Brazilian Legacies. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe,
1997. Pg 47
- Loewenstein, Karl. Brazil Under Vargas. New York: Russell &
Russell, 1973. Pg 351
- Bourne, Richard. Getulio Vargas of Brazil, 1883-1954 Sphinx of
the Pampas. London: C. Knight, 1974. Pg 198
- Levine, Robert M. Father of the Poor?: Vargas and His Era. New
York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Pg 67
- Levine, Robert M. Brazilian Legacies. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe,
1997. Pgs 186, 47
- Bourne, Richard. Getulio Vargas of Brazil, 1883-1954 Sphinx of
the Pampas. London: C. Knight, 1974. Pg 70
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