Brazil’s Fourth Republic, Part II: The Return of Getúlio Vargas
Eurico Gaspar Dutra’s most notable achievement in office was the Constitution of 1946, Brazil’s fifth, which was probably the most democratic the country had ever had up to that point. A slew of democratic rights and guarantees were set up, including universal suffrage for all adults, near-complete freedom of speech, of the press and of organisation, and free, secret, competitive and compulsory voting for all levels of government (the latter, having been brought in under Vargas, was felt reasonable enough to keep around). There would also be strict limits and checks on presidential authority, in order to prevent another dictatorship from arising. In terms of its overall structure, the Brazilian government looked quite similar to the United States, but with a few key differences: state legislatures were all unicameral, they and the Chamber of Deputies used proportional representation for all elections, the Senate would now have three seats per state, and perhaps most notably, there was no concept of a unified “ticket” for executive offices. In presidential elections, voters would cast one ballot for President and a totally separate ballot for Vice President, and they could and did split their vote if either candidate nominated by their chosen party didn’t appeal. The same was true for gubernatorial elections. Oh, and neither the President nor a state governor could serve more than one consecutive term, though (as we’ll see later) there was no such restriction for the VP.
To fill the third Senate seats, add 19 seats to the Chamber of Deputies (including ones for the territories) and elect new state governments, “supplementary” general elections (which I haven’t mapped) were held in January 1947. It’s impossible to compare the congressional elections with 1945 since not all seats were up, but comparing the state legislative elections to the 1945 Chamber results shows a clear loss for the PSD and an uptick in support for both the PTB and PCB, who now held nearly 15% and 10% of the vote respectively. The PCB actually became the largest party on the Rio de Janeiro city council, winning 18 out of 50 seats, and with some 200,000 enrolled members, it was fast becoming the largest organised political movement in the country.
This was of grave concern to Dutra, his associates and most of the governing class, who viewed the PCB (justly or not) as a threat to democracy, property rights and perhaps even Brazilian independence — Dutra said of the PCB that their professed internationalism made it impossible for them to support Brazil’s own national interest, and eagerly backed by the United States, his government successfully obtained a Supreme Court ruling in April that declared the PCB opposed to the democratic system and stripped them of their registration. This “soft ban” came as part of a pattern across Latin America — Chile banned its Communist Party outright the following year, and the newly-refounded Mexican Communist Party had already lost its status in a similar way to its Brazilian counterpart. The pressures of the Cold War were starting to be felt, although not in as dramatic a fashion as later on.
Dutra established a close relationship with the United States in more ways than one, encouraging American investment to develop Brazil’s economy (especially the oil industry) and arranging an inter-American security summit in Petrópolis in 1947, which was attended by Harry Truman and several other heads of state. He also initially supported free trade, although a balance of payments crisis forced his government to reverse course by 1948 and implement trade controls to keep the cruzeiro stable. This did no favours for Brazilian industry, however, and coupled with the harsh repression against labour organising that followed the anti-communist rulings, Dutra and the PSD had soon utterly discredited themselves among Brazil’s working classes.
Who benefited from this, you ask? Well, formerly there were two roughly equal forces on the Brazilian left, but the PCB ban made things relatively straightforward on that front. The PTB, however, lacked either the massive cadre organisation of the PCB or the patronage networks of the PSD, so in order to successfully reap the benefits of Dutra’s mistakes, they would need a clear voice to lead them. Someone charismatic, tested, and with instant name recognition across the entire country, who could unite the workers and peasants into a strong electoral majority. The choice was clear: they needed Getúlio Vargas back.
Vargas, who had been living on his ranch in Rio Grande do Sul ever since his removal from office in 1945, was certainly interested in returning to power. He’d been following Dutra’s actions closely all along, and with the blessing of the party he founded, he declared his candidacy for President and returned to the forefront of Brazilian politics. This time, so the line went, he would bring back the good times, secure national dignity, make Brazil great again, what have you. Above all, he would put Brazilian workers before the interests of big business and the United States — something like what Perón was doing over in Argentina. Also like Perón, Vargas announced his support for the “O petróleo é nosso” (“The Oil is Ours” — or, if you want to be funny, “It’s Brazil’s Oil”) movement, which called for the nationalisation of the oil industry in order to ensure that its benefits would go to Brazilians instead of foreign multinationals.
As hard as it might be to imagine if you just think of Vargas as the deposed pseudofascist dictator, his candidacy caused a groundswell of popular excitement. At the Rio Carnival in 1950, one of the most popular marcinhas was “Retrato do Velho” (“The Old Man’s Portrait”), which proclaimed that everything would be well once Vargas’ portrait was back up on the walls (as it had been in all public buildings during the dictatorship). Vargas (who was 68 at the time) apparently didn’t like being called an “old man”, but the song still spread like wildfire. There’s no denying its catchiness, even if the message is a bit, um.
Eduardo Gomes stood a second time as the UDN candidate, but floundered badly after he pledged to abolish the minimum wage brought in under Vargas, a catastrophically bad reading of the political mood at this point. The national PSD leadership, for their part, refused to back Vargas in his “rebellion” against Dutra, and instead put up Cristiano Machado, whose name will not be on the test — he was a federal deputy from Minas Gerais, was considered laughably obscure even at the time, and died in 1953. The only mark Machado made on Brazilian politics was in giving his name to the concept of cristianização (“Christianisation”), where a presidential candidate is so insignificant that even their own party turns their back and campaigns for someone else. In this case, obviously, that someone else was Vargas, who received official support from the state parties in Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul, and significant unofficial support from PSD members all around the country.
Vargas received nearly an overall majority of the vote, despite facing opposition from both of Brazil’s largest political parties. In addition to the significant number of rogue PSD members who backed his candidacy, he was aided by his alliance with the Social Progressive Party (Partido Social Progressista, PSP), which had been formed out of a merger between the PRP of Adhemar de Barrios and Café Filho with the union-based anti-Getulist PPS and the smaller National Agrarian Party of Mário Rolim Teles. Now, the English Wikipedia refers to the PSP as a “conservative, populist” party, while the Portuguese Wikipedia calls them “social democrats” (of course, that term doesn’t quite have the same meaning in Portuguese as it does in Germanic languages), so on balance I think it’s fair to think of them as a centrist party somewhat like the PSD, although with a different base. The PSP was quickly cementing itself as Brazil’s fourth party, with a particular stronghold in São Paulo, where Adhemar de Barrios managed to get himself elected governor in 1947 and now gave Vargas a crushing majority in the state that had so despised him the first time around that they’d launched an actual armed rebellion against his presidency.
The overwhelming success of Vargas in the presidential election didn’t really transfer over to the other races — Café Filho, who stood as Vargas’ running mate as part of the PTB-PSP alliance, won his race by a narrower margin, and though the PTB made gains in both chambers of Congress, they weren’t enough to really break through. The PSD and UDN still had their networks of support out in the provinces, and still captured about two thirds of the legislature between them. The exceptions to this rule were Rio, where the unions were strong enough to deliver the left reliable victories, Rio Grande do Sul, where Vargas had his local patronage networks to draw from, and São Paulo, where the unions and the PSP machine combined to deliver a deeply fractious result that’s only going to get more confusing as we move forward.
Minor parties generally did a bit better in 1950 than they had in 1945, perhaps because the election was held with more than about a month’s notice. The PR won their first two Senate seats as well as eleven deputies, the new Social Labour Party (Partido Social Trabalhista, PST) formed by dissident PSD and/or PTB groups (my sources are unclear) won majorities in Alagoas and Maranhão, and, of course, the Integralists came back.
Brazilian Integralism had very little to do with the Catholic movement of the same name that started under the French Third Republic, although it did have a bit of a mystical Christian air to it. It was, basically, the homegrown Brazilian form of fascism, but with some weird additions. For instance, it was outspokenly anti-racist, and its supporters greeted each other with the Tupi word anauê (“you are my brother”) alongside the Roman salute. Plínio Salgado, the founder and chief ideologue of Integralism, also opposed antisemitism, but seemingly not enough to kick the man who translated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Portuguese out of the movement. In the 30s, the Integralists and the Communists repeatedly clashed in the streets over the allegiances of the working class and the attention of Daddy Vargas, who ended up siding with the Integralists to clamp down on the Communists before turning on the Integralists and crushing them in turn, sending Salgado into exile in Portugal. Now though, Brazil had freedom of association (unless you were a Communist), and so Salgado figured he’d be alright to return home and rebuild the movement. To avoid too much fascist baggage, he rechristened it the Party of Popular Representation (Partido de Representação Popular, PRP). His goal was to stand candidates for Congress in 1950, hopefully win a few seats, then spend a few years building up the organisation before finally running for President in 1955. In the event, the PRP won only two seats, and while they would improve on that figure in the years to come, they’d never reach the heights Salgado dreamed of. Which was perhaps for the best.
Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, Vargas. As it turned out, hanging the old man’s portrait back on the wall did not, in fact, solve all Brazil’s problems. The economic crisis caused by Dutra’s contradictory economic policies was now a full-blown recession, and Vargas could do precious little to stop it. The creation of Petrobrás, a state oil monopoly modelled on Mexico’s Pemex, in 1953 was one of Vargas’ few real successes in office, fulfilling one of his key campaign promises. Everything else he tried to do bumped up against the large anti-Getulist bloc in Congress, led by the UDN deputy and newspaper baron Carlos Lacerda, who pledged to obstruct the administration at every turn until Vargas agreed to resign.
What ended Vargas’ presidency turned out to be something far stranger, though it did involve Lacerda. On 5 August 1954, multiple gunshots were heard outside 180 rua Tonelero in Copacabana, then and now one of Rio’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. This was Lacerda’s house, and the shots had been aimed at him, though the only casualty was Major Rubens Vaz, one of his bodyguards. The perpetrator fled the scene in a taxicab, but a police investigation eventually established his identity — a seemingly-random carpenter whose name I won’t trouble you with — and his link to the scene — according to the cab’s regular driver and other witnesses, he’d been seen with a member of President Vargas’ security detail on the day of the attack. Soon enough, the attack was conclusively linked to Gregório Fortunato, Vargas’ head of security, nicknamed the “Black Angel” both because of the colour of his skin and his perceived viciousness against the President’s enemies. Fortunato confessed to having helped plan the hit on Lacerda on the 8th, by which point it was already clear which way the evidence pointed, and the scandal that followed sent Vargas’ position from “embattled” to “untenable”. On the 22nd, nineteen senior generals signed a manifesto demanding Vargas resign from office.
Allegedly, when he received the manifesto on the morning of the 24th, Vargas is supposed to have said that “the only way I’ll leave Catete (the presidential palace in Rio) is as a corpse”. This detail may have been added after the fact, or it may not, but it certainly adds a touch of Greek tragedy to what happened next — Vargas shut himself into his office, took out a pistol from a desk drawer and shot himself in the chest. The Vargas era was, quite definitively, at an end.
