If the election of Getúlio Vargas had made his enemies fear that the new republic would end up sliding back into populist dictatorship, his suicide in office seemed to put those fears at ease for a time. But while Vargas was dead, the forces of left-wing populism and labour activism that he had ridden back into power would not go away so easily. And without Vargas as a unifying, “moderating” influence, those forces would spend the next ten years more and more openly embracing socialism as a cure for Brazil’s problems.
It might be useful to retread some ground here. As mentioned, Vargas won the 1950 election thanks to the re-emergence, in fact if not in name, of the coalition of regional power brokers (organised in the PSD) and urban trade unions (organised in the PTB) that had previously made up his support base during the Estado Novo years. During his presidency, these two factions were both represented in his administration, and spent most of the time at loggerheads. The ideological conflict, which didn’t quite align with partisan or socioeconomic dividing lines, was between economic nationalists and what we might call liberals (the only other good name I can find for them is entreguistas, which means something like “surrenderists” or, more idiomatically, “traitors”, and was a name applied to them by the nationalists). The former group, which was the more organised of the two, supported rapid industrial development through state investment in key sectors, and tended to be suspicious of American designs on Brazil, while the latter believed that American investment was the only realistic way to spur development and that international co-operation against the Communist threat was necessary for the survival of democracy.
As he had been in the 30s, Vargas himself was determined to play these sides off one another and draw power off both, but it would be difficult to accomplish in a time of much greater political consciousness and social strife. The economic crisis set off under Dutra was showing no signs of dissipating. By 1953, inflation had reached 20 percent, and the development measures undertaken by Vargas did nothing to slow it down. At the same time, Vargas, determined to secure his flank by shoring up relations with the unions, had spent two years calling on them to help him fight “speculators and profiteers” whom he blamed for driving up inflation, and eliminated the loyalty oaths for union leadership instituted under Dutra, which allowed a number of ex-Communist labour leaders to come back out of the woods.
Which brings us to the strikes. The issues around inflation and rising costs of living had hit Brazil’s industrial heart especially hard, and in March 1953, the textile workers of São Paulo went on strike for a 60% pay raise — which, given the inflation rate, would be only just enough to meet their needs. They soon received support from other unions, and eventually some 300,000 workers (out of an urban population of around two million) would be involved in some form. The strike was spearheaded by anti-Getulist ex-PCB organisers who accused Vargas of being a US puppet and viewed the strike as a way to build opposition to him within the movement as well as make material gains for the workers. This tendency was even further on display in June, when a hundred thousand dockworkers and sailors in Rio, Santos and Belém went on a wildcat strike with the explicit goal of removing the leadership of their own union, which was composed of PTB loyalists and was accused of being a cypher for the Ministry of Labour.
The sailors’ strike forced Vargas to take strong action, and on the 18th of June, he appointed João Goulart as Labour Minister. Goulart was a young estancieiro from the vicinity of São Borja, Vargas’ hometown on the Uruguay River in Rio Grande do Sul, who had made a name for himself as a mover-and-shaker in the PTB state government. Despite his comfortable background, and considerable independent wealth following his father’s death in 1943, Goulart was something of a left-wing firebrand, known to be unusually fair in dealings with his own employees and a strong supporter of organised labour during his time in state government. It was this quality that Vargas hoped would help bring about a resolution to the strike, and in a way, it did — Goulart immediately set about implementing most of the strikers’ demands, which he could do since the harbours were already nationalised and the shipping lines heavily regulated, and forced the union leadership to resign, paving the way for a group loyal to Goulart rather than Vargas to assume the leadership.
Over the following year, as the Vargas government moved in a more and more nationalist-populist direction with the creation of Petrobras and Electrobras, Goulart continued to speak out for workers’ rights and became the right’s public enemy number two (after Vargas). In February 1954, after Goulart expressed support for a proposal to double the minimum wage overnight, a group of army officers signed a memorandum deploring the state of the military budget, which also expressed doubts about a drastic minimum wage hike at a time when the state’s resources were clearly needed to shore up national defence. Vargas responded to this with a cabinet reshuffle, which sought to bring his government back in a conservative direction. Goulart was sacked, replaced with a complete nonentity whose name I won’t bother you with, and a committed anti-Communist army general who had ties to the memorandum’s authors was brought in as War Minister. The message was clear, and overnight, Goulart became a martyr to the labour movement.
None of this did anything to endear the opposition to Vargas, mind you, not least because he seemed uninterested in actually backing down from the nationalist policy programme. On May Day 1954, Vargas made a speech to the assembled unions of Rio de Janeiro, in which he announced that the minimum wage would, in fact, be doubled immediately. At the same time, rumours were beginning to spread that Vargas, Juan Perón and Carlos Ibáñez del Campo were secretly plotting to form an alliance directed against the United States, with the goal of establishing a South American network of “syndicalist republics”.
This was the state of play as the Rua Tonelero attack began to dominate the news. The attack came at a time when Vargas was already beset from all sides, and the news that his security detail had planned a hit against his loudest political opponent only provided the ammunition needed to bring stragglers in the Army and the political establishment out against Vargas. It is very probable that a coup d’état would’ve been launched had Vargas not taken the initiative — but of course, he did. With their bogeyman very helpfully removing himself as a factor, the military leadership now swung back around, declaring their support for a “legal solution” to the crisis — i.e. calm, orderly new elections.
The unions, too, saw a great shift in positions following Vargas’ suicide. Immediately after the news became known — and as sympathetic local leaders read out his bombastic suicide note in city after city — crowds of workers began pouring out into the streets and squares to show their support for the dead President and their hatred of his enemies, throwing stones at opposition newspapers and foreign-owned businesses and mobbing the US embassy in Rio de Janeiro. The leaders of the trade unions noticed this tremendous outpouring of popular anger and, more and more, began to see nationalist left-wing populism as the most effective political path to take. This included the former Communists, who were now free of having to oppose Vargas and ready to focus their efforts on opposing the business elite and the United States.
By this point, the four-year term of the Congress elected in 1950 was fast approaching its end, with new elections scheduled for the 3rd of October (so about five weeks after Vargas shot himself). The elections didn’t see too much change, surprisingly enough, but the PTB and PSD made some minor gains while the UDN fell back slightly. A factor that complicates things a bit is the growth of coalition lists, which varied wildly from state to state. I know which deputies belonged to which party, but the official result files for the Fourth Republic don’t show party affiliations for individual candidates within the coalitions, so I’ve been unable to separate out the results fully. As such, in cases where more than two major parties (PSD, UDN, PTB, PSP) participated in a coalition, I’ve used brown independent shades to depict them.
The death of Vargas brought into power Café Filho, one of the leaders of the PSP, who had utterly failed to make a mark as Vice President and would now mostly fail to make a mark as President. He immediately distanced himself from Vargas’ political legacy, appointing a cabinet mostly made up of UDN members, and spent most of his time ensuring that the presidential elections went off on schedule the following year. The Constitution of 1947 had established different terms of office for the presidency (five years) and the legislature (four), with states free to choose whether their governors served for four or five years. This disjoint would make Brazilian politics quite weird in the years that followed, and when Brazil returned to democracy in the 1980s, the decision was made to harmonise all terms of office to four years in order to avoid that sort of problem. Still, in this specific instance it’s kind of hard to see how Vargas shooting himself five weeks before the presidential election would’ve made things more stable, so maybe it was all for the better.
The PSD and PTB decided to capitalise on the political moment by forming an alliance, rebuffing the calls for a PSD-UDN “national unity ticket” coming from the right, and nominated Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, a rural doctor turned populist firebrand on the left wing of the PSD who had been elected Governor of Minas Gerais in 1950, for President. His running mate would be none other than João Goulart, the darling of the workers, who was better-placed than any other man in Brazil to claim the support of the labour movement. The “JK-Jango” campaign (“Jango” being Goulart’s nickname) became a national sensation, bringing out massive crowds across the country and gathering such a wide range of political operators behind them that they were almost assured of victory. Their campaign jingle, which again took the form of a Carnival marcinha, expressed hope for a bright future — Brazil, a “giant asleep for 400 years”, would enter the world stage with confidence, and Kubitschek was the “shining star in a sky of blue” who would lead them to greatness and “demonstrate to those who would dominate us that Brazil belongs to the Brazilians”.
The UDN nominated one of their many interchangeable former tenentes for the presidency, and while they improved on their 1945 and 1950 results, they were no match for Kubitschek and Goulart. Similarly for Adhemar de Barros, who had lost re-election as Governor of São Paulo to a no-name weirdo with a broom who will surely never become relevant again, and who decided to use the PSP, now freed of its alliance with Vargas, as a vehicle to run for President, hopefully capturing some of the centre ground yielded by the PSD when it nominated Kubitschek. It sort of worked in São Paulo itself, but Barros placed a distant third, and his running made failed to win a single state (Rondônia still being a territory). Oh, and Plínio Salgado decided the time was ripe for some fascism, but only about nine percent of the voters agreed, and he didn’t even bother to put up a running mate.
The election of a candidate who was easily as openly nationalistic and pro-labour as Vargas raised some eyebrows, however. A minority of army officers, spurred on by a letter published during the election campaign (and later revealed to have been forged) that claimed Goulart had been involved in talks with the Peronists in Argentina to set off an armed revolution and inaugurate a workers’ republic in Brazil, decided it might be worth taking direct action to prevent Kubitschek and Goulart from assuming power. Their hand was strengthened in early November, when Café Filho had a health scare that forced him to resign the presidency, handing power to President of the Chamber of Deputies Carlos Luz (PSD), a man very much on the right of the party who was rumoured to support a pre-emptive coup against Kubitschek.
This state of affairs forced the “legalists” (i.e. non-coupists) in the Army leadership to take decisive action — three days after Luz assumed the presidency, General Henrique Teixeira Lott mobilised thousands of troops around the capital, who seized control of key buildings and issued an ultimatum that forced Luz to resign. The leaderships of the Navy and Air Force denounced Lott’s actions, but the Army already held the ground by then, so any interservice confrontation was nipped in the bud. Congress was quickly convened, voted to ratify Luz’ removal from office and to appoint Nereu Ramos, now the President of the Senate, to take over the presidency until Kubitschek could be inaugurated.
Kubitschek was, in fact, inaugurated on schedule on 31 January 1956, and would, in fact, serve out a full five years in office — very technically the only President to do so under the 1946 Constitution, Dutra having already served a year in office when it was adopted. We will talk about his achievements in office next time.
