Getúlio Vargas

Getúlio Vargas: The Man Who Invented Modern Brazil

On the morning of 24 August 1954, cornered by a military ultimatum and an opposition press baying for his removal, the President of Brazil shot himself in the chest in the Catete Palace. He left a letter. "I fought against the exploitation of Brazil," it said. "I fear nothing." Within hours the crowds that had been demanding his resignation were burning the offices of the newspapers that had demanded it, and Getúlio Vargas — a small, unsmiling lawyer from the cattle country of the far south — had converted a political defeat into a myth that outlasted everyone who beat him.

The Gaúcho Lawyer

He was born on 19 April 1882 in São Borja, Rio Grande do Sul, on the Argentine frontier, into a family with a place in local politics. He served in the military between 1898 and 1903, then took a law degree at Porto Alegre in 1907, married Darci Lima Sarmanho in 1911, and worked his way up as a state attorney and state deputy. He was finance minister under Washington Luís from 1926 to 1927 and governor of Rio Grande do Sul from 1928 to 1930. Nothing about the résumé suggested a man who would hold power for nineteen of the next twenty-four years.

Revolution of 1930

The opening was economic. After the 1929 crash, coffee fell from 22.5 cents a pound to eight cents between 1929 and 1931, and the export economy on which the First Republic rested collapsed with it. That republic had been run by the *café com leite* arrangement, in which the coffee planters of São Paulo and the dairy interests of Minas Gerais passed the presidency between themselves. Vargas lost the 1930 election, declared it fraudulent, and led a revolution that deposed Washington Luís and stopped his successor from taking office. He governed by decree, dissolved the state legislatures, and created a Ministry of Labour, Industry and Commerce — the first sign of what he intended.

São Paulo revolted against him in 1932. He beat it, and then wrote a constitution in 1934 that broadened the suffrage and enshrined workers' rights, under which Congress elected him to a term due to expire in 1938.

The Estado Novo

He never let it expire. Squeezed between the Integralist right and a communist left whose 1935 uprising handed him a pretext for mass repression, Vargas moved steadily toward dictatorship. On 10 November 1937, invoking the Cohen Plan — a forged document purporting to reveal a communist plot — he declared a state of emergency, dissolved the legislature and proclaimed the Estado Novo. Political parties were abolished, the Integralists among them. The DOPS political police handled dissent; a propaganda department handled the news.

What makes the Estado Novo hard to file is that it also built things. Vargas founded state companies in petroleum, steel and hydroelectric power, and drove the Volta Redonda steel mill — the physical foundation of Brazilian heavy industry. In 1943 he issued the Consolidation of Labour Laws, the CLT, which bundled the eight-hour day, job stability and a minimum wage into a single code. It was genuine social protection and it was also a leash: unions were licensed, incorporated into the state and made dependent on the man who had granted their rights. Brazilian workers called him *o pai dos pobres*, the father of the poor. The paternity was the point.

War, and the Exit

Brazil stayed neutral until German submarine attacks on Brazilian shipping forced a declaration of war in August 1942. The Brazilian Expeditionary Force, raised in 1943, fought in Italy from 1944. The contradiction was not lost on anyone: a dictatorship with fascist trappings was sending troops to destroy fascism, and when they came home the argument at home was over. On 29 October 1945 the military removed him. Elections brought in his own war minister, Eurico Gaspar Dutra, and the Vargas era was declared finished.

The Return

It was not. In 1950 Vargas ran again and won at the ballot box, taking 3,849,040 votes to Eduardo Gomes's 2,342,384 — and doing it without carrying Minas Gerais, a feat no other Brazilian president has managed. The second presidency was economically his strongest: GDP grew by an average of 6.2 per cent a year, against 4.3 per cent in his first term. He created the BNDES development bank in June 1952 and, after the nationalist *O petróleo é nosso* campaign, signed Law 2,004 on 3 October 1953 establishing Petrobras — a state oil monopoly that remains one of the largest companies in Latin America.

The politics went the other way. Labour Minister João Goulart's 100 per cent minimum wage increase in February 1954 enraged the military and business and cost Goulart his job. The journalist Carlos Lacerda kept up a campaign of extraordinary ferocity in *Tribuna da Imprensa*. On 5 August 1954 gunmen attacked Lacerda in Rua Tonelero; he was wounded and an air force officer guarding him, Major Rubens Vaz, was killed. The trail led toward the presidential guard. The armed forces demanded Vargas go. On 24 August he did, by his own hand, and left the letter.

Why Getúlio Is Called a Genius

The faculty worth naming is strategic patience combined with an almost unmatched sense of political timing — the ability to see which forces were rising and to arrive ahead of them. He grasped before anyone else in Brazil that the coffee oligarchy's monopoly was finished, that an industrial working class was being created and would need a patron, and that whoever built the state institutions of industry would own the century. Volta Redonda, the CLT, Petrobras and the BNDES are all his, and all still standing. So is the shape of Brazilian politics: labour incorporated into the state, development driven by state enterprise, and a populist appeal to the poor over the heads of the elite. His final act was itself a calculation of genius, whatever else it was — a suicide that destroyed his enemies' victory and, some historians argue, postponed the military coup for a decade.

The counter-case is not subtle. From 1937 to 1945 he was a dictator, plainly: he took power on a forged document, abolished parties, ran a political police, and censored the press through a propaganda ministry. The labour rights he granted were designed to make independent unionism unnecessary and then impossible, and Brazilian labour law carried that corporatist architecture for decades. His repression of the left after the 1935 uprising was severe and handled by a secret police answerable to him. And this was not intellectual brilliance in any conventional sense — Vargas produced no doctrine, wrote no significant book, and left behind a method rather than a system of thought. What he had was an instinct for power so exact that it looked like foresight.

Legacy

Brazil has never stopped arguing with him, and the argument is not academic: the state oil company, the labour code, the development bank and the populist habit are all live features of the country's politics. Britannica calls him a modernizer and a dictator in the same breath, and both halves are load-bearing. He died at seventy-two, defeated, and won the next fifty years anyway.

Achievements

• federal deputy of Rio Grande do Sul (1923–1926)
• President of Brazil (1930–1945)
• President of Brazil (1951–1954)
• member of the Senate of Brazil (1946–1951)
• Collar of the Order of Isabella the Catholic‎ — 1952
• Order of the White Eagle
• Knight Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
• Grand Cross Special Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany — 1953
• Educated at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul