Brazil on the Move

by John Dos Passos

  Carlos Lacerda took to politics like a duck to water. He early showed a sharp pen for invective and a talent for public speaking. He had charm, good looks, and reckless personal courage. He was fired by all the enthusiasms of his father’s utopian socialism.

  Vargas’ first administration started out in a New Dealish kind of way, aiming towards universal suffrage, including votes for women, the encouragement of labor unions to protect working people, the colonization of the west, the elimination of poverty and epidemic disease, a beginning of the social reforms progressive Brazilians had been demanding for years. Vargas had plans for Brazil that won the support of the young idealists.

  Vargas had been Washington Luíz’s Minister of the Treasury (Fazenda), but his political rearing was in the school of Borges de Madeiros, the ironfisted boss of his home state of Rio Grande do Sul on the turbulent southern border. This was gaúcho country where politicians still talked with the gun. Not that Vargas was a man of violence. Far from it. A small stoutish fellow with a benevolent smile and friendly wrinkles round his eyes, he was a conniving man who preferred to triumph by corrupting his enemies rather than by a direct show of force.

  As Vargas watched the success overseas of Hitler’s National Socialism and of Mussolini’s Corporate State he began to plan something similar for Brazil. He began to appreciate the demagogic possibilities of an appeal to the masses. Through government subsidies and by planting his own men in their management he geared labor unions and student organizations, and much of big business, into his own political machine.

  His twenty year rule determined the shape of Brazilian society for years to come. As the only politician who had ever paid attention to them he had the devotion of the urban working class. The coffee barons and the new industrial magnates of São Paulo trusted him to keep the working class in order. It was under Vargas that the strange link was formed between Brazilian big business and the Brazilian left. He dominated the Army and Navy through appointments and promotions, the press through his censorship bureau. Where he couldn’t intimidate people he bought them.

  His appetite for power grew with the exercise, until in 1937 he was ready to proclaim his Estado Nôvo (the New State). Patriarchal government has deep roots in Brazil. In colonial days the father had power of life and death. Plumpfaced subtly smiling innocent appearing Getúlio Vargas was presented as a benevolent father to the poor. This was Fascism Brazilian style.

  Every career was closed to a nonconformist. The newspapers were forbidden to mention the word democracy.

  For a while the Communists offered the only vocal opposition. It is easy to see how a fiery young law student with a passion for civil liberties should be attracted to them. In those days all oppression seemed to come from the Fascists. The Communists operated under the banner of the popular front. In Brazil particularly the Party had taken over a certain romantic aura with the conversion to Marxism of Luís Carlos Prestes. Captain Prestes was a romantic young officer of engineers who, after the failure of one of the many popular outbursts against the oligarchical regime of the twenties, led a column of revolting troops and assorted revolutionists through thousands of miles of the wilderness of Mato Grosso and kept them together for many months before he was forced to seek asylum in Bolívia. The adventures of the Prestes column turned all the young men’s heads. Lacerda now says it was only the tactics of the popular front that kept him from formally becoming a party member.

  As student leader of a protest organization called the Alianza Libertadora he traveled about the country addressing meetings in behalf of laborleaders and anti-Fascists. When there was a strike he was for the strikers. His heated protests appeared in clandestine publications. Whenever Vargas’ police scented trouble Carlos Lacerda was among those they carried off to the jug. When he wasn’t in jail he was in hiding.

  He married at twentythree. When his first child was on the way he had to come to grips with the problem of making a living. Friends talked Vargas into letting the young firebrand out from one of his many jailings on the understanding that he would forego politics.

  He went to work for a nonpartisan journal of economics. He did spreads for an advertising agency. He won fame as reporter for O Jornal, the key newspaper of the Diários Associados, Chateaubriand’s national chain, which was the Brazilian counterpart of the Hearst or Scripps-Howard chains in the United States. In 1943 he was made city editor.

  How Vargas Became a Good Neighbor

  After the American entrance into the war against Hitler, and particularly when the military fortunes of the Axis powers began to dim, a change came over the Estado Nôvo. Fascist was becoming a term of abuse. Vargas began to model his image more on Franklin D. Roosevelt and less on Mussolini. The good neighbor began to win over the screaming dictator.

  Lacerda by this time was the outstanding journalist in Rio. He did everything he could to help the process on. He scooped the nation on the Normandy landings.

  It was Carlos Lacerda who accomplished the first break through Vargas’ press censorship. José Américo, a revered political oldtimer who had supported Vargas in his reforming days, gave Lacerda an interview in which he demanded free elections and a free press. O Jornal wouldn’t print it. For twenty days Lacerda tramped about Rio looking for an editor with nerve enough to print Américo’s statement.

  When the Correo da Manhã took the risk the result was sensational. The logjam broke. Protests against dictatorship erupted all over the country. The Correo da Manhã featured Lacerda’s columns from then on.

  By breaking with the Diários Associados, Lacerda, without a second thought, gave up an assured career as one of Brazil’s best paid journalists. During the same period he became estranged from the Communists. When Lacerda called for civil liberties and a government of law, he meant what he said. Stalin’s purges and the Hitler-Stalin pact convinced him that nothing was to be hoped from the Communists towards the sort of reforms he wanted. When the Brazilian Communists, after Moscow’s scrapping of the tactics of the popular front, took to supporting the Vargas dictatorship, Lacerda’s disillusionment was complete.

  The incident he says revolted him most was the appearance of Luís Carlos Prestes, by this time a docile party puppet, on the same platform with Getúlio Vargas. Vargas not only had nabbed Prestes and kept him in jail for years when he ventured home from exile, but at the height of his pro-Nazi enthusiasm he had turned Prestes’ German-Jewish wife over to the German authorities to be done to death in one of Hitler’s concentration camps.

  It took the threat of a military coup to induce Vargas to allow presidential elections in 1945. Lacerda jumped back into politics with both feet.

  He now hated Vargas and the Communists with equal fervor. The candidate for the presidency whom José Américo brought forward as spokesman for the hastily improvised anti-totalitarian coalition, which took the name of the Unhão Democrático Nacional, was one of the few army officers of rank who could not be accused of collaboration with the dictatorship, Brigadier Eduardo Gomes. Gomes was highly esteemed in democratic circles in the army, navy and aircorps as the sole survivor of the forlorn uprising of the Fort of Copacabana in the early twenties. Lacerda threw everything he had into campaigning for Gomes.

  In the course of the campaign he vented his bitterness against the Communists by daily taking the hide off a gentleman named Iedo Fuiza whom they were running for the presidency. Lacerda claimed that Fuiza had made a fortune in real estate while he headed the National Department of Railroads, and could not possibly believe in the Communist aims; he ended every speech by calling him a hypocritical rat.

  The response of the Communists was to turn Lacerda in to the police as a Trotzkyite. For one last time he found himself in Vargas’ hoosegow.

  That genial despot, though at one time he hadn’t allowed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speeches to be printed in the Brazilian newspapers, was proving the sincerity of his conversion to the cause of democracy by encouraging the Americans to build and operate airfields on th
e eastern bulge for the airlift to Africa. He further conciliated pro-Allied opinion at home and abroad by letting the Brazilian Army send an expeditionary force to Italy which gave a good account of itself fighting alongside the Americans.

  The wily old dictator was executing a skillful retreat from the Estado Nôvo. The Brazilians wanted political parties? Well they should have them. He set up a labor party, the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, based on his own subsidized labor unions. He did grudgingly allow free unions but they had to pay their own bills. To make sure the Labor Party should carry out his wishes, he put his own son in as chairman.

  Opposition? Very good, but it must be loyal. To keep the opposition in the family Vargas saw to it that his daughter’s husband should preside over the competing Partido Social Democrático. Having assured his machine of control of a majority of the votes he felt it safe to allow the orators of the Democratic Union to talk as much as they wanted to.

  The Tribune of the Press

  Carlos Lacerda became the Patrick Henry of the Democratic Union. He discovered that his voice was effective over the radio. All Rio listened to his broadcasts lambasting the corruptions of the Vargas regime and its Communist supporters. The argument became highly personal when a Communist gang waylaid him one night on his way home from the radio station and beat him up severely. His answer was to take a course in judo for selfdefense and to redouble the sarcasm of his attacks. At the same time he conducted a vigorously controversial column in the Correio da Manhã which he called Tribuna da Imprensa (the Tribune of the Press).

  Vargas’ Minister of War, General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, was elected President for a fiveyear term by a large majority in 1945. The Vargas machine conducted the election. The electoral boards ruled that approved members of Vargas’ labor unions should be registered automatically. They could be trusted to vote as they were told. Other people had to establish their right to vote by a literacy test.

  Though Dutra was elected by the Vargas machine, he was a somewhat independent minded man and could rely on the support of a large body of pro-Allied opinion which had become increasingly vocal with the decay of the censorship. Brazilian historians speak of Dutra’s presidency as a period of democratic convalescence.

  Parties were allowed to develop independently. Released from the threat of intervention by the federal government, political organizing began to center in the states. In São Paulo and Minas Gerais local machines flourished.

  In Rio Carlos Lacerda was in 1946 elected to his first public office as vereador (city counselor) by a large majority. The very violence of his enemies helped bring him support. Three years later he gave the name of his column “Tribuna da Imprensa” to a newspaper of his own. It was the first newspaper in Brazil established by public subscription. People from all walks of life bought stock. Several wellknown soccer players chipped in. One day a group of cleaning women turned up at Lacerda’s office offering to contribute a few crumpled ten-cruzeiro bills.

  President Dutra’s term would end in 1951. According to the current wording of the so often rewritten Brazilian constitution he could not succeed himself. Vargas, who had spent the five years in rural retirement on his estate at São Borja on the Argentine border, was urged to try again.

  He had been watching his apt pupil, Juan Perón, apply his own version of the Estado Nôvo to the distracted republic on the River Plate. President Roosevelt’s death and the breakdown of leadership from Washington had left a political vacuum in the world. Communism poured in. The stock of democracy was sinking again on the international market.

  Getúlio’s Return

  Vargas was old and tired but his henchmen were hungry. The old machine was still intact in the Labor Party and the labor unions. He had an active yellow press at his disposal. His supporters united the Communists, whose watchword was now down with everything connected with the United States, with the leftovers of Fascist nationalism, the frustrated radicals who still dreamed of a socialist utopia, and with local industrialists who feared foreign competition. An adept in the corruptions of politics Vargas played on these factions with a master hand and easily defeated the colorless candidate of the Social Democrats and the Democratic Union’s virtuous brigadier.

  The Brazilians were a youthful people, was how Lacerda explained the defeat of his party, statistically more than half the population was under eighteen. Many of the voters in 1951 were too young to remember the oppressions of the Estado Nôvo. Lacerda himself was bitterly reproached for libeling a good old man.

  The old dictator’s victory threw the moderate politicians into confusion. People braced themselves for a new bout of dictatorship. The Democratic Union almost fell apart. Lacerda’s Tribune of the Press, with much greater influence than could be accounted for by its circulation, remained as a rallying ground for those opposed to totalitarian schemes.

  After five quiet years, busied only with his ranches and his family, the good old man from São Borja moved back into the presidential palace in Rio. The ex-dictator felt a fatherly gratitude towards his people for having re-elected him their constitutional President. He sincerely believed he knew what was best for the Brazilians, but the Brazil he returned to was a changed country.

  American financing during the war had given Brazilian manufacturing just the push forward it needed. Volta Re-donda was already turning out steel. Fortunes were being made producing consumer goods in São Paulo in spite of the collapse of the world market in coffee. Industries were spreading out from Rio and São Paulo into the hinterlands of Minas Gerais. Roads were beginning to improve. Public health measures stimulated the growth of population. The cities were bursting at the seams. Contractors were getting rich building apartments. In spite of an adverse balance of payments, inflation, bluesky speculation and every fiscal ill on the calendar, Brazil was on the verge of an industrial boom.

  President Vargas, now a satisfied aging man with the old benevolent smile on his face, only wanted an easy life. He wanted everybody to think well of him without worrying too much about overcrowded cities or the problems of financing a vast irregularly developing nation.

  The trouble was that his supporters, the party stalwarts who had dragooned the workingclass voters into electing him, weren’t satisfied. They were hungry. They couldn’t wait to fill their pockets. Even the members of Vargas’ own family became infected by the get rich quick fever. The lobbies of the presidential palace swarmed with influence peddlers and fixers, many of them gangsters and lowlives with police records. In the memory of man no one had seen such barefaced thievery as went on in Vargas’ last administration.

  The Voice of Opposition

  As scandal after scandal boiled to the surface, Carlos Lacerda made it his business to see that nobody forgot them. He was determined to stave off a dictatorship. After a second term as city counselor he was planning to run for the federal Chamber of Deputies.

  He had discovered television. His face on the screen became a trade mark. The firm jaw, the clearcut nose between the dark shell rims of his glasses, through which glowing dark eyes burned into the consciousness of the audience, were unforgettable. Without talking down to the crowd he developed a way of explaining complicated problems so that they became understandable to a great many different sorts of people. Spoken, his editorials were even more effective than in the printed column.

  As Vargas’ presidential term drew to a close the old man began to see retirement staring him in the face. Though a presidential campaign was already underweigh, designing voices whispered in the President’s ear that maybe all these elections weren’t in the national interest after all. The Vargas politicians wanted to hold onto their jobs. Rio hummed with rumors of a new dictatorship.

  In his column in his afternoon paper Lacerda analyzed each new revelation. Evenings on TV he brought in facts and figures to back up his assertions. He drew charts of government malfeasance on a blackboard. His voice stung like a whip. It began to be reported that the men of Vargas’ personal bodyguard were threatening
to kill him if he didn’t cease from his attacks. Lacerda shared his scorn of these threats with his TV audience.

  Among the military there was considerable sympathy for Lacerda’s campaign. His support of Brigadier Gomes had made him popular among the younger officers. They couldn’t help admiring his courage. They shared his dismay at the corruption of the Vargas administration. Supporters in the Air Force took turns accompanying him home at night. They wanted to be sure he had a witness in case there was an attempt on his life. None of them imagined anybody would be so reckless as to shoot at an army officer.

  The manifesto of a group of colonels had forced the resignation of one of Vargas’ ministers. The Ministry of Labor was politically the keystone of his administration because it controlled the patronage of the labor unions. Vargas’ Minister of Labor was a young neighbor from São Borja whom the old man had taken a fancy to and whose debut in politics he had sponsored in his home state. João Goulart was an attractive young landowner of great wealth reputed to be a crony of Perón’s. The colonels accused him of planning a syndicalist republic, Peronista style. Reluctantly Vargas submitted to the retirement of Minister Goulart.

  Not long after, Lacerda was slated to address a political meeting. That night it was the turn of Major Rubens Vaz to see that he got home safely. Lacerda lived at that time in Copacabana, the famous beach resort which the first building boom of the thirties had made part of the city of Rio, in a new apartment house on a treelined street overshadowed by the mountain and the tall buildings. Broadleaved trees overgrowing the streetlamps made the sidewalks dark. The litter of construction was everywhere. As Lacerda and Major Vaz climbed out of their car at Lacerda’s front door somebody started shooting at them from across the street. Lacerda returned the fire. Major Vaz, who was unarmed, was killed. Lacerda was shot in the foot. The assailants escaped.