These changes were due as much to World War II itself as they were to the man who led Brazil through it. Thanks in large part to the opportunities afforded by the conflict, Brazil and its capital city could no longer be dismissed as postcolonial outposts at the fringes of civilization. Brazil may still have been waiting for its future to arrive, but by the time Vargas was entombed, his capital was at least living in the present.
Epilogue: The Legacy
An exhausted Osvaldo Aranha climbed into his ministerial car after embracing Alzira and the other surviving members of the Vargas family.1 As the sun started to burn off the morning mist that hung over Rio’s coastline, the finance minister’s car pushed its way through the angry, pro-Vargas crowds that had gathered outside the Catete Palace, and made its way back downtown.
As he rode along the city’s long avenues, Aranha thought of his old friend’s achievements and the changes that Brazil had undergone in the years since Vargas first seized power.2 Aranha’s mind may well have drifted back to the foreign policy document he had produced for Vargas’s meeting with President Roosevelt. The document had become something of a yardstick for measuring Brazil’s foreign policy goals during the war, and it now revealed the distance the country had come since the war.
The original document concluded by listing the eleven objectives that Brazil should aim to achieve in the war, and by the middle of the 1950s, it was clear that Vargas’s wartime policies had gone a long way toward helping Brazil to achieve these goals. Perhaps most importantly, Vargas had won Brazil a much better position in world politics than it had enjoyed before the war. True, the nation had not achieved its goal of securing a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. At a regional level, however, Brazil emerged from the war and its immediate aftermath as the dominant force in South America. To be sure, Brazil’s rivalry with Argentina would continue, but the professionalization of Brazil’s military during World War II would enable it to rest easy in its national security. Argentina had developed and strengthened with US assistance during the postwar period; indeed, Brazil’s military confidence may well have helped to prevent a military confrontation with Argentina. Thanks to World War II, the Brazilian army, air force, and navy collectively became the most powerful armed forces in South America.
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of postwar Brazilian foreign policy was its failure to develop closer cooperation with the United States. Aranha’s dream of a formal alliance between the two nations was never truly fulfilled. Then, too, Brazil’s militarization had its dark side. Trained and armed by the United States during World War II, the Brazilian military continued to intervene in civilian politics in the post–World War II era. Much of the political instability that characterized Brazilian postwar politics was attributable to the influence of the armed forces.
Perhaps Vargas’s greatest achievement during the war was his development of Brazilian industries—especially the creation of the huge steel mill at Volta Redonda with the help of US funding. President Vargas proved himself to be a clever negotiator with the United States on this project; his victory was a huge boon for Brazil and for its ability to develop a modern economy.
Overall, however, there remains a sense that Brazil could have extracted more from the United States had it made the decision to break with the Axis powers sooner than it did, and had it formally entered the war before the conflict’s outcome was certain. Had the FEB been dispatched to Europe before the middle of 1944, moreover, and had it remained there in the immediate postwar era, Brazil might have won from the conflict even more than it did.
The Vargas “revolution” in Brazil continued after his death. His political style was dominated by a powerful survival instinct, and he never succeeded in fully taking on the interest groups whose influence often rivaled his own. Ironically, the war strengthened some of Vargas’s strongest opponents, particularly those in the military, who were willing to challenge and ultimately remove him from power on two occasions, in 1945 and in 1954.
Vargas’s closest political allies never regained the same heights they had enjoyed while he was alive. Shortly after Vargas’s death, his left eye, Osvaldo Aranha, retired from politics. He died on January 27, 1960, following a heart attack.3 His role in the development of Brazilian foreign policy had been profound, and his close relationship with the Roosevelt administration had been critical in securing US support for the modernization of Brazil’s economic infrastructure and armed forces. Today, he is remembered as the man who helped develop the close ties between Brazil and the United States at a crucial time in the nation’s history.
As for Vargas’s right eye, following his death Alzira became the spirited guardian of her father’s political legacy. She worked with great vigor to record the key events of his career and to defend his memory against attacks from his political enemies.
And what of the legacy that Vargas worked so hard to cement in his final hours, and which Alzira spent the rest of her life protecting? The Vargas era remains a divisive issue in Brazil. For all his international pretensions and grandiose visions, the domestic implications of Vargas’s politics remain the most hotly contested. Today, half a century after he took his own life (and that “first step toward eternity”), there is still no definitive answer to the charge by his critics that Vargas was the father of the poor and the mother of the rich.
Acknowledgments
Over the two and a half years that it has taken to research and write this book I have been very fortunate to receive the help and support of a number of people to whom I am extremely grateful. David Lewis has helped support my position at University College London for a number of years and has been hugely supportive of all my research and books. For this book I was very fortunate to be able to spend time in archives in Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, London, New York, and Washington, DC. I would like to thank the British Academy and University College London for helping to finance these research trips. Even in the age of digital online archives it is vitally important to spend time in the overseas archives, many of which provide unexpected treasures.
In Rio de Janeiro, a special mention must go to Duncan and Elizabeth Barker who were fantastic hosts and did so much to make my initial trip to Brazil such a success for this book and for future projects. In Brazil, a number of people very kindly helped me navigate my way through the archives. I am especially grateful to Jaime Antunes da Silva, director general of the National Archives based in Rio de Janeiro, for giving me so much of his time and explaining exactly in which archives I needed to look for material. To Sátiro Nunes for helping me specifically with the photographs from World War II and the wider documentation in the National Archives. The whole staff at the National Archives in Rio was wonderfully helpful.
Tenente Coronel José Luiz Cruz Andrade, director of the Military Archives, helped me enormously with documents about the Força Expedicionária Brasileira (FEB) in Italy. Likewise, Leo Christiano, who kindly sent me newspaper documentation of the FEB in Italy during 1944–1945. Ruth Aqunio and George Iso helped me get started in Rio, as did Elmer C. Corrêa Barbosa. I would also like to thank the staff at O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas for their help both in Brazil and with subsequent enquiries. The staff at Copacabana Palace Hotel were extremely helpful in providing material from the hotel’s archive.
In Lisbon, I would like to thank all the staff at Torre do Tombo (the Portuguese National Archive) for their assistance in handling my frequent requests for documents. At the Portuguese Foreign Ministry Archives, I am grateful to the staff for their guidance as to which files to look for and for their guidance around their first-class archive. I would also like to thank the staff at both the Lisbon and Cascais Municipality Archives—these two local archives contain important information and records for the period.
In London, the staff at the Public Records Office (Nationa
l Archives) in Kew were, as ever, extremely helpful and enthusiastic in helping direct me to the huge volume of documentary material that Brazil and its role in World War II had created. Also thank you to Professor Michael Berkowitz at University College London for his amazing enthusiasm and to Professor Joachim Shloer at Southampton University for sending me much-needed material.
In the United States, the staff at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) were very good in helping me locate material on the Jewish refugees in both Portugal and Brazil during World War II. Judith Cohen, director of the photographic collection at USHMM, helped identify some wonderful images. At the US National Archives in Maryland, I am extremely grateful to the staff who assisted me in locating the files (both civilian and military) that I needed in order to write this book. The lack of a good centralized computer system in the archive made the help provided by the team there absolutely invaluable. In New York at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Archive, a special note of thanks to the foundation director, Richard Armstrong, and to the archive manager, Francine Snyder, for their assistance in preparing all the documents in advance of my arrival.
At Basic Books, it has been a great pleasure working with my editor, Alex Littlefield, who has enormously helped this book develop into its final form, and also a special note of thanks to Lara Heimert, publisher at Basic Books. My thanks also to Isabelle Bleecker and the international rights team at Perseus Books Group. It has been a pleasure dealing with such a professional publisher. Additional thanks must also be given to Francisco Espadinha at Editorial Presença for his continued support on this project and other future ones.
There are a number of people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for their help and support during my research: both Rob and Jane Wilson, as well as Simon Frederick. Matt Freeman and Helena Shaw have done a marvelous job developing and maintaining my website over the years. To José Mateus for his boundless enthusiasm for all things to do with history and banking. Antonio Costa (Mayor of Lisbon) and Catarina Vaz-Pinto for their strong support over the years. Pureza Fino is a wonderful publicist, and it has been a great pleasure to work with her on this project as well as on the Lisbon book.
Finally, and most important of all, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my family for their continued love and support: to my mother, my wife, Emma, and most of all my children, Benjamin and Hélèna. The book is dedicated to my wife and children, with an apology for my long absences at my writing desk.
Photo Credits
photo 1:Fundação Joaquim Nabuco - Biblioteca Digital do MEC.
photo 2:Copacabana Hotel Arquivo Histórico.
photo 3:O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
photo 4:O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
photo 5:O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
photo 6:O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
photo 7:Copacabana Hotel Arquivo Histórico.
photo 8:O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
photo 9:Copacabana Hotel Arquivo Histórico.
photo 10:O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
photo 11:O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
photo 12:O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
photo 13:O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
photo 14:Fundação Biblioteca Nacional.
photo 15:Public domain.
photo 16:O Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) é a Escola de Ciências Sociais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
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