The Jewish American intellectual Waldo Frank, who had dubbed Alzira “the right eye of the president,” called Osvaldo Aranha “the left eye of Vargas.” Getúlio Vargas and Osvaldo Aranha were a political double act, and seemed to complement one another perfectly. Their similarities started and ended with being Gaúchos, hailing from Rio Grande do Sul.
Vargas was cautious and a good listener, and he liked to weigh both sides of an argument before deciding which side to support. His oratory skills were sufficient, but he relied on the depth and detail of the content of his speeches, rather than the range of his vocal chords, to carry the audience. More often than not, he left the wining and dining of foreign dignitaries to Aranha, preferring instead to work late in the Catete Palace or the Guanabara Palace.19 But there was one important social aspect of Vargas’s character: he liked golf. Indeed, he used the golf course as a mobile office. Even in times of national or international crisis, he was able to get in a round of golf each week. Although Vargas was not by any stretch of the imagination an accomplished golfer, he recorded almost every round in his diary and enjoyed the peace and quiet of the course.20
Aranha, on the other hand, was outgoing, charismatic, and slightly crazy-looking, the kind of man who assumed the spotlight the moment he walked into any room. Physically, he could not have been more different than the president. Aranha was tall and handsome, with a full head of gray hair and passionate eyes that burned brightly. He loved being the center of attention, and he enjoyed the trappings of the formal dinners and banquets that the foreign ministry put on at the Itamaraty Palace for diplomats and other foreign guests. By 1938, Aranha had already shown himself to be equally at home with a range of political leaders, leading intellectuals, and cultural icons—from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Walt Disney. In truth, Aranha regarded himself as an intellectual, or at the very least the equal of men like Waldo Frank. Following a meeting with Aranha, Frank summed him up: “Within the brilliant volubility of his speech are intuitive perceptions that disarm you. He is a gay man, a lover of high living, of horses and, I suspect (like all Brazilians), of women. He gives the impression of well ordered madness: of a mad energy on a rail.”21
Frank, like many other intellectuals, was seduced by Aranha’s energy and gusto, though he understood all too well that Aranha was something of a rascal and an operator. Aranha knew how to make people feel important. When Frank visited Rio in 1942, Aranha arranged for his plane to be met at Rio’s Santos Dumont Airport by a large delegation of journalists, photographers, intellectuals, and representatives of the foreign ministry. The head of the international office of the foreign ministry informed Frank on the tarmac he was “the guest of honor of Brazil.”22 Lots of American VIPs received the same red carpet treatment when they arrived in Rio during World War II, and each reception was carefully choreographed by the Brazilian foreign ministry. The American film producer and actor Orson Welles, whom Aranha befriended while Welles was shooting a film in Brazil during the war, wrote a typically verbose and edgy tribute to the foreign minister as part of his introduction for a joint Thanksgiving national radio broadcast to America:
Here’s a passionately honest statesman, an eloquently indiscreet diplomatist who looks you in the eye and talks straight from the shoulder . . . a great American—who wears easily and with style the authentic magnificence of the history maker. You know what he looks like, then—those twinkly shrewd eyes have taken yours from the pages of magazines and newspapers, honest eyes that appraise and appreciate.
Dr. Aranha is that rarest of public figures, a handsome man who looks like you could trust him. They certainly trust him in Washington and you’ve probably heard all about his popularity there when he was his country’s ambassador . . .
Osvaldo Aranha is many things plus. First off, he’s a hero, a real one straight out of Brazil’s modern revolution. Crowds have been known to carry him through the streets of Rio. He understands how to shoot a gun and he’s also realized what it is like to be shot at.23
Orson Welles, a man who liked the sound of his own voice, then quickened his pace, putting on a thick cowboy accent. Reaching a crescendo, Welles recommended that the United States listen to this patriotic, clever, and down-to-earth leader. For many Americans who listened to the radio show, this was the first time they had heard the name Osvaldo Aranha. Welles, for all his theatrical language and silly voices, had done Aranha, and Brazil, a great service.
Welles’s wartime radio introduction was spot-on regarding one point: in Washington, where Aranha had previously served as the Brazilian ambassador, he was regarded as the Americans’ “main man” in South America, and he could rely on the direct support of the White House. The British understood this point very clearly. Yet the British, due in part to competition with the United States over trade links with Brazil, were less complimentary about Aranha’s character than American celebrities such as Frank and Welles. As the British embassy in Rio put it:
Senhor Aranha has charm and a very quick intelligence, but his desire to please and a native optimism lead him often into assurances which are not to be taken too literally. He has kept many valuable contacts in the United States of America, remains steadily devoted to the development of close relations with that country, and may be counted the most important agent of United States influence in South America.24
Whatever shortcomings the British may have thought he had, Aranha possessed a rare gift at the time in Brazil, and in South America more broadly: he had a world vision. Not just a vague idea, but also a set of goals for his country and a road map for how best to get there. He saw where Brazil currently fit into South America and the wider world, and he wanted to change its position in both spheres. In this, Aranha was markedly different from his old friend Vargas. The president was a national leader, and he spent his working days trying to dismantle Brazil’s powerful old elites and manage the country’s shifting coalitions. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that the nation was ungovernable, for it was not. Ruling it was, however, a full-time job, and one to which Vargas was completely dedicated. He, like Aranha, had a sense of how Brazil could fit into the regional and international systems. Aranha, however, had a clear plan of how best to achieve this vision, while Vargas, bogged down in balancing Brazil’s shifting domestic coalitions, did not. Vargas, in a sense, was blind to everything but the immediate political imperatives of running the country; for everything beyond that, he relied heavily on Aranha and Alzira, who helped him see distant threats, challenges, and possibilities of which he might otherwise not have been aware.
The Vargas-Aranha alliance had problems even before the events of June and July 1938. “There were numerous times that these two friends fought and made up,” Alzira admitted.25 There was a sense, too, among many of Vargas’s loyalists that one day Aranha, whose pro-democracy views were to the left of Vargas’s, would try to assume power for himself. Indeed, during the Dutra-Aranha crisis of 1938 there were suspicions among some Vargas supporters that Aranha was trying to become a focal point for Brazilian pro-democracy groups that were dissatisfied with the authoritarian Estado Novo. There was a palpable sense of relief at the Guanabara Palace when Aranha agreed to return to the fold and continue to lead Brazil’s foreign policy.
The feeling of relief at Aranha’s return to the foreign ministry was shared across town at the American embassy. The US ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, had arrived in Rio in 1937 from his previous appointment as ambassador to Cuba. In May 1938, Caffery was feeling pretty pleased with his life in Rio, gloating that, after much searching, he had managed to find himself an excellent house—not quite as nice as the Argentine ambassador’s residence, he acknowledged, but a place whose owner had at least “refused to rent it to the British ambassador.”26 The ambassador’s comments said much about the diplomatic pecking order in Rio. Brazil’s historic rival, Argentina, occupied the pole position, while the American delegation was looking to put one over on their British rivals
in the city.
Caffery was a southern gentleman, a trained lawyer, and a career diplomat who was well trusted and liked inside the State Department.27 Tall, well-dressed, and polished, he was nevertheless something of a whiner, consistently complaining in official dispatches to the State Department about poor conditions in Rio.28 Despite his complaints, however, Caffery regarded his posting as the most important one in South America and did not take kindly to anyone who tried to undermine his authority.
The British were quite naturally suspicious and hostile to Caffery. “He could do no wrong as far as the State Department was concerned,”29 complained Sir Noel Charles, the British ambassador to Rio, who also took issue with Caffery’s Irish extraction and Roman Catholic faith. The foreign office was equally down on Caffery, and sent a calming note to Charles. It had been carefully worded; earlier drafts were marked up with much stronger anti-Caffery sentiments written, in pencil, by officials who had dealt directly with him during his time in Cuba. “You have my sympathy in having as your colleague a person with such a character, which can only complicate the relations, already somewhat delicate, between our own and the American representatives in Latin America,” the note to Charles said. “A consoling thought is that his predecessor was still more exasperating by all accounts.”30
While Caffery was seemingly disinterested in smoothing over Anglo-American relations during his tenure in Brazil, he moved swiftly to show US support for both Vargas and Aranha. The events of May 11 had caught the Americans somewhat unawares, but President Roosevelt was quick to send to Vargas what the embassy files describe as “a telegram of felicitation upon his escape from the attempt on his life.”31 The subsequent arrests of the Integralistas and the crisis between Dutra and Aranha had all been closely monitored by the Americans, as had the Germans’ reactions to these events. Caffery may have been quick to dismiss the British as serious rivals to US interests in Brazil, but he most certainly did not underestimate the Germans or Adolf Hitler’s desire to develop closer ties with the Brazilian regime. The increase in Brazilian trade links with Germany and Berlin’s massive rearmament program, along with its willingness to provide Brazil with arms, made the Germans a serious threat to US efforts in Brazil.
In reality, despite the strong trade links between the two countries, Brazilian-German relations had been in something of crisis of their own, due in no small part to the Brazilian government’s decision to restrict foreign political activities in Brazil. Decree 383 had been signed by Vargas on April 18, 1938, and was intended to stop all foreign political activity in the country, but was mainly directed against German activity in the south of Brazil. The arrest of German nationals in the police roundup following the events of May 11 proved too much for the German ambassador, who demanded a meeting with Aranha in which he officially protested the arrests and Decree 383. The minister of foreign affairs coolly informed the ambassador, “The government will decline to modify Decree 383 of April 18, and if Germans were arrested in connection with ‘the putsch,’ there was undoubtedly good reason therefore.”32 The German ambassador left Aranha’s office pausing only to nod to Caffery, who was waiting, next in line, for a meeting with Aranha. “In my opinion, there was some German connection with the putsch, Aranha confidentially informed Caffery at the start of their meeting.”33 The unofficial German line was that if they had been involved, the outcome of the events of May 11 would have been very different. It is difficult to know what wounded the Germans most—the implication that they were involved in the plot, or that they were accused of involvement in such a poorly organized and inefficient operation.
Back at the Guanabara Palace, Vargas was relieved that the major fallout from the events of May 11 was essentially restricted to internal politics. His focus could now shift back to the future, and he could enjoy a bit of free time—enough for a round of golf and, at night, a cigar and whiskey. Vargas had good reason to feel contented with events. He had managed to keep his two key ministers in the cabinet. His authority within the Brazilian armed forces remained strong, and the establishment of the Estado Novo in November 1937 appeared to have solidified his support among the leading officers of the military. He had not had to use either his preexisting or new powers to crush the Integralista movement, as he had done with the communists after their moment in November 1935. The Intregralistas simply ceased to exist as a major national movement after 1938. One of the major leaders of the movement, Plínio Salgado, who was reported to have been “overcome with excitement” when he heard news of the uprising of May 11, was not even arrested.34 Instead he went into voluntary exile, sailing to Portugal and a position at Coimbra University in 1939.
Naturally, Vargas’s failure to crush the Intregralistas, combined with the disorganized nature of the rebellion, led to a great many conspiracy theories; for years, Brazilians would debate whether the president himself had been behind the attack. He had certainly gained from the attempted putsch in more ways than one, consolidating his own power even further while winning a great deal of international praise for his bravery and his handling of the aftermath of the rebellion.
Perhaps most importantly (and ironically), the failed uprising had burnished the reputation of Vargas’s dictatorship. The Estado Novo, which many countries had been nervous about when Vargas declared it in November 1937, enjoyed new legitimacy in the offices of the leaders of the most powerful nations in the world following May 11. This legitimacy was due in no small part to the support of President Roosevelt, who continued to believe that Brazil’s attitude toward the United States—and not its system of government—was the most important factor in developing ties with it. Later, the American diplomat George Kennan came to articulate this important American policy in a more scientific manner. As Kennan put it in his report PPS/35, written about the Cold War, “the domestic character of a government was less important than its international behavior.”35 This tenet of realpolitik, along with the fact that Brazil was an extremely important target for the Germans, Italians, and Japanese—all of whom had large immigrant colonies there—made the American stakes in Brazil very high indeed.
Brazil was about to find itself in a position of even greater power. Guided by his two eyes, Alzira and Osvaldo, Vargas would have the historic opportunity to convert his homeland from a backward, divided nation into the new economic and political powerhouse of South America. This was to be a high-stakes, diplomatic rollercoaster, which would transform Brazil in ways that even the visionary Osvaldo Aranha had not foreseen.
Part Two: Brazilian Neutrality
3 Dangerous Games
On September 1, 1939, darkness had already fallen in Rio as Osvaldo Aranha’s car set out from the Itamaraty Palace to make its 3.4-mile drive to the Guanabara Palace. The car sped out of the foreign ministry and headed east along Avenida President Vargas. Going in the opposite direction was the most direct route to get to the Guanabara Palace, but the easterly direction was the more scenic, and Aranha preferred it—even if it often took nearly twenty minutes and kept the president waiting for longer than necessary.1 The evening traffic was heavy in downtown Rio, and the pace of the traffic was further slowed by broken-down vehicles, minor accidents, and—the real scourge to Rio’s drivers—road construction. In September 1939, Avenida President Vargas was a straight, two-lane road, which ran from east to west and acted as one of the major link roads across the city. The volume of traffic in Rio, however, was simply too much for the two lanes to bear. Traffic congestion was a constant problem across Rio, and the leaders of the Estado Novo had ambitious plans to resolve it.
Prime among Vargas’s goals for Rio was a plan to widen Avenida President Vargas to match the scale of major European boulevards. Vargas oversaw this effort personally, including the plan for demolishing over five hundred buildings along the avenue and incorporating this space into the roadway as two new side lanes. The buildings that were to be knocked down included city hall, four churches, and Praça Onze, the central square
and home to the city’s Carnaval celebrations. The finished avenue, which was scheduled to open in 1944, aimed to give the city a hugely impressive central throughway, which was to be a symbol of the Estado Novo and its public works program.
Aranha’s car turned right off Avenida President Vargas and entered Avenida Rio Branco. “All streets in this city start at the Avenida Rio Branco,” Stefan Zweig, the Jewish writer, would soon declare after seeking refuge in Rio, and in 1939 this was no exaggeration.2 Driving along the Rio Branco, one of the most splendid streets in Rio, Aranha’s car passed the city’s beautiful opera house, the national library (with a collection of books borrowed from Portugal), as well as one of the best hotels in the city. The avenue had been transformed at the beginning of the twentieth century, and its new buildings dominated the remaining smaller, older ones. From one side of the avenue ran the roads to Rio’s harbor. There, luxury passenger liners from countries around the globe were berthed next to merchant ships flying the Nazi flag. These German merchantmen had come to Rio by way of Lisbon, and their cargos—many of them secretly containing arms—were carefully unloaded under the watchful eye of the police.
Avenida Rio Branco, like much of downtown Rio, was a work in progress in 1939. Given the rapid development of the city, it was already too narrow and had become something of a parking lot, with perennial bumper-to-bumper traffic. The resulting pollution was already having an impact on the limestone buildings, many of which looked older than they actually were. The grime disappeared somewhat at night, when Avenida Rio Branco, as if to live up to its name, was lit with powerful double-headed streetlights, out of which shone a brilliant white light that turned the avenue’s buildings into a shadowy backdrop. There was a constant hum as the noise of the traffic bounced off the avenue’s multistory buildings, some of which rose as high as six floors, making them among the first high-rises built in the city.
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