Four days before Christmas, late in the morning on December 21, minister of war Dutra arrived at the Guanabara Palace demanding to see the president.13 Vargas’s immediate instinct was that something was seriously wrong, and the walk from the pavilion to the main palace building left him tired, hot, and in no mood for small talk, so Dutra stuck to his short, preplanned script. “I have come to resign from my post,” he declared.14 He did not pause at the end of the sentence to give the president an opportunity to speak. “The armaments situation is hopeless,” Dutra continued. “We cannot receive German weapons because of the English opposition, and nothing is expected from the United States.” Vargas did not accept either Dutra’s resignation or the reason he gave for it, and tried to reassure the general, but Dutra left without giving any indication of whether he would reconsider.15
The following day, after playing his weekly round of golf, Vargas returned to the Guanabara Palace to find the army chief of staff, General Góes Monteiro, waiting to meet with him. It soon became clear that the arms issue and its implications for the Brazilian army had deeply frustrated Góes Monteiro, just as it had Dutra. Although Góes Monteiro didn’t agree with Dutra’s threat of resignation, he did make it clear that Brazil’s problem with Great Britain was far from settled. The army was not willing to let Brazil’s deal with Great Britain prevent it from receiving further weapons shipments from Germany. Some of the contracted weapons were already loaded on the SS Bagé at the docks in Lisbon; other arms due to Brazil under the same contract were still sitting in Germany awaiting transportation to Portugal.
A quiet Christmas in Petrópolis was not in the cards for Vargas after all. He tried to calm the military with a speech to army and navy commanders in the Rio de Janeiro area on December 31, but did not sleep properly in the days leading up to the event owing to the heat, and was tired and irritable as a result.16 To make matters worse, his son, Getúlinho, had been sick for a number of days, and Vargas’s wife, Darci, had returned to Rio to be at the youth’s bedside day and night.17 The boy had a close relationship with his father, and Vargas’s concern for his son had only increased his stress.
The president’s speech started with a glowing tribute to the military, which he acknowledged was operating under very difficult circumstances. He warned his audience that this world war’s impact on Brazil would be greater than that of the previous conflict, saying, “The present has much more far reaching repercussions than that of 1914.”18 Vargas then offered his audience what it most wanted to hear—a full-throated defense of Brazil’s efforts to procure German weapons, and a warning to Great Britain against trying to stop such trade in the future:
We have taken steps to improve our army personnel and material. In view of the financial difficulties, which confronted us, this material represents an extraordinary effort on the part of the nation for its own safety. Our purchases are not excessive; they are the minimum for our needs. To obtain them we have used funds produced by our labor. We therefore consider them the legitimate product of our capacity to fulfill the imperative needs of our national defense without asking for help or financial assistance from others. The war material, which we ordered, is ours and was bought with our money. To impede its arrival in our hands would be a violation of our rights, and whoever attempts to do so cannot expect from us acts of good will or a spirit of friendly cooperation.19
Vargas’s remarks represented a bald attempt to appease the Brazilian military by taking a hard line with the country it most resented. Vargas surely anticipated that his words would have the added effect of renewing Allied fears about Brazil’s political leanings and strengthening his hand for future dealings with Great Britain and the United States.
The British, however, chose to ignore the warning. In January 1941, they forced the Bagé, which was still anchored in Lisbon, to unload its cargo of German weapons just before it was due to sail for Brazil. Both Dutra and Góes Monteiro argued that the cargo was largely comprised of parts needed for weapons Brazil had already received in previous shipments, but their protests fell on deaf ears.
Osvaldo Aranha was not surprised by the actions of the British in Lisbon or the response of the Brazilian military. Indeed, he had argued against making a fuss over the seizure of the weapons. During the resolution of the Siqueira Campos crisis he had promised that there would be no additional attempts to import German weapons into Brazil, and he was not willing to go back on his word for the sake of the cargo on the Bagé. He had made this promise to the British after consulting with the president, Dutra, and Góes Monteiro; he had to believe that the military had fully understood the implications of the deal with the British, and that any outrage they expressed was for show.
Yet Dutra, for one, appeared not to have comprehended this aspect of the agreement at all—or at least, he did not want to. He denied giving his backing to Aranha’s guarantee that the Siqueira Campos would be the last shipment of German arms.20 Once more, Dutra offered his resignation to the president. Aranha, too, raised the stakes. At the start of January, he informed the president that if Vargas did not back him, he would have no alternative but to resign.21
In the ensuing political standoff, each of the sides looked to their internal and external allies for help securing a victory. Góes Monteiro secretly asked the US army to try to help get the arms released. Aranha approached the US State Department in the hopes that it could do the same and help him save face by not seeming to go back on his promise. Within Brazil, meanwhile, both Dutra and Góes Monteiro launched a series of bitter attacks against the British in the state-controlled Brazilian press. The attacks became vicious enough for Aranha to intervene, asking the editors and publishers to tone down their coverage of the Bagé crisis.22 When news of Aranha’s intervention reached Góes Monteiro, the general flew into a rage. He ranted about the presence of fifth columnists in Brazil, and fumed that the army had to know who was onside. And he demanded meetings with all the owners of the country’s newspapers, so that he could ask them, point-blank, “are you pro-Brazil or pro-Britain?”23 Luckily for them, the meetings never took place, but Góes Monteiro and Dutra continued to demand a strong anti-British line from all newspapers. In London, meanwhile, the foreign office was growing edgy about the level of anti-British rhetoric in the Brazilian press. Yet there was a sense in London that Great Britain was in the right, that a deal was a deal, and it should be adhered to at all costs.24
The fixation on the Brazilian press in both London and the highest offices of the Brazilian military reflected a near-universal perception that because Brazilian newspapers were controlled by Vargas’s government, anything they printed was essentially the opinion of the state itself. In truth, while Vargas could exert pressure on Brazil’s press and censor—even shutter—them if they disobeyed, he lacked the practical apparatus or political will to muzzle the press completely. Censorship was often self-imposed and was by no means universal—a fact that would come to haunt Vargas in the days ahead.
On January 18, 1941, Vargas was in the Guanabara Palace, overseeing the final stages of packing for his summer relocation to Petrópolis, when, with a great crack of thunder, the rain finally arrived in Rio. The irony of the weather breaking on the day of his departure, following weeks of oppressive heat, was not lost on the president. He was suffering from weeks of poor sleep due to the heat of Rio’s summer nights, and had been longing for a drop in the temperature. Now cooler weather was coming just as he headed into the mountains for a respite.
As Vargas’s car made its way up the winding mountain road toward Petrópolis later on January 18, the rain turned torrential, forcing the president’s driver to slow down and dragging the trip out longer than the usual one and a half hours. There was one upside to the rain, however; on arriving at the Rio Negro Palace, Vargas was delighted that he had made it into Petrópolis almost unnoticed.25 That evening, he dined with Alzira and her husband, Ernâni do Amaral Peixoto, who had served as the governor of the state o
f Rio de Janeiro.26 Alzira had traveled to Petrópolis from the family ranch in Rio Grande in order to be with her father. Both Alzira and Amaral warned the president about Góes Monteiro’s increasing hostility toward the press, and informed him that the press was going to mount something of a thinly veiled counteroffensive against the military in the coming days. If that happened, it could cause a political firestorm within Brazil, and create even more of a rift between the military and Vargas’s government. Alzira and Amaral urged the president to intercede before the newspaper publishers could go ahead with their plan. Vargas promised, “I’ll give the matter some thought.” The president was keen, however, to leaven his work schedule with some leisure, and had made plans to play golf the next day.27
Just as Alzira had predicted, events came to a head the next day, when two newspapers appeared to step over the line the military had drawn in the sand. On January 19, the daily paper Correio da Manhã ran a seemingly harmless advertisement by the commission of British industries, which included a pro-British remark by Aranha. At the same time, an editorial in another daily, the Diário Carioca, called for Brazilians to support Vargas. The latter piece was generally seen as a warning to the army to stay out of politics.28 Dutra and Góes Monteiro were furious about both articles, believing that—by supporting the British and undercutting the army, respectively—Aranha and Vargas had set back the army’s efforts to secure the release of the German arms held in Lisbon.
The proprietor of Correio da Manhã was a well-known Anglophile, Paulo Bittencourt, the most interesting of Brazil’s newspaper owners. Slight, olive-skinned, and handsome, Bittencourt enjoyed collecting modern art and furniture and showing them off at dinner parties at his mansion, which boasted a large patio and beautifully kept gardens. He spoke perfect English, with an accent that came straight from one of Great Britain’s finest public schools, and he was extremely well connected with members of the Brazilian government and with the leading Brazilian families and industrialists.29
Bittencourt’s newspaper was widely regarded as the most influential in Rio, and while Brazil technically had no free press, Bittencourt was keen to push his agenda within the parameters set by the government. Bittencourt was well known for his strong pro-British views, which he had defended in the pages of Correio da Manhã and in meetings with Brazilian officials. He respected the British Empire and attacked anybody who claimed that the empire was doomed in its current confrontation with the Axis. He did not regard the Americans as the equals of the British in any sense, arguing that the Brazilians, and not the Yankees—as he referred to them—were the natural heirs of Great Britain and its empire.30
Not everybody in Brazil agreed with Bittencourt’s viewpoint, but it did reflect a sizeable school of thought within the country’s older noble families, specifically those in Rio. These influential families preferred the calm order of the British to the noise and brashness of Americans, and were concerned that the rise of American influence in Brazil would fundamentally change Brazil’s way of life. Indeed, many Brazilians were uncomfortable about the effects of US involvement in Latin America, and feared that their country would become little more than a satellite outpost of the United States.
Among those who shared Bittencourt’s suspicions of American imperialism was President Vargas. Although Brazil and the United States had just completed one of the most important economic deals in Brazilian history, Vargas could not quite shake his unease at Washington’s growing influence in Brazilian affairs. This surely shaped his response to the newspaper crisis—but so, too, did his basic political instincts, just as Bittencourt had anticipated they would.
Before publishing the British advertisement that contained Aranha’s pro-British comment, Bittencourt had thought long and hard about the repercussions he would likely face if he ran it. Bittencourt believed that he understood one crucially important point regarding the modus operandi of President Vargas: as Waldo Frank noted, “Vargas holds Brazil intact by playing the middle against both ends. By playing coolness against all the fires; by playing centripetal delay against all the tangential dynamisms of the country . . . Vargas senses the people and obeys what he senses.”31 Knowing that the president’s political strategy necessarily kept him from taking sides in political clashes, Bittencourt anticipated that Vargas would not back the army in any crisis between the military and the newspapers. Brazilians valued their press, even if it was not free in the Western liberal sense, and the president would not allow the generals to close down Correio da Manhã. So Bittencourt had rolled the dice.
As soon as Bittencourt ran the ad, both Dutra and Góes Monteiro demanded that Correio da Manhã be permanently closed down. They were less harsh with the Diário Carioca, which had run articles in the past that were sympathetic to the chief of staff; Dutra and Góes Monteiro asked that it be only temporarily suspended as punishment for its article.
Bittencourt’s political judgment, however, proved to be spot-on. Vargas rejected the idea of closing Correio da Manhã. He did suspend the publication of Diário Carioca for a short period, noting that the newspaper’s article could be viewed as an attempt to create divisions between the president and the armed forces. But he refused to punish Bittencourt for running the pro-British ad, and he also refused to sanction Dutra’s protests any longer. Dutra had threatened to resign unless Vargas gave him his full backing over the crisis about the latest shipment of weapons, but Vargas now informed Dutra that he did not accept his resignation and ordered him to return to his duties. The military was enraged, but impotent. On hearing the news of the temporary suspension of Diário Carioca, troops protested outside its headquarters until Góes Monteiro, who denied ordering the protest, demanded that Dutra call the men off; the minister of war soon complied with the request.32
The outcome of the newspaper crisis was viewed as a political victory for Aranha and a defeat for the military, and this vindication of the foreign minister had important ramifications for Brazilian policy toward the Allies.33 After the crisis, the Brazilian armed forces reduced their pressure on the British to allow further shipments of German weapons into Brazil.34 The military accepted that the prospects of receiving the final shipment of German arms from the 1938 contract were nonexistent. Instead, they would seek replacements for the undelivered weapons from the United States.
The resolution of Brazil’s latest crisis marked an important turning point in US-Brazilian relations particularly. The Brazilian military had finally come to terms with the fact that German weapons were no longer an option. The mutual suspicions that had characterized the relationship between the Brazilian military and the US government remained, but the generals in Rio needed to modernize the army above all else, and they no longer had any other option than to work with the Americans.
The United States softened its policy toward Brazil as well. The two sides had yet to formalize the mutual-defense arrangements and arms shipments that they had tentatively agreed to in the Góes Monteiro Draft conceived during the Siqueira Campos affair, but Vargas and Aranha’s fealty to the spirit of the deal had obviously made an impression in Washington. It now took a more positive position regarding which arms it was able and willing to deliver to Brazil: for the first time, the Brazilian military could expect to receive machine guns and air defense guns along with artillery and ammunition. The United States also adopted a generous credit scheme to allow Brazil to purchase the weapons—a concession that greatly relieved Rio, which had remained anxious about its ability to pay for the weapons in legal tender or gold rather than coffee and cotton.35
Much to the delight of Paulo Bittencourt, the ending of the crisis with Great Britain also led to a rapid improvement in Anglo-Brazilian relations. Vargas sought a rapid rapprochement with London following the crisis, and his haste—and the popular support for his efforts—appeared to confirm that many Brazilians viewed close relations with Great Britain as a popular counterfoil against the United States’s creeping influence. The British,
for their part, clearly felt vindicated for having stuck to the original terms of the agreement over the Siqueira Campos, but were keen to mend fences with the Brazilian regime as rapidly as possible. The original instigators of the dispute, the British ministry of economic warfare, eventually adopted a more liberal interpretation of the blockade policy toward Brazil, helping ensure smoother management of the blockade through 1941.36
The Brazilian military, however, remained angry. Despite the promise of US weapons to make up for the ones that would no longer be flowing into Brazil from Germany, the military sensed a lack of support from the president over the issue of weapons. It was not the only such cause for conflict.
The day after he rebuked the army for its attempts to close the two newspapers, Vargas incurred the wrath of the armed forces again. This time, the issue was the appointment of the first minister of air. In the autumn of 1940, Góes Monteiro had called for all aviation, with the exception of naval aviation, to be brought under the control of the ministry of war. Vargas rejected this idea and planned to establish a new ministry to cover all aviation.37 Both the army and the navy believed that the ministry should be headed by one of their own. But on January 20, 1941, the president announced that he had appointed a civilian, Joaquim Pedro Salgado Filho, as the new minister of air.38 Vargas had made the decision following a round of golf that had been interrupted by his chief military aide, who had tried to convince him to appoint a military man to the job so as to appease Dutra and Góes Monteiro.
The nature of the appointment, as well as its timing, represented a calculated risk by the president. It was a clear signal that he would not allow the armed forces to undermine his authority, and it elicited a strong response from the military; Dutra accused Vargas of using the establishment of the new ministry to play the various parts of the armed forces off against one another. Yet for all the danger inherent in his decision, it augured well for US-Brazilian relations. Vargas’s popularity with the Brazilian people, along with his growing confidence in his authority over the military, positioned him better than ever before to lead Brazil at a time when Washington was seeking to rapidly deepen its ties with Rio.
Brazil : The Fortunes of War (9780465080700) Page 12
