After sending his reply, Vargas left Rio in order to make a rare overland trip to Paraguay. While his trip had been planned for some time, his departure so soon after sending the letter resembled that of a boy leaving town after having just stood up to the schoolyard bully.
Very little progress took place in Brazil in Vargas’s absence. Two weeks later, on August 18, an increasingly alarmed Cordell Hull cabled Caffery to ask if the president’s questions, which Vargas promised to put before the commission, had been decided.39 Hull admitted that neither the State Department nor the War Department had any information as to whether the American requests had even been brought before the commission.40 The Brazilians were clearly not in as much of a hurry as the Americans to reach agreement on the issue.
Aranha tried to smooth Caffery’s ruffled feathers when the two men met three days later on August 21.41 “Vargas is cooperating, as is the army,” Aranha informed the ambassador. Caffery understood the crux of the problem and outlined it later to Hull, explaining, “I must repeat that although the Brazilians will invite us to send troops to northeastern Brazil when the German menace really seems imminent to them; in the meantime they will not do so unless we furnish them with adequate supplies of material for the defense of that region.” The message was clear: Brazil wanted the economic and military means for its own defense, not just American troops.
In the months following the exchange with Roosevelt, the United States and Brazil did sign agreements for exactly the sort of support Brazil had sought from its northern neighbor. A lend-lease agreement finalized on October 1, 1941, stipulated that the United States would supply Brazil with some $100 million worth of arms over a period up until 1947.42 Brazil was to pay $35 million for the arms between 1942 and 1947. The first shipments of arms, with a value of $16 million (comprised of $15 million of army material and $1 million of navy material), were promised to arrive in Brazil within a year from the signing of the agreement.43
The deal, while much heralded by Caffery and in Washington, was modest in nature, and was received with a degree of skepticism and disappointment in Brazil.44 During the lengthy negotiations over the lend-lease deal, General Góes Monteiro had reminded the US general staff negotiators that Germany was still willing to sell arms to Brazil, and at a better rate than the United States proposed.45 Indeed, Berlin had assured the Brazilian army it would undercut the terms of any Brazilian-US deal. While Góes Monteiro was bluffing to a degree, his response revealed the extent to which the Brazilian military remained keen on obtaining German weapons over US ones, largely because they suspected that the Americans might cancel the deal.
On October 27, 1941, a sweating Góes Monteiro arrived at the Guanabara Palace for a meeting with Vargas, having phoned ahead to warn Alzira that the meeting was extremely urgent. The head of the US staff who had conducted the negotiations with the Brazilians over the lend-lease agreement, General Lehman B. Miller, had made some worrisome public statements once he had returned home from Brazil. Góes Monteiro told Vargas, “Miller has given a talk upon his return to the United States. He alleged during the talk that our army is not to be trusted and is seen as pro-German. The arms that we are due to receive from the United States will not come soon according to Miller’s comments. Furthermore, Miller talks about American troops based in northeastern Brazil and not a US-Brazilian collaboration.”46
Somewhat taken aback by Góes Monteiro’s comments, Vargas replied that only two weeks prior Miller had been an invited guest in the very room where they now spoke. “Have you spoken with Miller since we have received reports of the talk?” he asked. After a long pause, Góes Monteiro admitted, “I haven’t yet had the chance.”
After the general left the room, Alzira called Osvaldo Aranha and set up a meeting for him with the president. As it turned out, Aranha learned in his investigation of the case that Miller’s comments were meant to have been off the record. Caffery was subsequently summoned to the foreign ministry and was forced to give an assurance of the US delivery of armaments to Brazil.
Yet this misstep was an inauspicious beginning to the closer relationship the United States had been seeking with Brazil, and it boded ill for the future. Over the autumn of 1941, relations between Brazil and the United States did not move forward at the pace the Americans had hoped for after the signing of the lend-lease agreement. Mutual, deep suspicion characterized relations between the leaders of the US and Brazilian militaries, and to some extent this distrust began to creep into the civilian sectors as well. President Vargas appeared reluctant to commit to more deals, lest he be accused of becoming an American stooge. There were rumors of an Integralista plot involving elements of the military. American and British attempts to close pro-Axis local airlines heightened tensions between the Allies and Brazil, and Vargas in particular was reluctant to move too quickly against the airlines.
In the midst of the airline dilemma, Jefferson Caffery offered Washington one of his most astute pieces of advice—a maxim that the Americans, often pushy with Brazil to formalize understandings between the two nations, were forced to remember even after the autumn of 1941.47 “It would be a mistake to insist on signing any sort of a formal agreement at this juncture,” the ambassador argued. “It is often possible to get more out of Brazilians without a signed agreement than with one.”48
Part Three: Slipping Toward War
8 Right Behind You
It was late evening in Rio, and the evening temperature hadn’t cooled the city’s buildings enough to make working inside them tolerable. A weary President Vargas sat in his small study in the Guanabara Palace, carefully reading the diplomatic cables just as fast as Alzira could translate them from English into Portuguese. The news was not good, and he understood that it would impact the future not only of the Estado Novo, but also of Brazil as a whole.
Vargas had first learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor earlier in the day, when a presidential aide interrupted his round of golf.1 The president had given strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed unless it was vitally important. Vargas liked to play nine holes in the morning on the links course on the outskirts of Rio and then break for lunch before completing another nine holes in the afternoon. He wasn’t a particularly good golfer; his best recorded score for the eighteen holes was 122 (handicap 52, if one that high were allowed for men).2 When footage of the president playing golf was shown in cinemas in Rio, the audience roared with laughter.
After playing golf, the president liked to nap, and he was known to have fallen asleep in the locker room at the golf club. He would get no such rest on December 7, 1941.
On hearing the news from Hawaii, Vargas had rushed back to Rio to prepare for a crucial meeting late in the evening with Osvaldo Aranha. Yet prior to the meeting, realizing that there was little he could do until he heard from Aranha, the president went out to the cinema, as he had originally planned to do. In times of crisis, as in the morning after the Integralista plot in May 1938, Vargas liked to present an air of normality by going about his usual business; it was well known that after a day of golf the president liked to unwind with a trip to the cinema followed by a cigar (usually a corona from the north of Brazil).
When the two gaúchos finally met, they fell into a deep conversation. Alzira stood by, acting as both a point of information—diplomatic cables continued to arrive at the palace even at this late hour—and an informal minute taker for the meeting.
“Do we need to convene a full meeting of the cabinet for tomorrow morning?” Vargas asked. Aranha answered in the affirmative, but Vargas’s question had been rhetorical.3 The president understood the need for the cabinet to meet at this crucial juncture, but he never liked the prospect of cabinet meetings, since every minister demanded to speak. Over the years, Vargas had developed what he considered a much more effective system, receiving two ministers each day at the Catete Palace and giving them an opportunity to discuss issues with him at length.4 He also empl
oyed this system for officials like the chief of staff, General Góes Monteiro, who was permitted extensive access to the president. Osvaldo Aranha was one of the few people, however, who had effective walk-in rights at the Guanabara Palace, and at the end of 1941 the foreign minister was a frequent late-night visitor to Vargas’s study.
Like the president, Aranha did not enjoy full cabinet meetings, as he knew his sworn political enemy, the minister of war, Eurico Gaspar Dutra, would use each one as an opportunity to lay political traps for him. Aranha’s rule of thumb was that if a cabinet meeting was absolutely necessary, it was better to get the president fully committed to a specific foreign policy before the meeting took place, since Vargas’s word was essentially law. And in the late evening of December 7, Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs understood that Vargas needed to commit fully to the American cause—at least in words, if not yet in actual deeds.
Typically, Aranha had already promised Jefferson Caffery Brazilian support in the event that the United States joined the hostilities. But nobody, the Americans least of all, had foreseen the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, which would have the unavoidable effect of drawing the United States into the war much earlier than most of the combatants had expected. This posed a problem for Aranha: the ever-cautious Vargas appeared unprepared to make the seismic decision to throw Brazil’s lot completely in with the United States, as Washington was sure to demand.
Still, Aranha did what he could. In their meeting on December 7, the foreign minister pleaded with Vargas to announce a clear and concise commitment to the Americans the following day and to offer tangible support to the Allied cause against Axis aggression. Aranha then took his leave of the president, who continued to go over the new cables from London and Washington, which Alzira had finished translating.
One question went unasked during the meeting between Vargas and Aranha, but it was at the forefront of both men’s minds: If the Axis attacked Brazil, could the country defend itself? For all its negotiations with the United States, Brazil had still not received any weapons of real value, nor had it received the bulk of the German weapons for which it had contracted. Brazil was in no position to fend off a German assault.
Dutra and Góes Monteiro were widely expected to harp on this unpreparedness as a reason to keep Brazil from being dragged into the war. Sumner Welles conceded the reluctance of the Brazilian armed forces to get involved in the war when he wrote to President Roosevelt at the beginning of 1942:
Like all armies, the Brazilian high command is not inclined to be enthusiastic about getting into a war if they have none of the basic elements for defense. If they are not promptly given the necessary assurances and if they are not able to see with their own eyes before long some concrete evidences of help coming, exactly that kind of a situation which the Nazis could use to their best advantage will be created.5
The undersecretary of state did not spell out what kind of “situation” the lack of American support and reassurances might create, but he did not have to. The Brazilian army’s pro-German bias was by now well known in Washington, and with Brazil still uncommitted in the war, there remained a very real chance that the army could use its influence to tip Brazil into the arms of the Axis.
Yet while the Americans continued to worry about Germany’s plans for Brazil, at this point, in early December 1941, the Brazilians themselves also feared another, closer threat. The Brazilian high command’s concerns about its readiness for war were driven in large part by the fear that Argentina might use the uncertainty caused by the expansion of the world war to engage in an aggressive campaign against Buenos Aires’s South American rival, Rio. The truth of the matter was that, while both Vargas and Aranha had suspected that the United States would be dragged into the war, they had not foreseen this happening before Brazil was armed and able to protect itself against any escalation that might occur in Latin America as a result of US involvement in the conflict.
On the morning of December 8, 1941, the full Brazilian cabinet met in the Guanabara Palace. As it was still early, the president chose to meet the cabinet in his residence rather than in the Catete Palace, which was the usual venue for full cabinet meetings. During the meeting all members of the government were given an opportunity to speak, and many did so at great length. There was agreement on the course of action that Brazil should take and on the wording of the statement to be released to the public.
Following the meeting, it was announced that the cabinet had unanimously resolved that Brazil would declare its solidarity with the United States in accordance with its traditions and understandings. The decision marked a massive shift in Brazilian policy toward the Allies and the Axis, yet several factors tempered what might otherwise have been a clamorous reaction to the news. In Brazil itself, the statement was overshadowed by the dramatic seven-minute “Day of Infamy” speech that President Roosevelt gave to the US Congress on the same day, and that legislative body’s subsequent vote to declare war on Japan. For their part, the Americans welcomed the Brazilian statement, but their enthusiasm quickly soured when it became clear that the Brazilian idea of solidarity did not mean formally entering the war alongside the United States. This news was met with disappointment in many quarters in Washington.
With America now rushing into the fray, President Roosevelt demanded more from the Brazilians. Through the remainder of December 1941, Vargas came under intense diplomatic pressure to bring Brazil toward the US position much more quickly.6 One key US demand was that, given the onset of war between the Axis and the United States, Vargas should replace some of the officials in his government whom Washington viewed as leaning toward the Axis. On December 21, following several meetings with Jefferson Caffery, Aranha explained to Vargas his interpretation of the US position. “They do not trust elements of your government and want them replaced before they deliver arms to us,” Aranha suggested. Vargas, however, was having none of it. “The truth is that they don’t trust us, full stop,” he retorted.7
The world was changing fast and Vargas, who was a cautious man, found it difficult to keep up. One thing was certain, however: he was not going to let Washington dictate who was in his government and who was not. Washington, on the other hand, had specific plans for shaping Brazilian policy to fit American needs.
A conference of the foreign ministers from all the Americas was to be held in Rio in January 1942, and the meeting would serve to showcase the Roosevelt administration’s initial strategy for Latin America following the United States’s entry into the war. The Americans had lofty aims for the region—the loftiest of which they had been harboring since well before Pearl Harbor. In the weeks leading up to the conference, they continued to seek permission from President Vargas to station a US military force in the northeast of Brazil. Vargas, however, continued to resist such a move until he had a better deal on the supply of US weapons.
The fundamental goal of the conference was to get as many of the Latin American countries as possible to agree to break relations with the Axis powers. On this front, however, things did not bode well for the United States. The main problem appeared to be Argentina, which in the run-up to the conference had indicated a strong reluctance to toe the American line on the issue, arguing that the attack at Pearl Harbor was not an attack on the countries of Latin America. The pro-Axis orientation of Argentina’s President Ramón Castillo complicated matters further for the Allies.
Nor was the impact of the Argentine position limited to its relations with the United States. President Vargas made it clear to Washington that he wanted any deal at the conference to include all the Latin American countries, Argentina included. Vargas was concerned that if Argentina stayed neutral while the rest of Latin America sided with the United States, it would give the Germans a potential ally at Brazil’s back door. Any agreement would therefore have to be worded so as to keep Argentina in line with the other Latin American countries. As the State Department soon discovered, this would be t
he central challenge of the conference itself.
On January 10, 1942, President Vargas convened a special meeting of the Brazilian national security council in order to discuss the forthcoming foreign ministers’ conference. The president had met with Aranha the previous evening in the Guanabara Palace to prepare Vargas’s statement to the council and to go over his opening speech for the conference. As ever, Aranha was keen for him and the president to coordinate their messages.8
The foreign minister’s imprimatur was plainly visible at the council meeting, in which Vargas told the assembled cabinet members and military leaders that Brazil must fully throw its lot in with the United States.
I have reached the decision that, both from the standpoint of the highest interests of Brazil as well as from the standpoint of the commitments which Brazil has previously made, Brazil must now stand or fall with the United States. Any member of the government who is in disagreement with this policy is at liberty to resign his position.9
He went on to issue a stark warning against any dissent from the armed forces, which he believed would be deeply troubled by his choice:
The government does not have to depend upon the armed forces of the republic for the control of subversive activities, even including any attempt at a local uprising by German or Italian sympathizers. The Brazilian people are 100 percent in agreement with the policy upon which I have decided, and the people themselves will be able to take care of any attempts at Axis-inspired uprisings.10
Vargas’s words were nothing if not an open challenge to his generals: if they didn’t give him their full support, they would quickly find that their services were no longer needed.
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