Brazil : The Fortunes of War (9780465080700)

by Lochery, Neill

  In his remarks to the throngs of Queremistas, Vargas appeared to endorse their idea of a constituent assembly, with which he would work to steer Brazil into the postwar era. The opposition and the military were appalled, if not surprised, by Vargas’s comments, which amounted to a throwing down of the gauntlet. Additional Queremista rallies followed, as did a statement from the military that presidential elections would indeed go ahead as promised. The stage was set for a conflagration.

  The explosion came on October 29, 1945. That morning, President Vargas took what the British ambassador, David Gainer, described as the “fatal step”: he appointed his brother, Benjamin, chief of police. The president’s motives for the appointment remain something of a mystery; Vargas may in fact have been trying to help Benjamin’s predecessor as chief of police fulfill his political ambitions, because that man was promoted to a prefect of the federal district.9 Whatever the rationale behind Benjamin’s appointment, however, it caused uproar in military circles and within the opposition.

  The outrage over Benjamin’s appointment paled in comparison to the furor over his first act as chief of police. Immediately after his appointment was confirmed, Benjamin waltzed into a meeting with the new minister of war, General Góes Monteiro, and said patly, “The president has agreed to alter the electoral procedure and to summon a constituent assembly.”10

  For the weeks leading up to this moment, Góes Monteiro’s frustration had been building. He was caught between a rock and a hard place; one of President Vargas’s most loyal followers over the years, he was reluctant to be the one who toppled him. Góes Monteiro had felt slightly reassured when, as the political temperature in Rio climbed in the second part of 1945, Vargas promised him on several occasions that the presidential elections would go ahead, and that he himself would not be a candidate.

  Benjamin’s comments on the morning of October 29 amounted to a slap in the face for the minister of war. Angry, hurt, and now completely unsure of exactly what the president had in store for the country, Góes Monteiro summoned a meeting of the generals. On the agenda was only one item: Should the armed forces remove the president from office?

  The debate, if any, seems to have been brief. Góes Monteiro, feeling betrayed and mistreated, was in favor of dethroning Vargas, and his fellow generals sided with him. At the conclusion of the meeting, the military took over key junctions in Rio and took up positions near the Guanabara Palace. The coup was on.

  Dutra had a prearranged meeting with the president in the early evening of October 29, and he decided to keep it. He cut straight to the point and said, “The armed forces do not accept the appointment of Benjamin, and it should be withdrawn.”11 In a rare show of emotion, President Vargas raised his voice and said, “If I am not free to choose even a chief of police whom I can trust, this means I am no longer president.”12 He calmed down, however, when Dutra informed him that troops were already in the streets, and were ready to depose him. Backpedaling, Vargas offered to cancel Benjamin’s appointment and select a chief of police who was satisfactory to the armed forces.13 Dutra promised to take the president’s offer back to Góes Monteiro.

  But the minister of war was in no mood for compromise. Dutra—who seemed to still feel that Vargas would back his bid for the presidency—attempted to set up a meeting between Góes Monteiro and the president, believing that if the two men could speak face-to-face, like the old days, they would be able to hammer out a deal. Góes Monteiro declined the invitation, however. He clearly felt the time had come to remove Vargas from office, and that there was no point in further discussion.

  Góes Monteiro instructed his newly appointed chief of staff, Osvaldo Cordeiro de Farias, to deliver an ultimatum to the president at the Guanabara Palace. At first, Cordeiro de Farias was reluctant to carry out the assignment, arguing that he still enjoyed good relations with the president, but eventually—and under considerable pressure from Góes Monteiro—he agreed.

  Before Cordeiro de Farias departed for the Guanabara Palace, the two presidential candidates met to discuss the crisis. Eduardo Gomes had left his campaign trail in southern Brazil to return to Rio, and after a brief discussion, he and Dutra agreed that they would both support the coup. They also agreed on a temporary replacement for Vargas: the chief justice, José Linhares, would take over the presidency until elections took place.14 This decision was especially important, because the plotters did not wish to create the impression that Vargas had been removed by a military coup. Although this was of course what his ouster amounted to, the appearance of a military coup would almost certainly alienate the United States from the new regime—an unacceptable outcome, as far as the plotters were concerned.

  When Cordeiro de Farias arrived to deliver the ultimatum to President Vargas, the president appeared calm. Informed that he must resign immediately, Vargas “did not lose his poise,” Cordeiro de Farias later noted.15 In a soldierly manner, he summarized the situation for the president. He reminded the president that the generals held all the cards and that the palace was surrounded. “You should resign and leave,” he advised him. “This is the price the generals are demanding for the safe conduct of yourself and the family.”

  Vargas was initially torn between accepting the offer and resisting. He told Cordeiro de Farias, “I will die fighting against an unconstitutional military coup and leave Góes Monteiro responsible for the massacre of the president and his family.”16 Cordeiro de Farias ignored the president’s histrionics, however, and calmly informed him that the generals had nothing of the sort in mind. “It is a simple case of you leaving in an orderly and dignified manner or being faced with a situation of the water and electricity to the palace being cut off,” he explained.

  Vargas retired to his study to mull over his options. He spent just over fifteen minutes alone. When he emerged with Alzira, who had gone in to check on him, he spoke in a calm voice. “I would prefer that you all attack me and that my death remain as a protest against this violence,” he said. “But as this is to be a bloodless coup, I shall not be the cause of disturbance.” With this statement, and with issuance of Vargas’s letter of resignation, the immediate crisis was over.

  With the president preparing to leave the Guanabara Palace, members of the military headed out into Rio to find his replacement. Chief Justice José Linhares was attending a formal dinner party, and when the officers located him and informed him that he was to become president of Brazil early the next morning, he was taken aback. He consented only after being told that the military and both presidential candidates supported him as an interim president until either Dutra or Gomes could be elected to the post.

  At 10 p.m. on the evening of October 29, 1945, the news of Vargas’s deposition was broadcast to the Brazilian public. At 2 a.m. the following morning, Linhares was sworn in as president. The purr of tank engines making their slow way back to barracks could soon be heard across the city. Bloodshed had been avoided, but as Cariocas discussed events over their morning coffee in the beachfront bars, there was a general consensus that while Vargas had lost this round, his influence would still be felt in the elections—and that, one day, he would return.

  Back at the Guanabara Palace, Vargas was almost ready to depart. “Take care of your mother as I’m leaving alone,” he informed Alzira, who was still in a state of shock. Vargas then proceeded to hand his daughter a letter and told her to open it only if something happened to him on the way back to Rio Grande do Sul. If he arrived home safely, Alzira was to burn the note.

  One of Vargas’s last official acts in the palace was to write a short statement to the chief of police, who had been reinstated following Benjamin’s removal from the position. Vargas explained that he did not want to discuss the reasons for his surprise departure from office, and added something of a white lie: “I hold no grudges.”

  Later that day, Alzira drove her father to the airport, where he was to board a plane to Rio Grande do Sul. In his final publ
ic statement before take-off, Vargas repeated his desire that Brazilians remain calm, and that public order be maintained in Rio and across the country. The people who witnessed his departure noted that he appeared calm, and in no way resembled a broken man. He seemed to sense that this was not the end of the story, that he still had a role to play in Brazil’s future.

  While Vargas had been preparing to leave Rio, Linhares’s temporary cabinet met with several ministers who made the case that Vargas should be sent into exile abroad or to the interior of the country, rather than being allowed to retreat to his home state. Yet the military, led by Góes Monteiro, refused to contemplate such plans. Vargas had kept his side of the bargain, so the military was intent on keeping its side; the president, his family, and several close advisors departed Rio without incident.

  The Rio-based press welcomed these developments—ever since the effective ending of censorship earlier in the year, the papers had been full of anti-Vargas articles. Correio de Manhã declared simply “Vargas Deposed” on its front page, which contained several detailed accounts of the events, including an interview with Cordeiro de Farias, who suggested that the military had been left with no alternative but to act swiftly to unseat the dictator.17 Jornal do Brasil ran with the headline “Resignation of Vargas,” and its coverage discussed the political implications of his demise.18

  The British described Vargas’s ouster as a “bloodless revolution.” In his correspondence with London the ambassador wrote, “President Vargas was deposed (for it was really a deposition) by general consent, as it was feared, with some reason, that he would prevent the elections: in other words, action was taken not against him personally so much as against his policy, or what was believed to be his policy.”19

  For many Vargas supporters, the question of Vargas’s intentions was a sticking point. No one had any conclusive proof that Vargas was going to cancel the presidential elections. Vargas’s enemies had taken Benjamin Vargas’s comments to Góes Monteiro on the morning of October 29 as evidence of the president’s intention of doing so, but there was likely a bit of confirmation bias at work here; the case against Vargas was founded largely in his enemies’ expectations (based, fairly, on ample evidence of Vargas’s past political intrigues) that he would cancel elections, but in the months leading up to the coup he had said nothing to this effect. In his remarks to the Queremista rally on October 3, he had appeared to support the idea of a constitutional assembly—but this is as close as he ever came to suggesting the elections would be cancelled.

  Whatever questions Brazilians may have had about the coup, one thing was certain: Vargas’s enemies had gotten their man. It remained to be seen whether they had been able to do so in a way that would be palatable to the United States. But on this count, the plotters had reason to be confident. Berle, the US ambassador, had essentially given the military the green light in a speech he had delivered to a group of journalists on September 29. The speech had been a thinly veiled warning to Vargas that the United States expected “impartial elections” to take place in Brazil as promised, and that any attempt to cancel the elections in favor of a constitutional assembly would be a disaster for Brazil.20 In fact, to some extent Berle viewed Vargas’s overthrow as a vindication of his comments the previous month.

  Washington’s reaction to the coup was more complex than that of its ambassador in Rio. Vargas had proven himself to be a strong ally of the United States in the war. For a time, there had seemed to be a chance of Latin America slipping into the Axis sphere of influence, and Vargas had stepped in to check the slide. He had also moved against German and Italian influence in his country’s southlands, and he had provided the United States territory for air and naval bases—bases that, moreover, remained alluring to US military planners.

  The problem was that Vargas’s best friends in Washington—Roosevelt, Hull, and Welles—were no longer around to make the case that Brazil’s internal politics were not as important as its foreign policy orientation. Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s successor in the White House, was still well disposed toward Brazil, but his administration was preoccupied with the challenges of the postwar era—namely, the onrushing Cold War with the Soviet Union. In other words, any personal considerations that might have driven US policy toward Brazil had long since vanished.

  US officials seemed more concerned with the Brazilian military’s role in facilitating free elections than with the fact that a coup had taken place. The fact that it had been a bloodless coup made this all the easier. Berle did note that if Vargas had resigned from the presidency and ran for office as one of the candidates in the presidential election, he would have won.21 There were no opinion polls to verify this claim, but it is clear that Vargas did continue to enjoy widespread support among the masses. His enemies, predominantly middle-class liberals, dominated the press and were on the ascendency, but it was by no means certain that Vargas would have been deposed had it not been for the appointment of his younger brother as chief of police, and Benjamin Vargas’s subsequent face-off with Góes Monteiro on the day of his appointment. It all was a very particularly Brazilian coup.

  The coup’s biggest winner appeared to be the opposition candidate for president, Eduardo Gomes. Praised for his calm intervention in the crisis (and untainted by having served in the Vargas administration), he looked like a shoo-in for the presidency. Dutra, for his part, was still in a slump. His campaign style hadn’t changed and his oratory was second rate; he spoke like a bureaucrat instead of a national leader.

  The presidential election took place on December 2, 1945, as planned. It was characterized by a sense of calm, with no reports of political violence anywhere in the country. Gomes had reason to be confident as Brazilians lined up at the polls—but any confidence he might have felt quickly dissipated as the results came in.

  Dutra was in the lead. As officials tallied the numbers, in fact, it became clear that the presidency was his—and that Gomes had not even really come close to beating him. One of the keys to Dutra’s success appeared to be the support he received from the Catholic Church, which feared that Gomes and his supporters would prove to be too liberal if elected to office.22 The church’s intervention on Dutra’s behalf was heavily criticized in the newspapers, but it made a difference in a country where Catholicism remained a powerful force with strong political as well as social influence. The church had been relatively weak under Vargas, who was not a religious man, and so the 1945 election marked its resumption of a prominent role in the nation’s politics.23

  The real story of the election, however, was the return of Getúlio Vargas. In truth, although he was exiled to his ranch in the south of Brazil, Vargas had never been far from the political action. Despite the military’s promise to keep his influence in check and to prevent him from running for the senate (which Góes Monteiro and other officers feared he might do in order to reclaim some of his lost power), politicians had continued to fly to Rio Grande do Sul to visit the ex-president. Eventually, Vargas was persuaded by his political allies and family to run for the senate, and was duly elected to that body thanks to Brazil’s complex system of proportional representation. The military seemed to be reluctant to confront Vargas, and it didn’t challenge his election—so his exile proved to be extremely short-lived.

  It was in the presidential election, however, that Vargas’s influence was most strongly felt. When Alzira and other interlocutors pinned him down on the question of which presidential candidate he preferred, Vargas was forced to concede that it was Dutra over Gomes. In the last few weeks of the campaign, he issued a signed statement to that effect, recommending that the electorate choose Dutra. His intervention proved vital in mobilizing regional and national political forces to support Dutra, and also in rallying the electorate—particularly the nation’s workers—behind him. Dutra later conceded that his victory over Gomes was due almost entirely to Vargas’s endorsement.24 A large portion of the Brazilian press took the same view, regardi
ng Dutra’s election as, in effect, a victory for Vargas. Diário de Notícias opined that “Brazilian reality is still a crepuscular prolongation of the dictatorial darkness.”25

  January 31, 1946, the date of Dutra’s inauguration, was a hot summer’s day in Rio. And as Dutra was sworn in, becoming Brazil’s first post–World War II democratically elected president, Vargas, the ex-president turned kingmaker, was orchestrating his own political comeback.26 In agreeing to leave the Guanabara Palace quietly at the end of October 1945, Vargas had lived to fight another day—and, in a sense, had also ensured that his political exile would not be permanent. The man who appeared to have run out of energy and ideas the previous year had to some extent been rejuvenated by his spell away from Rio, and by his respite from the pressures of leadership after such an extended period in office. His road back to the palace would not be easy, short, or straight, but his sense of injustice at his treatment at the hands of the military was a strong motivation to keep him going.27

  Vargas also knew an opportunity when he saw one. He understood that despite Dutra’s comfortable victory in the recent elections, Dutra’s presidency would ultimately fail; Vargas had known Dutra for decades, and was confident that his former minister of war was not up to the job. This belief was why he had originally recommended Dutra for the position, and it would prove to be an additional motivation as he attempted to claw his way back to the top of Brazilian politics.

  For all the economic and military advancements that Brazil had gleaned from World War II, the country was still in rough shape in 1946. The British embassy in Rio perhaps summed up Brazil’s predicament best:

  Brazil is at present in a most difficult financial and economic situation. Inflation, profiteering, and corruption are rife, the food situation and (closely connected therewith) the transport situation are most serious, as is also the housing problem . . . The present regime does not at present command a sufficient majority, or perhaps sufficient constructive talent, to initiate the drastic measures which alone could save the situation.28