Getúlio Vargas

(1883 - 1954) He was the greatest Brazilian statesman. He was also people’s beloved leader as well as the the elite’s most hated politician. He, after all, compelled our our urban enterpreneurs - children of slave owners - to accept workers rights. The traditional big shots, guardians or complacent with the old legality, have never forvigen him for their expulsion from the political scene.

The left-wing intelectuals as well as the communists do not forgive themselves for having lost for Getúlio the admiration and the support of the working class. He was the unquestionable leader of the 1930 Revolution. Having occupied important posts before, Getúlio headed a number of young “gaúchos” (people born in Rio Grande do Sul) who - allied to young Army officers (lieutenants) - made the 1930 Revolution, the only one to deserve such name, because of the deep modernizing and social tranformation it brought to Brazil.

Politically, the 1930 Revolution expelled from power the landowners with their electoral “constituencies” and destituted the coffee barons who made of the Republic their own property. Getúlio institutionalized and professionalized the Army, taking it off rebellions and getting it inside the barracks.

Socially, he acknowledged the development of class struggle - up to then seen as police matter - and organized the urban workers in steady Government supported Unions struggling against the bosses.

He reformed Education and encouraged Brazilian culture. Getúlio governed Brazil for fifteen years under revolutionary legitimation, was overthrown and returned for further five years in government as a result of popular vote. He faced the powerful managers of international enterprises who opposed themselves to the creation of Petrobrás and Eletrobrás and defeated them with his suicide, when he left a will letter which is the highest and noblest political document ever seen in Brazilian history.

Let’s have a look, bit by bit, into Getúlio’s deeds. Soon after the victory he structured the Federal Government with his revolutionary partners, like Oswaldo Aranha and Lindolfo Collor, whom Francisco Campos, Gustavo Capanema, Pedro Ernesto and others joined later on. He also brought his military allied for the Government - Juarez Távora, João Alberto, Estilac Leal, Juracy Magalhães - appointing them for the Government of several states and important civil posts. Only two heroes of the lieutenants’s movement were missing: Luís Carlos Prestes because he had joined, months before, soviet marxism, and Siqueira Campos, who died in an accident during the conspiracy.

The Revolutionary Government created the Education and Health Ministry given to Chico Campos, founded the Brazilian University and regulated high school teaching, on base that lasted for two decades. It created, simultaneously, the Labour Ministry, given to Lindolfo Collor who brought about - in the following years- the basic labour legislation, unified later on in the CLT (Labour Law), still in force in Brazil. Trade-union and strike rights, trade-union unity and trade-union tax contribution that would maintain it. Paid holidays. Minimum wage. Compensation for employment’s permanence and job security. Free Saturdays. 8 hours working day. Equal pay for men and women, etc.

Getúlio got his inspiration for all such deeds from Comte’s positivism that already oriented Rio Grande do Sul, Uruguay and Argentina’s labour policies. Oswaldo Aranha, ahead of the Exchequer reorganized the financial system, revalued the national currency and negotiated the old and heavy external debt with the British, in favourable base for Brazil.

IDEOLOGICAL WAR

Two years after the victorious revolution, Getúlio faced the big-shots-counter-revolution that bursted up in São Paulo, defending the restoration of the old legality in the name of democracy.

In 1934 he called a Constitutional Assembly that approved a new Constitution, based upon the Weimar’s one. According to it, he was elected Constitutional President of Brazil. Getúlio had to face, since then, the projection over Brazil of the world’s ideological dispute, getting ready to fight in a total war. On one side Mussolini’s fascists, who took Italy over, and Hitler’s nazis that rearticulated Germany, trying to spread themselves all over the world. On the opposite side the communists, headed by the Soviet Union, with equal ambitions.

The right-wing organized itself here in the Partido Integralista that grew and got powerful in the middle-classes, mainly amongst the Armed Forces young officers.

The communists started a militancy in the Unions extending their influence to the military barracks. They quickly widened up their action, through the Aliança Libertadora Nacional (National Liberation Front) which attracted the whole democratic left as well as the anti-fascists. They got from Moscow, which supported an alliance policy with all the anti-fascists of the world, the permission to make of Brazil an exception, believing that here it would be easy to seize power due to Prestes’s enormous popular prestige.

They started the insurrection in 1935. It was a disaster. It not only desorganized and destroyed the Communist Party but also led to a strong wave of repression over all democrats resulting in many arrests, tortures, exile and political murders. The main consequence of the unsucessful attempt was the strengthening of Partido Integralista by opening up wide areas of support for it in many layers of the population, allowing it to organize big mass demonstrations, “green shirts” (how they dressed) marchs and to appeal with all sort of publicity in order to elect Plínio Salgado, their leader, President of the Republic. Getúlio ended up by dissolving Partido Integralista and assuming, himself, the role of head of a New State, of authoritarian nature. He broke regional separatism down by centralizing power and encouraging Brazilian nationalism.

THE WAR In 1939 the war broke up. Everybody thought that Getúlio’s tendency would be to support the Axle’s powers because of the generals’stand. Surprisingly, he started to foster links with the democracies, through Oswaldo Aranha, who made the allied realize that he tended to support the democracies. He didn’t do it without political cost, however. He demanded from the United States of America - as compensation for the war effort - two very important concessions to Brazil in exchange for the use of military base in Belém and Natal, as well as the supply of minerals, rubber and other raw materials. The first would be the creation of a big mining company later on called Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN), our industrialization matrix. The second would be the British to give back the manganese and iron ore reserves of Minas Gerais and Vitória-Minas Railway which were in their power. From them it was created Companhia Vale do Rio Doce which, in the following decades, had a prodigious growth. Such negotiation culminated when Getúlio managed to bring Roosevelt to Natal, in his wheel chair, to talk to him, consolidating those agreements and getting Brazil to send an armed battalion to the Italian front.

With the Allied’s victory in the war, the redemocratization movement in Brazil grew. It soon became incompatible with Getúlio’s presence ahead of the Brazilian State. He tried to conduct such process and created with his left hand the PTB - to speak on behalf of the working classes - and with his right hand the PSD - to represent the public administration powers, with whom he had governed. He generated suspicion in all and was finally overthrown by a military coup headed by Góes Monteiro and Eurico Gaspar Dutra, his War Minister. The Government was handed over to the Superior Federal Court that called and ran elections in which Brigadeiro Eduardo Gomes - representing the democratic forces - and general Gaspar Dutra - in the opposite side - confronted each other. Dutra won thanks to the support of Getúlio,who lived in his farm, in Itu, Rio Grande do Sul, almost as if he were in exile. Simultaneously, Getúlio was elected for the Senate for São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul States and Federal Deputy for the Federal District, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Bahia and Paraná.

THE WAY BACK Getúlio became candidate to the presidency of the Republic in the 1950 election, facing Eduardo Gomes, and won it. He found a destroyed State, bankrupted by Dutra, whom, elected by him, had governed with UDN’s right-wing. Soon after he took power, he formulated our first state capitalism autonomous national development project and a program to widen up workers rights. He started to glance at the agrarian masses. The peculiarity of his government was , however, the confrontation with foreign capital accused by him of exploiting Brazil by making wealth generated here, in cruzeiros, to become dollars abroad, through scandalous profit remmitances. The whole right-wing, associated to those foreign enterprises and by them financed, got into the conspiracy, subsidizing the press in order to encourage a hostile environment for Getúlio, whose government was portrayed as a “muddy sea”. In such environment the murder of an Air Force major - Carlos Lacerda’s body-guard - by a member of Getúlio’s personal guard in Catete’s Palace, generated a revolt wave assumed passionately by the Air Force culminating in an inquest with the aim to overthrow Getúlio.

The Government was in a political crisis until the last ministerial meeting in which Getúlio realized that all his ministers, except for Tancredo Neves, wanted his resignation. He had received, from Leonel Brizola, the information that he could count upon the Armed Forces in Southern Brazil. But, for it, it would be necessary to start a civil war in the country. The solution for Getúlio was his suicide. Before carrying it out he handed over to João Goulart the Will Letter, which became the essential document of Contemporary Brazilian History.

THE REVERSAL

Getúlio’s suicide reverted completely the course of events. Public opinion, under press anaesthetics before, suddenly realized that it had been a coup against national and popular interests, that it was the right-wing that was taking power and that Getúlio had been victim of an wide conspiracy. The foreign enterprises’s managers and the right-wing party that expected to get hold of power started to panic and set back. The Armed Forces redefined their stand and the conditions for Juscelino Kubitscheck’s election were created.

Getúlio’s body transfer from Catete’s Palace to Santos Dumont’s Airport was the major, most lamentable, most dramatic public demonstration ever seen in Brazil. It can be well understood the astonishment and the revolt of Brazilian people in the face of such serial of tragic events that led their greatest leader to commit suicide as an extreme attitude to get by the political sequence which would end up with the right-wing’s rise to power (Darcy Ribeiro, 1994).