Vargas’ first administration started out in a New Dealish kind of way, aiming towards universal suffrage, including votes for women, the encouragement of labor unions to protect working people, the colonization of the west, the elimination of poverty and epidemic disease, a beginning of the social reforms progressive Brazilians had been demanding for years. Vargas had plans for Brazil that won the support of the young idealists.
Vargas had been Washington Luíz’s Minister of the Treasury (Fazenda), but his political rearing was in the school of Borges de Madeiros, the ironfisted boss of his home state of Rio Grande do Sul on the turbulent southern border. This was gaúcho country where politicians still talked with the gun. Not that Vargas was a man of violence. Far from it. A small stoutish fellow with a benevolent smile and friendly wrinkles round his eyes, he was a conniving man who preferred to triumph by corrupting his enemies rather than by a direct show of force.
As Vargas watched the success overseas of Hitler’s National Socialism and of Mussolini’s Corporate State he began to plan something similar for Brazil. He began to appreciate the demagogic possibilities of an appeal to the masses. Through government subsidies and by planting his own men in their management he geared labor unions and student organizations, and much of big business, into his own political machine.
His twenty year rule determined the shape of Brazilian society for years to come. As the only politician who had ever paid attention to them he had the devotion of the urban working class. The coffee barons and the new industrial magnates of São Paulo trusted him to keep the working class in order. It was under Vargas that the strange link was formed between Brazilian big business and the Brazilian left. He dominated the Army and Navy through appointments and promotions, the press through his censorship bureau. Where he couldn’t intimidate people he bought them.
His appetite for power grew with the exercise, until in 1937 he was ready to proclaim his Estado Nôvo (the New State). Patriarchal government has deep roots in Brazil. In colonial days the father had power of life and death. Plumpfaced subtly smiling innocent appearing Getúlio Vargas was presented as a benevolent father to the poor. This was Fascism Brazilian style.
Every career was closed to a nonconformist. The newspapers were forbidden to mention the word democracy.
For a while the Communists offered the only vocal opposition. It is easy to see how a fiery young law student with a passion for civil liberties should be attracted to them. In those days all oppression seemed to come from the Fascists. The Communists operated under the banner of the popular front. In Brazil particularly the Party had taken over a certain romantic aura with the conversion to Marxism of Luís Carlos Prestes. Captain Prestes was a romantic young officer of engineers who, after the failure of one of the many popular outbursts against the oligarchical regime of the twenties, led a column of revolting troops and assorted revolutionists through thousands of miles of the wilderness of Mato Grosso and kept them together for many months before he was forced to seek asylum in Bolívia. The adventures of the Prestes column turned all the young men’s heads. Lacerda now says it was only the tactics of the popular front that kept him from formally becoming a party member.
As student leader of a protest organization called the Alianza Libertadora he traveled about the country addressing meetings in behalf of laborleaders and anti-Fascists. When there was a strike he was for the strikers. His heated protests appeared in clandestine publications. Whenever Vargas’ police scented trouble Carlos Lacerda was among those they carried off to the jug. When he wasn’t in jail he was in hiding.
He married at twentythree. When his first child was on the way he had to come to grips with the problem of making a living. Friends talked Vargas into letting the young firebrand out from one of his many jailings on the understanding that he would forego politics.
He went to work for a nonpartisan journal of economics. He did spreads for an advertising agency. He won fame as reporter for O Jornal, the key newspaper of the Diários Associados, Chateaubriand’s national chain, which was the Brazilian counterpart of the Hearst or Scripps-Howard chains in the United States. In 1943 he was made city editor.
How Vargas Became a Good Neighbor
After the American entrance into the war against Hitler, and particularly when the military fortunes of the Axis powers began to dim, a change came over the Estado Nôvo. Fascist was becoming a term of abuse. Vargas began to model his image more on Franklin D. Roosevelt and less on Mussolini. The good neighbor began to win over the screaming dictator.
Lacerda by this time was the outstanding journalist in Rio. He did everything he could to help the process on. He scooped the nation on the Normandy landings.
It was Carlos Lacerda who accomplished the first break through Vargas’ press censorship. José Américo, a revered political oldtimer who had supported Vargas in his reforming days, gave Lacerda an interview in which he demanded free elections and a free press. O Jornal wouldn’t print it. For twenty days Lacerda tramped about Rio looking for an editor with nerve enough to print Américo’s statement.
When the Correo da Manhã took the risk the result was sensational. The logjam broke. Protests against dictatorship erupted all over the country. The Correo da Manhã featured Lacerda’s columns from then on.
By breaking with the Diários Associados, Lacerda, without a second thought, gave up an assured career as one of Brazil’s best paid journalists. During the same period he became estranged from the Communists. When Lacerda called for civil liberties and a government of law, he meant what he said. Stalin’s purges and the Hitler-Stalin pact convinced him that nothing was to be hoped from the Communists towards the sort of reforms he wanted. When the Brazilian Communists, after Moscow’s scrapping of the tactics of the popular front, took to supporting the Vargas dictatorship, Lacerda’s disillusionment was complete.
The incident he says revolted him most was the appearance of Luís Carlos Prestes, by this time a docile party puppet, on the same platform with Getúlio Vargas. Vargas not only had nabbed Prestes and kept him in jail for years when he ventured home from exile, but at the height of his pro-Nazi enthusiasm he had turned Prestes’ German-Jewish wife over to the German authorities to be done to death in one of Hitler’s concentration camps.
It took the threat of a military coup to induce Vargas to allow presidential elections in 1945. Lacerda jumped back into politics with both feet.
He now hated Vargas and the Communists with equal fervor. The candidate for the presidency whom José Américo brought forward as spokesman for the hastily improvised anti-totalitarian coalition, which took the name of the Unhão Democrático Nacional, was one of the few army officers of rank who could not be accused of collaboration with the dictatorship, Brigadier Eduardo Gomes. Gomes was highly esteemed in democratic circles in the army, navy and aircorps as the sole survivor of the forlorn uprising of the Fort of Copacabana in the early twenties. Lacerda threw everything he had into campaigning for Gomes.
In the course of the campaign he vented his bitterness against the Communists by daily taking the hide off a gentleman named Iedo Fuiza whom they were running for the presidency. Lacerda claimed that Fuiza had made a fortune in real estate while he headed the National Department of Railroads, and could not possibly believe in the Communist aims; he ended every speech by calling him a hypocritical rat.