The response of the Communists was to turn Lacerda in to the police as a Trotzkyite. For one last time he found himself in Vargas’ hoosegow.
That genial despot, though at one time he hadn’t allowed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speeches to be printed in the Brazilian newspapers, was proving the sincerity of his conversion to the cause of democracy by encouraging the Americans to build and operate airfields on the eastern bulge for the airlift to Africa. He further conciliated pro-Allied opinion at home and abroad by letting the Brazilian Army send an expeditionary force to Italy which gave a good account of itself fighting alongside the Americans.
The wily old dictator was executing a skillful retreat from the Estado Nôvo. The Brazilians wanted political parties? Well they should have them. He set up a labor party, the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, based on his own subsidized labor unions. He did grudgingly allow free unions but they had to pay their own bills. To make sure the Labor Party should carry out his wishes, he put his own son in as chairman.
Opposition? Very good, but it must be loyal. To keep the opposition in the family Vargas saw to it that his daughter’s husband should preside over the competing Partido Social Democrático. Having assured his machine of control of a majority of the votes he felt it safe to allow the orators of the Democratic Union to talk as much as they wanted to.
The Tribune of the Press
Carlos Lacerda became the Patrick Henry of the Democratic Union. He discovered that his voice was effective over the radio. All Rio listened to his broadcasts lambasting the corruptions of the Vargas regime and its Communist supporters. The argument became highly personal when a Communist gang waylaid him one night on his way home from the radio station and beat him up severely. His answer was to take a course in judo for selfdefense and to redouble the sarcasm of his attacks. At the same time he conducted a vigorously controversial column in the Correio da Manhã which he called Tribuna da Imprensa (the Tribune of the Press).
Vargas’ Minister of War, General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, was elected President for a fiveyear term by a large majority in 1945. The Vargas machine conducted the election. The electoral boards ruled that approved members of Vargas’ labor unions should be registered automatically. They could be trusted to vote as they were told. Other people had to establish their right to vote by a literacy test.
Though Dutra was elected by the Vargas machine, he was a somewhat independent minded man and could rely on the support of a large body of pro-Allied opinion which had become increasingly vocal with the decay of the censorship. Brazilian historians speak of Dutra’s presidency as a period of democratic convalescence.
Parties were allowed to develop independently. Released from the threat of intervention by the federal government, political organizing began to center in the states. In São Paulo and Minas Gerais local machines flourished.
In Rio Carlos Lacerda was in 1946 elected to his first public office as vereador (city counselor) by a large majority. The very violence of his enemies helped bring him support. Three years later he gave the name of his column “Tribuna da Imprensa” to a newspaper of his own. It was the first newspaper in Brazil established by public subscription. People from all walks of life bought stock. Several wellknown soccer players chipped in. One day a group of cleaning women turned up at Lacerda’s office offering to contribute a few crumpled ten-cruzeiro bills.
President Dutra’s term would end in 1951. According to the current wording of the so often rewritten Brazilian constitution he could not succeed himself. Vargas, who had spent the five years in rural retirement on his estate at São Borja on the Argentine border, was urged to try again.
He had been watching his apt pupil, Juan Perón, apply his own version of the Estado Nôvo to the distracted republic on the River Plate. President Roosevelt’s death and the breakdown of leadership from Washington had left a political vacuum in the world. Communism poured in. The stock of democracy was sinking again on the international market.
Getúlio’s Return
Vargas was old and tired but his henchmen were hungry. The old machine was still intact in the Labor Party and the labor unions. He had an active yellow press at his disposal. His supporters united the Communists, whose watchword was now down with everything connected with the United States, with the leftovers of Fascist nationalism, the frustrated radicals who still dreamed of a socialist utopia, and with local industrialists who feared foreign competition. An adept in the corruptions of politics Vargas played on these factions with a master hand and easily defeated the colorless candidate of the Social Democrats and the Democratic Union’s virtuous brigadier.
The Brazilians were a youthful people, was how Lacerda explained the defeat of his party, statistically more than half the population was under eighteen. Many of the voters in 1951 were too young to remember the oppressions of the Estado Nôvo. Lacerda himself was bitterly reproached for libeling a good old man.
The old dictator’s victory threw the moderate politicians into confusion. People braced themselves for a new bout of dictatorship. The Democratic Union almost fell apart. Lacerda’s Tribune of the Press, with much greater influence than could be accounted for by its circulation, remained as a rallying ground for those opposed to totalitarian schemes.
After five quiet years, busied only with his ranches and his family, the good old man from São Borja moved back into the presidential palace in Rio. The ex-dictator felt a fatherly gratitude towards his people for having re-elected him their constitutional President. He sincerely believed he knew what was best for the Brazilians, but the Brazil he returned to was a changed country.
American financing during the war had given Brazilian manufacturing just the push forward it needed. Volta Re-donda was already turning out steel. Fortunes were being made producing consumer goods in São Paulo in spite of the collapse of the world market in coffee. Industries were spreading out from Rio and São Paulo into the hinterlands of Minas Gerais. Roads were beginning to improve. Public health measures stimulated the growth of population. The cities were bursting at the seams. Contractors were getting rich building apartments. In spite of an adverse balance of payments, inflation, bluesky speculation and every fiscal ill on the calendar, Brazil was on the verge of an industrial boom.
President Vargas, now a satisfied aging man with the old benevolent smile on his face, only wanted an easy life. He wanted everybody to think well of him without worrying too much about overcrowded cities or the problems of financing a vast irregularly developing nation.
The trouble was that his supporters, the party stalwarts who had dragooned the workingclass voters into electing him, weren’t satisfied. They were hungry. They couldn’t wait to fill their pockets. Even the members of Vargas’ own family became infected by the get rich quick fever. The lobbies of the presidential palace swarmed with influence peddlers and fixers, many of them gangsters and lowlives with police records. In the memory of man no one had seen such barefaced thievery as went on in Vargas’ last administration.
The Voice of Opposition
As scandal after scandal boiled to the surface, Carlos Lacerda made it his business to see that nobody forgot them. He was determined to stave off a dictatorship. After a second term as city counselor he was planning to run for the federal Chamber of Deputies.
He had discovered television. His face on the screen became a trade mark. The firm jaw, the clearcut nose between the dark shell rims of his glasses, through which glowing dark eyes burned into the consciousness of the audience, were unforgettable. Without talking down to the crowd he developed a way of explaining complicated problems so that they became understandable to a great many different sorts of people. Spoken, his editorials were even more effective than in the printed column.