Brazil on the Move (19 page)

Lacerda’s ideas, began my friend, are those of many generous-minded men in our time in many different countries the world over, but he takes them so seriously. He began to laugh. The trouble with Carlos is that once he starts talking he doesn’t know when to stop. Controversial. He can’t open his mouth without stirring up controversy.

He was brought up from the cradle in an atmosphere of controversy. The whole family was in politics. Carlos was born in Rio the year the First World War began, but his grandfather, Sebastião Lacerda, who was a justice of the Brazilian Supreme Court, insisted on registering his birth at the old family home at Vassouras on the Paraíba River in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

The state of Rio, a weirdly beautiful region of halfabandoned great houses and plantations that have been running down ever since the emancipation of the slaves, has always been separate from the city, which in the days before the federal district was moved into the interior, was the capital of Brazil.

Carlos’ father, Maurício Lacerda, was a rather erratic Socialist deputy. He came back from Europe after the Russian revolution declaring himself to be a Maximalist. The Maximalists were the extreme left wing of the Russian Socialists before Lenin taught everybody in Russia to think the same way. The father was too busy with a number of things to pay much attention to his family, so young Carlos was raised at his grandfather’s place on the Paraíba River. This was a small fruit farm established by Carlos’ greatgrandparents. The wife,
who was Portuguese, sold mangoes while the husband, by profession a baker, baked bread. Out of the proceeds they sent Carlos’ grandfather to study law in São Paulo where another member of the family had already made a name for himself as a jurist. Perhaps Carlos’ countryman’s fondness for growing things originated in these early days at Vassoura. He says the Paraíba River was as important to his boyhood as the Mississippi was to Mark Twain’s.

Carlos was a precocious lad. At sixteen he was already on his own in Rio, studying law and picking up a little money writing for the newspapers. He was developing a prodigious ability for hard work.

This was in 1930, the year when a widespread rising of military men and politicians installed Getúlio Vargas in the presidency. Brazil was suffering its share of the political upheavals that followed in the wake of the Great Depression.

Vargas ousted the business-oriented regime of President Washington Luíz, who was such a good friend of the White House that Herbert Hoover sent him home on a battleship after a state visit to the United States. Washington Luíz was the last of a line of Brazilian statesmen who considered friendship with the United States virtually part of their oath of office. Now the stockmarket crash had made a dent in American prestige.

Portugal, Spain, and Italy were already under various sorts of Fascist dictatorships. Hitler’s baleful star was rising in the north. Among the people of Europe Fascism was the rage. Vargas looked to Europe for guidance rather than to the United States.

Up to Vargas’ time politics in Brazil had been the business of oligarchical groups. Vargas appealed to the masses. His eventual denial of any of the rights of political agitation helped by a spirit of contradiction to arouse the public and make politics one of the great Brazilian preoccupations.

Carlos Lacerda took to politics like a duck to water. He early showed a sharp pen for invective and a talent for public speaking. He had charm, good looks, and reckless personal courage. He was fired by all the enthusiasms of his father’s utopian socialism.

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.

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.

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.

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.