Brazil on the Move (20 page)

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.

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.

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.

As Vargas’ presidential term drew to a close the old man began to see retirement staring him in the face. Though a presidential campaign was already underweigh, designing voices whispered in the President’s ear that maybe all these elections weren’t in the national interest after all. The Vargas politicians wanted to hold onto their jobs. Rio hummed with rumors of a new dictatorship.

In his column in his afternoon paper Lacerda analyzed each new revelation. Evenings on TV he brought in facts and figures to back up his assertions. He drew charts of government malfeasance on a blackboard. His voice stung like a whip. It
began to be reported that the men of Vargas’ personal bodyguard were threatening to kill him if he didn’t cease from his attacks. Lacerda shared his scorn of these threats with his TV audience.

Among the military there was considerable sympathy for Lacerda’s campaign. His support of Brigadier Gomes had made him popular among the younger officers. They couldn’t help admiring his courage. They shared his dismay at the corruption of the Vargas administration. Supporters in the Air Force took turns accompanying him home at night. They wanted to be sure he had a witness in case there was an attempt on his life. None of them imagined anybody would be so reckless as to shoot at an army officer.

The manifesto of a group of colonels had forced the resignation of one of Vargas’ ministers. The Ministry of Labor was politically the keystone of his administration because it controlled the patronage of the labor unions. Vargas’ Minister of Labor was a young neighbor from São Borja whom the old man had taken a fancy to and whose debut in politics he had sponsored in his home state. João Goulart was an attractive young landowner of great wealth reputed to be a crony of Perón’s. The colonels accused him of planning a syndicalist republic,
Peronista
style. Reluctantly Vargas submitted to the retirement of Minister Goulart.

Not long after, Lacerda was slated to address a political meeting. That night it was the turn of Major Rubens Vaz to see that he got home safely. Lacerda lived at that time in Copacabana, the famous beach resort which the first building boom of the thirties had made part of the city of Rio, in a new apartment house on a treelined street overshadowed by the mountain and the tall buildings. Broadleaved trees overgrowing the streetlamps made the sidewalks dark. The litter of construction was everywhere. As Lacerda and Major Vaz climbed out of their car at Lacerda’s front door somebody
started shooting at them from across the street. Lacerda returned the fire. Major Vaz, who was unarmed, was killed. Lacerda was shot in the foot. The assailants escaped.

When Vargas’ police appeared on the scene they tried to make it appear that it was Lacerda, while firing at an imaginary gunman, who had killed Major Vaz.

Major Vaz had a wife and children. He was a popular young officer. His murder infuriated his comrades in the Air Force. Brushing the police aside, a group of senior officers decided to hold their own inquest. It became clear that the murder was instigated by a Negro named Fortunato Gregório who was known as the “black angel” of Vargas’ personal bodyguard. He eventually confessed to having hired the gunman to do the job and was sent to jail for twenty years, there being no death penalty in Brazil.

The press, the houses of Congress, the military clubs rang with denunciations of the crime on Toneleros Street. Demands for President Vargas’ resignation were heard on every hand. The old man was terribly shaken by Gregório’s confession and by definite proof which was placed on his desk that his own children were trading on his name in all sorts of financial deals. At a meeting of his Cabinet the night of August 23 he spoke despairingly of “the sea of mud” under the presidential palace and consented, after much urging, if not to resign, at least to retire from the government.

After the cabinet meeting President Vargas went to his room in the early hours of August 24 and there shot himself through the heart.

“The odd thing about it,” said my friend when he broke off the story, “is that Vargas’ suicide made him a national hero … the Brazilians are a sentimental people.”

“But how can they blame Lacerda for it?” cried his wife impatiently. “It was Lacerda who was the hero.”

We had driven out beyond the cobbled treeshaded avenues of Petrópolis into a broad rimrocked valley. Brilliantly green vegetation sprouting with all kinds of flowers overflowed the stone garden walls on either side of the road.

When we reached Lacerda’s country place my friend parked his little car in an embrasure in one of the walls and led the way up some stone steps through a tunnel of bougainvillaea into a flagged patio. Everything was so full of flowering plants you couldn’t tell which was the garden and which was the house.

Lacerda set down a flowerpot as he came out to greet us. He was tanned, very much the sunburned Apollo in shell-rimmed spectacles. He was completely preoccupied with his gardening operations. As we walked about his orchard and vegetable garden he introduced each plant and tree as if it were a person.

He had reason to be proud of his plantings. The valleys in the mountains around Petrópolis are one of those marvelous regions where plants from the tropical and temperate zones flourish with equal profusion. There are orchids along with nasturtiums. Cabbages grow next to pineapples. Beside mangoes grow guavas, oranges, and apricots, and even occasionally an apple tree. Lacerda was particularly proud of his apple tree.

Somebody said the place was like the Garden of Eden. “Naturally. We are in my native state of Rio de Janeiro,” Lacerda answered dreamily in English. “It is truly a paradise”—he laughed—“where only man is vile … Maybe not so vile. Let’s give him a chance.”

We met his wife, who looked much too young to be the mother of two wellgrown boys and a girl. Lacerda himself looked younger than I had remembered. There was an air of
youthfulness and closeknit intimacy about the whole family. You felt they were all in it together.

Dona Lota’s house, built by Sérgio Bernardes of glass and steel beside a cascading brook, was something to see, though one skeptic did mutter into another skeptic’s ear that it did look a little like the model of an oldfashioned railroad station. There was a pleasant gathering at lunch: the architect Bernardes, an eminent historian, a number of people interested primarily in painting and sculpture. The talk, half in English, half in Portuguese, was about Picasso and Léger and books and St. John Perse and the new museum for modern art which was going up in Rio. Lacerda was at home in all this. He showed a flair for painting. He expressed the reasoned likes and dislikes of a man who did his own reading and used his own eyes and his own ears. His remarks had a humorous tone that kept us all laughing. Not a word about contemporary politics.

On the way back down the mountain my friend’s wife said she was a little let down. It was as if we had been lunching in Paris, instead of Brazil. She had expected Lacerda to be more forceful. “It’s a Sunday,” said her husband soothingly, “a man can’t be forceful every day of the week.”

A few nights later at the apartment on Toneleros Street, where he still lived, Lacerda himself described the scramble of events so unfortunate for his Democratic Union that followed Vargas’ death. He didn’t spare himself. He gave a comical cast to the recital of his political misadventures.

After Vargas’ death Vice-President Café Filho, a wellmeaning gentleman from one of the small northeastern states, took over the presidency in due form. He had been on good terms with the old man and took the attitude that as interim President his only business was to see that the elections were peacefully conducted.

The country was preoccupied with the funeral eulogies of the great Getúlio. The industrial workers felt that they had lost their best friend. Even among the growing middle class, who tended to sympathize with the Democratic Union, it was admitted that Vargas had broadened the base of participation in political life. Every Brazilian now felt himself a citizen. The crimes and corruptions of the dictatorship were forgotten in the general mourning.

Lacerda, in speeches and editorials, was driving for a complete cleanup of the remnants of the Vargas regime. In his
Tribune of the Press
he called for an end of machine politics. He was piling up votes for his candidacy for the Chamber of Deputies.

Party labels have little meaning in Brazil. With the relaxation of Vargas’ heavy centralizing hand the national parties fell under the command of local leaders in the different states. The state governors became powerful figures. Groupings of local politicians resulted in splinterings and coalitions. Dozens of minor parties came into being. In São Paulo, for example, a pokerfaced politico named Adhemar de Barros used his patronage as governor to build up a Social Progressive Party of his own. In Minas Gerais the governor, Dr. Juscelino Kubitschek, was being groomed for the presidency by his local Social Democratic machine. From their stronghold in Rio Grande do Sul, under the banner of a testament supposedly written out by Vargas before his death, João Goulart and his brotherinlaw Leonel Brizola kept Vargas’ Labor Party intact, though its greatest strength still lay in the labor unions of the city of Rio.