Background José Américo de Almeida and
Armando de Sales Oliveira, who supported the
Revolution of 1930, were running for presidency in the 1937 Brazilian elections, as well as the fascist-aligned integralist
Plínio Salgado. The Vargas government, on 30 September 1937, made public an alleged communist plan aiming to seize the central government, later dubbed the
Cohen Plan. The
National Congress declared martial law the next day, 1 October. by the
Brazilian Army's Council of Justification (requested on 26 December 1956). He later
initiated the 1964 ''coup d'état''. On 19 October,
Rio Grande do Sul governor José Flores da Cunha lost control of the state's
Military Brigade, which Vargas had subordinated to the Brazilian Army. Surrounded by General Góis Monteiro's men, Flores da Cunha left office and went into exile in Uruguay. He had bought a large quantity of arms into Europe and been the last possible military resistance to the Vargas coup attempt. Armando de Sales might have opposed the coup, but he had already left his position in the
São Paulo government to run for presidency in the 1937 election. His successor,
José de Melo Neto, promised Vargas that "São Paulo would not have another revolution". He promulgated a new constitution the same day that gave him absolute control of the country and the power to appoint federal intervenors () with autonomy to replace the states' governors. All governors had already been replaced after Vargas assumed power following the 1930 revolution, with the exception of
Minas Gerais, whose governor, Olegário Maciel, was kept in office. Vargas had also appointed
tenentist revolutionary leaders for the other states, such as Flores da Cunha in Rio Grande do Sul, Carlos de Lima Cavalcanti in Pernambuco, and
João Alberto Lins de Barros in São Paulo.
Consolidation Juscelino Kubitschek in 1940 The
1937 constitution, entirely drafted by
Francisco Campos, became known as "
Polaca" (Portuguese
demonym for the Polish), because it was inspired by the
April Constitution of Poland. It shut down the Congress,
state and
municipal legislatures, and abolished universal suffrage. Decree-Law No. 37 of 2 December 1937 abolished political parties, including two that were critical of the then-political system, and preached "direct contact with the masses":Considering that the electoral system then in force...encouraged the proliferation of parties, with the sole and exclusive aim of giving candidacies and elective positions the appearance of legitimacy, and:...the new regime... must be in direct contact with the people, overriding partisan struggles of any kind, independent of the consultation of groupings, parties or organizations, ostensibly or disguisedly aimed at conquering public power. The government censored the press through the Department of Press and Propaganda (DIP), created by Decree-Law No. 1,915 of 27 December 1939. Vargas said in a speech to the
Federal Senate on 13 December 1946 regarding the creation of the DIP:...I shouldn't solve our problems according to the convenience of international propaganda, but on the basis of the convenience of Brazil and America... The excessive diligence of British propaganda repeatedly disrupted my actions. But to a certain extent it was useful, because it led to measures that guaranteed our impeccable neutrality (in the early years of the
World War II). Vargas' cabinet was relatively stable. His ministers of
Finance,
War, the
Navy and
Education remained in office throughout the period. The
Integralist Uprising on 8 May 1938, which attacked the
Guanabara Palace, attempting to depose Vargas, was the only response to the coup. It led him to appoint a personal guard, which the people called the "Black Guard". Vargas said in a
Revista do Globo interview that the 1938 Integralist coup attempt: "...was organized by the German embassy. The Brazilians served only as instruments in a plan to hand the country over to the German government. Naturally, if it hadn't been for the help of German agents, they would never have carried it out, because they didn't have the capacity or the courage to do so."
Political repression and torture The preamble to the 1937 Constitution stated that the Estado Novo was installed to meet "the legitimate aspirations of the Brazilian people for political and social peace, deeply disturbed by notorious factors of disorder... tending, by their natural development, to resolve themselves in terms of violence, placing the nation under the ominous imminence of civil war due to communist infiltration..." Torture at the Rio de Janeiro Police headquarters in
Filinto Müller's administration was reported. and some critics of the Estado Novo claim that torture occurred throughout Brazil. On 3 October 1931, Vargas said that due to his changes to the
Civil Police of the Federal District in his first year in office, the
Civil Police of the Federal District "Under the revolutionary government, the Civil Police of the Federal District redeemed itself in the eyes of public opinion; it was, in fact, one of the departments that had fallen the lowest in the country's general opinion. This department had long since ceased to be an apparatus of order, but had been transformed into a terrorist organization, whose fame had already spread, with the prestige of sinister things, beyond our borders." These reforms followed the suggestions of the Civil Police Reform Commission of the
Federal District under Police Chief João Batista Luzardo. Decree-Law No. 5,504 of May 20, 1943 created the Federal District Police Inspectorate to supervise the Civil Police of the Federal District. The bad reputation of Civil Police of Rio de Janeiro dated back to the
Old Republic, and was mocked in the first
samba recorded in Brazil,
Pelo Telefone, by
Donga in 1917: "Over the phone, the Chief of Police tells me that in Carioca there's a roulette wheel to play". Several artists did directly accuse Vargas of restricting individual rights, and he replied on 23 July 1938: "The Estado Novo does not recognize the rights of individuals against the community. Individuals don't have rights, they have duties! Rights belong to the community! The state, overriding the struggle of interests, guarantees the rights of the community and enforces its duties towards it." "The Vargas regime's relentless persecution of its opponents (real and imagined), whose methods heavily involved the use of torture, violence, deportation and murder," said
UOL, was just one of the facets, perhaps the best known, of this period." Lawyer Marina Pasquini Toffolli has called the Estado Nova "a dictatorship that spread terror and built barbarism throughout its territory, suppressing all individual guarantees" and noted the dismissal of the federal, state and municipal parliaments, censorship of the press and repression. The first civilian to examine the secret police archives in Rio de Janeiro, American researcher R.S.Rose, collected material in his book
One of the Forgotten Things: Getúlio Vargas and Brazilian social control – 1930–1954, published in 2001 by
Companhia das Letras. Rose saw the Estado Novo as an unpopular regime that needed to "coerce the people" to survive: "During Vargas' rule, the quality and quantity of human rights abuses reached unprecedented levels. Violence, as a means of coercing the people, was evident in all sectors of the security apparatus... The nation's police forces redefined and in some cases reinvented the torture that had already taken place in Brazil since
colonial times. The cruelty of their methods was matched only by the fervor with which this example was followed by subsequent generations." However, an October 1954 special edition of the magazine
O Mundo Ilustrado said that Vargas enjoyed his greatest popularity in the dictatorial period: "The popular prestige of President Vargas grew even more after the proclamation of the Estado Novo. Never before has a head of state been so loved by his people in our country. His prestige never waned, and Vargas remained beloved until his tragic death." Journalist David Nasser lists some of the more common forms of torture in his
Falta Alguém em Nuremberg: Torturas da Polícia de Felinto Strubling Müller. and the 1952 novel
The Bowels of Liberty by
Jorge Amado, who went into exile in 1948, relate "details of the repression of the
Brazilian Communist Party, censorship, torture and imprisonment" under the Estado Novo, He was arrested in 1936 and 1937 for subversion based on his involvement with the Communist Uprising. In 1937, his books were burned in a public square in
Salvador. In his book
Tancredo Fala de Getúlio, on the other hand,
Tancredo Neves, Minister of Justice from 1953 to 1954, wrote that: "He tried hard to project himself in history as a unique dictator, because he was a progressive dictator, a humanitarian dictator. Despite one or two accusations of violence, the people don't accept Getúlio as a violent dictator".
World War II , daughter of
Benito Mussolini, is greeted by
Adhemar de Barros during her visit to São Paulo in 1939. Vargas and the military maintained a neutral stance from September 1939 to 1941. Public opinion was divided. Many immigrants from the
Axis powers sympathized with those countries but the majority of
Afro-descendants and communists, especially after the June 1941 invasion of the
USSR (aligned with the
Allies), and had great mobilization power and influence in the press. During this period, Vargas wrote in his diary: "It seems to me that the Americans want to drag us into the war, without it being of any use to us or to them!" The United States created
Plan Rubber to invade the
northeastern region of Brazil if Vargas did not agree to airbases, which would compromise the country's neutrality. However, the plan was necessary because, with or without Vargas' knowledge, the Brazilian military had since 1934 already reached a "cautious alignment" with the US in the event of another world conflict. Furthermore, the planned blockade by the
British navy on Germany and Italy made large-scale trade with them impossible. After extensive negotiation, Brazil and the United States signed an agreement in which the US committed to finance the construction of a large Brazilian steel plant (
Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional) in
Volta Redonda,
Rio de Janeiro, in exchange for permission to set up military bases and airports in the north and northeast of the country. The
German navy extended submarine warfare to Brazilian-flagged merchant ships, and the
Italian navy followed suit. However, Vargas did not declare war until 22 August, seven months after the attacks. On 28 January 1943, Vargas and US President
Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed at the
Natal Conference, to create the
Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB) in August, a year after the declaration of war. The
pracinhas, as FEB soldiers became known, were 25,000 in 1945, of an estimated 200,000. They fought in Italy in July 1944, and served from September to the end of the European conflict on 8 May 1945. The US and the UK invited Brazil to join the
occupation of Austria, but Brazil refused.
Decline Among the FEB soldiers were eight law students from the
University of São Paulo, who took part in peaceful demonstrations against Vargas such as the Silent March in which they paraded with black gags to symbolize the lack of freedom of expression. "We were called up as a punishment – as if it could be a punishment to serve Brazil!" wrote one student, Geraldo Vidigal. The role of these students in the war was to disarm landmines before the tanks got through. Vargas expressed concern about the future of the Estado Novo in his diary on 27 January 1942: An opponent of the Estado Novo, writer
Monteiro Lobato, was imprisoned after accusing Vargas of not allowing Brazilians to search for
oil. As World War II ended in 1945, pressures grew for redemocratization. José Américo de Almeida's interview with
Carlos Lacerda on 22 February 1945, published in Rio de Janeiro's
Correio da Manhã, symbolized the end of press censorship under the Estado Novo and the weakening and fall of the regime. Despite measures like setting a date for presidential elections on 28 May 1945 (2 December), amnesty for
Luís Carlos Prestes and other political prisoners, freedom of party organization and a commitment to elect a new
Constituent Assembly, pressure for Getúlio to resign remained strong. Vargas was deposed on 29 October 1945 by a military movement led by generals from his own ministry.
José Linhares' term Linhares stayed in office for three months before handing over power to
president-elect Eurico Gaspar Dutra. A valuable contribution to Eurico Dutra's electoral victory came from Hugo Borghi, who distributed thousands of pamphlets accusing candidate
Eduardo Gomes of saying: "I don't need the votes of the
marmiteiros". In fact, what Eduardo said, at the
Municipal Theater in Rio de Janeiro on 19 November, was: "I don't need the votes of these unemployed people who support the dictator to elect me president of the Republic". Linhares prepared the country for the return of the democratic order, replacing the stakeholders in the states by judiciary members, giving the new parliament constitution-making powers, extinguishing the Court of National Security, abolishing the state of emergency, provided in the 1937 Constitution, among other measures. Besides such transition measures, he sought to fight inflation and revoked anti-trust legislation (which were key on deposing Vargas). In December 1945,
elections were held for the presidency and the National Constituent Assembly. == Economy and infrastructure ==