How did Getúlio Vargas die?

A journalist’s war

Vargas had ruled Brazil as a dictator until 1945, and in 1950 he set out to come back by the vote. Not everyone would accept it. On June 1, 1950, the journalist Carlos Lacerda wrote in his paper, the Tribuna da Imprensa, that Vargas must not be a candidate; if a candidate, must not be elected; if elected, must not take office; and if he took office, revolution should stop him from governing. Vargas won anyway, and Lacerda kept up the attack for four years.

The attack on Rua Tonelero

In the small hours of August 5, 1954, Lacerda came home to Rua Tonelero, in Copacabana, with his 15-year-old son and Major Rubens Vaz of the air force, who was acting as his escort. A gunman stepped out of the shadows and fired. Lacerda was hit in the foot. Major Vaz was killed.

The air force took over the investigation at its Galeão base, which the press soon called the Republic of Galeão. The trail led into the presidential palace: the inquiry named Gregório Fortunato, head of the president’s personal guard, as the man who ordered the attack. No evidence ever linked Vargas himself to the crime. But it had come from inside the Catete, and that was enough. The opposition spoke of a “sea of mud,” and the military began to demand his resignation.

The last hours

On August 22, army generals publicly called for him to resign. In the early hours of the 24th, the cabinet met at the Catete and proposed a way out: a leave of absence. Vargas accepted, on conditions. A few hours later word arrived that the generals wanted him gone for good.

That morning, Getúlio Vargas took his own life. He left a typed, signed letter and a handwritten note. No one can say what passes through another person’s mind in such an hour. What the record shows is the siege of those three weeks, and a letter that is, above all, a political text. Radio stations read it to the whole country within hours. It ends with the line the country kept: “I leave life to enter History.”

A country in the streets

Brazil stopped. In Rio, crowds attacked the offices of the Tribuna da Imprensa and the trucks of opposition newspapers, and Lacerda had to go into hiding. Tens of thousands of people filed past the coffin at the Catete. The coup that had seemed ready did not happen. Several historians argue that it was only postponed: it came ten years later, as What was the 1964 coup in Brazil? explains.

On August 26 he was buried in São Borja, the town in the far south where he had been born. To some in the crowd he was the father of the poor; to others, the dictator of the Estado Novo. At the graveside, his former labor minister João Goulart, then 35, unfolded the letter and read it aloud. The man himself is profiled in Who was Getúlio Vargas?

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