What was the Brazilian Revolution of 1930?

Coffee with milk

For most of Brazil’s First Republic (1889–1930), the presidency passed back and forth between the two richest states: São Paulo, land of coffee, and Minas Gerais, land of dairy farms. Brazilians call it the politics of café com leite, coffee with milk. In 1929 President Washington Luís broke the deal by naming another man from São Paulo, Júlio Prestes, as his successor. Minas struck back. It formed the Liberal Alliance with Rio Grande do Sul and Paraíba and ran Rio Grande do Sul’s governor, Getúlio Vargas, for president, with Paraíba’s governor, João Pessoa, for vice president.

Then Wall Street crashed in October 1929, and the price of coffee, the crop that kept Brazil going, collapsed. On March 1, 1930, Prestes won the election. The vote was open, not secret, and there was fraud on both sides. Vargas seemed ready to accept defeat. The younger men of the Alliance were not.

A murder in Recife

On July 26, 1930, João Pessoa was shot dead at the Confeitaria Glória, a café on Rua Nova in Recife, by João Dantas, a lawyer from Paraíba. It is often said that the federal government ordered the killing. It did not. Dantas was Pessoa’s political and personal enemy: shortly before, the Paraíba police had raided his office and published his private letters. The Alliance made Pessoa a martyr anyway and blamed the government. Paraíba’s capital was renamed João Pessoa, and the state flag took the word with which he had refused to back Prestes: Nego, “I refuse.”

Half past four

On October 3, in the governor’s palace in Porto Alegre, Vargas opened his diary:

Half past four. The hour is approaching. I examine myself and feel the calm spirit of one who plays a decisive hand because he found no other dignified way out for his state.

At half past five the rebels seized the army headquarters. The revolt spread to Minas Gerais and the Northeast, and trains packed with soldiers from the south rolled north toward São Paulo. Everyone expected a great battle at Itararé, on São Paulo’s border with Paraná.

The battle that never was

It never came. On October 24, generals in Rio deposed Washington Luís to avoid a civil war, while crowds set fire to pro-government newspapers. Itararé became “the battle that never was,” and a humorist started signing himself the Baron of Itararé. The junta toyed with keeping power, but Vargas’s right hand, Oswaldo Aranha, flew to Rio and negotiated the handover. Prestes never took office and went into exile.

On October 31 Vargas arrived in Rio by train, in uniform and hat, and his soldiers kept a famous promise: they tied their horses to the obelisk on Avenida Rio Branco. On November 3, at the Catete palace, he took charge of a Provisional Government.

Revolution or coup?

The name stuck, and the change was real: the coffee-with-milk order was finished, and Vargas would stay in power for 15 years (Who was Getúlio Vargas?). But, as the historian Boris Fausto points out, the victory itself came from generals deposing a president in the capital. And the “provisional” government soon closed Congress, the state assemblies and the town councils by decree and sent its own appointees to run the states. São Paulo answered with rifles two years later, in the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932.