What was the Estado Novo in Brazil?

Portugal’s dictatorship under António de Oliveira Salazar used the same name, Estado Novo. This page is about Brazil’s, which lasted eight years.

A forged plot on the radio

On the night of September 30, 1937, with a presidential election three months away and Vargas barred from running by the Constitution of 1934, the government radio program Hora do Brasil announced that the army had uncovered a communist plan to seize power. The document was signed by one Cohen. Brazilians believed it because the memory was fresh: in November 1935, communist officers had risen in Natal, Recife and Rio, and the revolt had been crushed in days.

The Cohen Plan was a fake. It had been written by an army captain, Olímpio Mourão Filho, who ran the intelligence service of Integralist Action, a movement inspired by fascism. In 1945, General Góis Monteiro, who had released the document, revealed the fraud.

November 10, 1937

With fear in the air, Congress approved a state of war. On November 10 police surrounded the building, and that night Vargas went on the radio to present a new constitution, written by his justice minister, Francisco Campos. It was soon nicknamed the Polaca, “the Polish one,” for its likeness to Poland’s authoritarian constitution of 1935. One article did the essential work:

The Chamber of Deputies, the Federal Senate, the Legislative Assemblies of the States and the Municipal Councils are dissolved as of this date.

New elections were to wait for a plebiscite, under article 187. It never took place. Weeks later, at a ceremony in Rio, the flags of the states were burned on a pyre. From then on there would be only one flag.

Censors and a radio hour

In December 1939 a decree-law created the Department of Press and Propaganda, the DIP. It censored newspapers, radio, films and even samba lyrics, and hung Vargas’s portrait in schools and public offices. Every station carried the Hora do Brasil, a program that still airs under another name, A Voz do Brasil. The same regime also created the minimum wage and the labor code; that other face is weighed in Was Getúlio Vargas a dictator?

How it ended

World War II exposed the contradiction. From 1944 Brazilian troops fought fascism in Italy (What was the Brazilian Expeditionary Force?) while Brazil itself lived under a dictatorship. In 1943 politicians from Minas Gerais signed a manifesto saying that people who fight for other nations’ freedom can demand it at home. In 1945 censorship ended and elections were called.

Then came a twist. Luís Carlos Prestes, the communist leader whose companion the regime had handed to the Nazis, was freed in April 1945 after nine years in prison, and argued that Vargas should stay on to oversee a new constitution. Crowds of queremistas chanted “We want Getúlio.” On October 29, 1945, the generals surrounded the palace and deposed him. In December the voters chose General Eurico Dutra, the war minister of the whole Estado Novo, as president.