Who was Getúlio Vargas?

A gaúcho from the border

Getúlio Dornelles Vargas was born in 1882 in São Borja, a town in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, on the Argentine border. People from that state are called gaúchos, and he never stopped being one. He studied law in Porto Alegre, sat in the state assembly and in Congress, served as finance minister to President Washington Luís and in 1928 became governor of Rio Grande do Sul. Keep that detail in mind: two years later he would overthrow the president he had served.

Four roads to power

Was Vargas elected? Sometimes. He reached power, or held on to it, in four different ways:

• 1930, revolution. He lost the election of March 1, 1930, to Júlio Prestes, then led the revolt that toppled Washington Luís and took charge of a Provisional Government on November 3. The story is in What was the Brazilian Revolution of 1930?
• 1934, an indirect vote. The day after a Constituent Assembly passed a new constitution, it elected him president, with a term ending in 1938 and no re-election.
• 1937, a coup. Weeks before the vote that should have chosen his successor, he closed Congress and founded the Estado Novo, the “New State.”
• 1950, the ballot box. Five years after being deposed, he won the presidency with 48.7% of the vote, against Eduardo Gomes and Cristiano Machado, and took office on January 31, 1951.

Fifteen years, three ways of governing

From 1930 to 1945 he ruled first by decree, then with an elected Congress under the Constitution of 1934, and finally with no Congress at all. In those years he faced an armed uprising by São Paulo, signed the Electoral Code that gave women the vote nationwide, created the minimum wage in 1940 and the labor code known as the CLT in 1943, and sent Brazilian soldiers to fight in Italy in World War II, as What was the Brazilian Expeditionary Force? tells. The same government censored newspapers and radio and jailed opponents without trial.

Admirers called him the “father of the poor”; opponents called him a dictator. Historians say he was both at once, and the evidence for each is laid out in Was Getúlio Vargas a dictator?

Deposed, then elected

On October 29, 1945, the generals surrounded the palace and removed him. He went home to São Borja. Weeks later, without campaigning, he was elected senator for two states and deputy for several more. His comeback in 1950 inspired a carnival hit, “Put the old man’s picture back up,” and his second term founded Petrobras, the state oil company, in 1953. In August 1954, cornered by the crisis that followed an attack on the opposition journalist Carlos Lacerda, he took his own life at the Catete palace in Rio, aged 72. That month is told in How did Getúlio Vargas die?

What he left in writing

Vargas kept a diary from 1930 to 1942. His family held on to it, and the CPDOC, the history archive of the Fundação Getulio Vargas, published it in 1995. He was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters and took his seat in 1943, in the middle of his dictatorship. And he left a final typed letter, the carta-testamento, which closes with the line the country kept: “I leave life to enter History.”