Vargas-era Brazil

The period matters because modern Brazil was assembled inside it. The labour code of 1943, the steelworks at Volta Redonda, the state oil and ore agencies, the professional civil service, the national statistics institute, the minimum wage and the industrial working class all date from these fifteen years. So does the political vocabulary that survived the dictatorship: trabalhismo, the labour-based populism that carried Vargas back to power in 1950 and shaped every Brazilian election until 1964. Brazil also fought in the Second World War under this regime, sending 25,000 soldiers to Italy — the only South American country to send troops overseas — while its own government imprisoned without trial and banned political parties at home.

The label "unitary state" needs a word of explanation, because it is the map's category rather than anything Brazilians called their country. The 1937 constitution still described Brazil as a federation of states, and the states survived as administrative units. In practice the Estado Novo was unitary: interventors appointed from Rio governed the states, state legislatures and state flags were abolished, and the president exercised all legislative power by decree-law because the Congress that might have checked him never met. The dataset files the regime under a single centralised polity for that reason. Anyone looking for a country formally renamed "the Unitary State of Brazil" will not find one.

At a glance

How did the Old Republic collapse?

The First Republic that Vargas overthrew was a federation of state machines, not a democracy of citizens. Under the constitution of 1891 the states elected their own governors, taxed exports and kept their own military police, and the presidency alternated between São Paulo, the coffee state, and Minas Gerais, the dairy and cattle state — the arrangement Brazilians call café com leite, coffee with milk. Voting was open, illiterates could not vote, and the results in the interior were negotiated with the coronéis who controlled the land and the electorate. Between 1889 and 1930 no national election was lost by the incumbent alliance.

The 1929 crash broke that machine at its weakest point. Coffee had supplied about 71 per cent of Brazil's export earnings in 1929, and the price of a pound of Santos coffee fell from roughly 22 cents to eight cents between 1929 and 1931, taking the customs revenue that financed the federal government with it. The coffee valorisation programme, under which the state bought surplus crops to hold up prices, collapsed when foreign loans dried up. Washington Luís's government tried to defend convertibility for foreign creditors, which satisfied nobody: the planters wanted credit, the urban middle class wanted protection, and the army wanted a government that would not use it against striking workers.

The election of 1 March 1930 made the break personal. Washington Luís broke the coffee-with-milk rotation by naming Júlio Prestes, the governor of São Paulo, as his successor instead of a Minas candidate. Minas, Paraíba and Rio Grande do Sul formed a Liberal Alliance and put up Vargas, a Rio Grande cattle rancher and lawyer who had been finance minister and governor of his state, with João Pessoa of Paraíba as his running mate. Prestes won. The Alliance denounced the result as fraudulent, and then spent four months doing nothing — until João Pessoa was shot dead in a Recife confectioner's shop on 26 July 1930 by a political enemy. The murder turned a disputed election into a funeral, and the funeral into a conspiracy.

The revolution began at half past five in the afternoon of 3 October 1930 in Rio Grande do Sul, where the state brigade and dissident army officers took Porto Alegre. Columns moved north through Santa Catarina and Paraná and along the north-east coast. What decided the outcome was not the fighting but the capital: on 24 October a junta of senior generals — Tasso Fragoso, Mena Barreto and the admiral Isaías de Noronha — deposed Washington Luís, and on 3 November they handed power to Vargas, who arrived by train from the south. The old republic ended in three weeks with a few hundred to a thousand dead, most of them in the south. It was less a revolution than a coup inside the army that the rebel columns made inevitable.

What did the provisional government change?

Vargas governed for four years without a constitution. The 1891 charter was abrogated, the National Congress dissolved, and the states placed under interventores — federal officials with the powers of governors, most of them tenentes or allies of the new regime. The old state machines were decapitated: São Paulo's Republican Party, Minas's and Rio Grande's Federalist machines lost their federal patronage, and with it their grip on their own interiors. This was the single most consequential act of the period. Everything later described as centralisation began as an emergency measure taken by a government with no legal basis.

The provisional government legislated at speed and by decree. It created a Ministry of Labour, Industry and Commerce in November 1930 and gave it power to recognise trade unions; a decree of March 1931 required a single union for each category in each locality, licensed by the ministry and barred from political activity; the compulsory union levy that financed the system came in 1940. It reformed the civil service, created the first national statistics machinery that would produce the 1940 census, and in February 1932 issued an electoral code with a secret ballot, proportional representation and votes for women — both a genuine liberal reform and a calculation, since a new electorate would weaken the old state bosses. It also faced down the first serious challenge to its authority, in São Paulo.

The regime's intellectual centre of gravity was the tenentes, the young officers who had revolted at Copacabana in 1922 and ridden the Prestes Column through the interior in the 1920s. They wanted a strong state, land reform, nationalisation of mines and a labour code. They founded the 3rd of October Club in February 1931 and used it to veto appointments. Their influence peaked in 1932 and declined after the Paulista war, when Vargas chose to conciliate the coffee planters rather than the lieutenants; the club dissolved in 1935. Vargas survived by never letting any one faction own him, and by making each of them believe he was their instrument.

Why did São Paulo take up arms in 1932?

São Paulo had lost the presidency, its federal patronage and its preferred economic policy in a single week, and it was asked to accept a governor imposed from Rio — first the tenente João Alberto, then a civilian, Pedro de Toledo, who was not the man the state's elite wanted. The immediate trigger was a demonstration in the city centre on 23 May 1932, when police fired on a crowd and killed four students whose surnames — Martins, Miragaia, Dráusio and Camargo — gave the movement its name, MMDC. A fifth, Alvarenga, died of his wounds months later.

The revolt began on 9 July 1932. São Paulo's politicians expected Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul to join them, which would have made it a constitutional front against Vargas rather than a regional rebellion; neither state moved, and the federal government was free to concentrate troops. São Paulo improvised an army of volunteers and factory workers, financed it by public subscription, and held the Paraíba valley for nearly three months, with heavy fighting around the Mantiqueira tunnel and the passes into Minas. The federal blockade cut the state off from imports of arms and fuel. The surrender came on 2 October, with some units still fighting two days later.

The casualty figures are softer than they look in most accounts. The official count is 934 dead; unofficial estimates run to about 2,200; the totals printed in reference works — 2,500 dead on one side, 1,050 on the other — are not reconcilable with either. What is clear is that this was the largest internal war in Brazil since the Paraguayan War, fought with artillery and aircraft over a territory containing a third of the country's industry.

Militarily São Paulo lost; politically it won most of what it had asked for. Vargas granted an amnesty, replaced the interventor with a civilian acceptable to the state, and called elections to a constituent assembly for 3 May 1933. He also learned the lesson that shaped the rest of the decade: the army would defend him against regional elites, so the army had to be kept content, and the elite had to be split rather than confronted all at once. The 1932 war is commemorated in São Paulo as the state's founding civic act, with an obelisk and an eternal flame on the site of the MMDC killings; the cult matters politically, because it fixes the Paulista elite's self-image as the defender of legality against a dictator, a role it did not play in 1937, when the dictatorship was installed without a shot from São Paulo.

What did the 1934 constitution promise?

The Constituent Assembly elected in May 1933 was a government-majority body — Vargas's interventors delivered most state delegations — but it was not a rubber stamp, and it produced the most progressive constitution Brazil had yet had. Promulgated on 16 July 1934, it kept the federation and the presidential system, restored the Chamber and Senate, confirmed the secret ballot and women's suffrage, and added a whole title on the "economic and social order" that promised a minimum wage, an eight-hour day, weekly rest, paid holidays, maternity protection, workmen's compensation, free primary education and labour courts. It declared mining deposits and waterfalls subject to federal authorisation, subordinated property to its "social function", and gave the federal government power to plan the economy and to nationalise "industries indispensable to national defence".

It also, crucially, left room for more than one union per category, and it preserved substantial state autonomy. Vargas disliked it for exactly those reasons, and said so later: a "hasty constitutionalisation, out of time", which repeated the mistakes of 1891 and added "provisions of pure legal invention". On 17 July the assembly elected him president for a four-year term, 175 votes to 59 for Borges de Medeiros, with the remaining votes scattered over minor candidates. He was barred from immediate re-election, which meant that from the day he took the oath his successor was the central political question of Brazil.

The years 1934 to 1937 were a three-cornered fight. On the right, the Integralist Action (AIB), founded by Plínio Salgado in 1932 and modelled on Italian fascism, marched in green shirts, used the Greek sigma as its symbol, recruited heavily among German and Italian immigrants and claimed hundreds of thousands of members. On the left, a broad front of communists, socialists, progressive officers and intellectuals formed the National Liberation Alliance in March 1935. In the centre, Vargas manoeuvred, using each extreme to frighten the other and both to frighten the Congress into granting him emergency powers. The 1934 constitution did not fail because it was unworkable. It failed because the president had no intention of leaving office under it, and because the two mass movements gave him the pretext he needed.

How did the communist rising of 1935 change the regime?

The National Liberation Alliance was founded in Rio de Janeiro on 12 March 1935 and publicly launched at the end of the month. It was a popular front, not a party: its programme demanded the cancellation of foreign debts, nationalisation of foreign companies, land for the landless, civil liberties and a minimum wage, and its honorary president was Luís Carlos Prestes, the army engineer who had led the Prestes Column and had joined the Communist Party in exile. It grew fast — some 1,600 local branches within months — and it did so in the open, with rallies and a newspaper, which is what made it dangerous to a government that had no party of its own.

The government moved in April, pushing a National Security Law through Congress that defined crimes against the political and social order and created a fast-track military justice for them. On 11 July 1935 a decree closed every ANL branch for six months on the ground of "subversive activity", and the organisation went underground. Its military wing, run by the Communist Party with Comintern money and a handful of foreign agents including Prestes's German wife Olga Benário, had been planning an armed rising in the garrisons for months, against the better judgement of much of the party.

The rising came in November 1935, and it came early and in the wrong order. On 23 November the 21st Battalion of Caçadores rose in Natal, took the city and held it for four days under a "popular revolutionary government" — the only place where the revolt briefly worked. On 24 November the 29th Battalion rose in Recife and was suppressed within a day. On the morning of 27 November the Third Infantry Regiment and the Aviation School rose in Rio de Janeiro; loyal troops and the police, forewarned, isolated and crushed them in a few hours. Well over a hundred people died across the three cities. Prestes was arrested in March 1936; Olga Benário, pregnant, was deported to Germany in 1936 and died in the Bernburg gas chamber in 1942.

The consequences were far larger than the event. Congress, frightened, voted the government a state of siege, then a National Security Tribunal with power to try civilians by closed procedure, then a series of laws that transferred emergency powers to the executive on a permanent footing. Thousands of people were arrested, including the novelist Graciliano Ramos, whose Memórias do Cárcere is the best account of what the prisons were like. The army purged its own ranks. And the government acquired the weapon it used two years later: the claim that Brazil was permanently on the edge of a communist insurrection, which made any limitation on the president's powers look like disarmament in the face of an enemy already inside the gates.

How did Vargas make himself dictator in 1937?

The presidential election was set for 3 January 1938, and three candidates were campaigning: José Américo de Almeida, a former minister; Armando de Sales Oliveira, the Paulista who had been federal interventor in São Paulo after 1932; and Plínio Salgado for the Integralists. Vargas was barred from standing. None of the three was a radical, and the government's own preferred outcome — an amenable successor who would let Vargas continue to pull the strings — looked unlikely to survive a real contest.

On 30 September 1937 the War Ministry put a document on the state radio programme, the Hora do Brasil, called the Cohen Plan. It purported to be a communist blueprint for a rising, complete with orders to burn churches, massacre families and impose a soviet. It was a forgery, drafted in the army's own information section by an Integralist captain, Olímpio Mourão Filho, from material lifted from a Comintern document about methods of guerrilla warfare; the "Cohen" of the title was a misspelling of Béla Kun. Congress declared a state of war on 1 October. On 10 November, troops surrounded the Chamber of Deputies, and Vargas went on the radio to announce that Brazil stood on the brink of civil war and that he had therefore dissolved Congress and granted the country a new constitution.

The constitution of 10 November 1937 was drafted by Francisco Campos, the jurist who had also written the 1932 electoral code and who would go on to draft the institutional acts of the 1964 dictatorship. It was modelled closely on Józef Piłsudski's April Constitution of Poland, which is why it was nicknamed a polaca, "the Polish one". It concentrated all authority in the president, gave him a six-year term and the right to appoint and dismiss state interventors, allowed the death penalty, abolished the states' political autonomy, removed the right to strike, permitted the government to dismiss officials for "incompatibility" with the regime, and provided for a plebiscite and a new Congress that were never held. Article 180 allowed the president to issue decree-laws whenever Congress was not sitting; since Congress never sat again until 1946, the whole legislative output of the Estado Novo was issued by decree.

The dictatorship then dressed itself in the symbols of unity. On 2 December 1937 a decree dissolved every political party, including the Integralists who had helped frighten Congress into submission. In the same weeks — sources give 27 November, others the first days of December — the flags of the states were burned in a ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, after which only the national flag, arms and anthem were permitted. Six months later, on the night of 10–11 May 1938, Integralist militants attacked the Guanabara Palace in an attempt to overthrow Vargas; the guard held, and the regime used the failure to justify a personal bodyguard, nicknamed the "Black Guard", and a further purge.

How was the Estado Novo governed?

Brazil under the Estado Novo was administered by decree-laws, interventors and federal agencies. The states kept their boundaries and their administrations, but their governors were federal appointees with both executive and legislative power in their states; their legislatures were closed; their flags, anthems and coats of arms were abolished. In 1938 a new territorial law reorganised the municipalities, and in 1943 six federal territories — Amapá, Rio Branco, Guaporé, Ponta Porã, Iguaçu and Fernando de Noronha — were carved out of frontier regions and placed directly under Rio. The word "federation" stayed in the constitution and in the country's name; the practice was unitary government from the Guanabara.

The administrative arm of the regime was the Administrative Department of the Public Service, created in 1938, which introduced competitive examinations, a career structure and a budget office, and which produced a professional civil service on a scale Brazil had not had before. Alongside it came a National Petroleum Council in 1938, a National Steel Council, a National Gasogen Commission to keep cars running on charcoal during the fuel shortages, and the statistical apparatus that carried out the 1940 census. Vargas described his interior policy as the Marcha para o Oeste, the March to the West: settlement of the Amazon and the central plateaux, highways, agricultural colonies, and the rhetorical claim that Brazil's empty interior was its future. Parts of it were real — the Goiás and Amazon colonisation schemes, the Rio Branco and Guaporé territories — and much of it was publicity.

Publicity was an industry. The Department of Press and Propaganda, created by decree-law on 27 December 1939, censored newspapers, radio and film before publication, ran the Hora do Brasil and the official newsreel, promoted Vargas's birthday and the May Day ceremonies, and built the cult of the president as o pai dos pobres, the father of the poor. Censorship was not total — opposition newspapers survived, O Estado de S. Paulo was taken over from its owners and run by an interventor, and foreign correspondents reported fairly freely — but no newspaper could print an attack on the regime's core. The political police, under Filinto Müller in the Federal District, and the state departments of political and social order ran a system of arrests, beatings and torture documented by prisoners, by the foreign press and, after 1945, by the first researchers allowed into the archives.

The regime's other pillar was the army. Vargas never created a party or a militia of his own, and he never attempted to subordinate the officer corps, as Mussolini and Hitler had done with theirs. He paid it: promotions, new equipment, American instructors and Lend-Lease supplies, and the promise of a steel industry to make munitions. The army's senior generals — Eurico Gaspar Dutra at the War Ministry, Pedro Aurélio de Góis Monteiro at the General Staff — were the regime's guarantors and, in the end, its executioners. That arrangement explains both the durability of the Estado Novo and its peculiar ending: the same institution that kept Vargas in power in 1937 and 1938 removed him in 1945 when he became an embarrassment.

What did corporatism do for Brazilian workers?

The Estado Novo's claim was that the state stood above the class struggle and would organise both capital and labour into a single national effort. This was not an original Brazilian invention: it came from Catholic social doctrine, from the Italian Carta del Lavoro of 1927 and from Salazar's Portugal, whose own Estado Novo gave the Brazilian regime its name. Its Brazilian theorist was Francisco José de Oliveira Viana, who argued that a weak state and an unorganised people needed a paternal administration to discipline both landlords and workers. The instruments were the licensed union, the labour court and the labour code.

The union system was built between 1930 and 1943 in layers. The decree of March 1931 recognised one union per category per locality, subject to ministerial approval; the 1934 constitution opened the door to plural unions and the right to strike; the 1937 constitution shut it again; and the decree-law of 1940 created the imposto sindical, a compulsory levy on every worker in a category, collected by the state and paid to the recognised union. The effect was to make union officials financially dependent on the government, and to make the union's function the delivery of benefits rather than the organisation of conflict. Brazilians call the result peleguismo, after the union leaders who acted as brokers between the ministry and the rank and file.

The benefits were real. A minimum wage was instituted by decree-law on 1 May 1940, fixed region by region at a level meant to cover food, housing, clothing, hygiene and transport, and raised in 1943. The labour courts were created in 1939 and installed in 1941, giving individual workers a forum in which to sue for unpaid wages and wrongful dismissal. Paid holidays, the eight-hour day, weekly rest, overtime rates, maternity leave, the employment record book that proved a worker's service, and stability of tenure after ten years in the same job all became enforceable entitlements, not charitable concessions. On 1 May 1943 Vargas signed the Consolidation of Labour Laws — the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho, or CLT — a single code of 900-odd articles that gathered and systematised everything passed since 1930. It came into force on 10 November 1943, the sixth anniversary of the coup, and it is still, in amended form, the basis of Brazilian labour law.

The limits were equally real, and they are where the mythology is thickest. Article 7 of the CLT excluded domestic servants, rural workers and public employees from its protection. In 1940 that meant the majority of the workforce: Brazil was a country of sharecroppers, colonos, cane cutters and housemaids, and none of them got the eight-hour day. The code also banned strikes in public services, subjected others to compulsory arbitration and made the union the only lawful channel for a grievance. The CLT was a charter of citizenship for the urban worker and a charter of exclusion for everyone else, and the distinction mapped onto race and region: the industrial working class that the code protected was disproportionately white and southern, the rural workforce it ignored disproportionately black and north-eastern. That bifurcation is one of the deepest structural facts of modern Brazil.

Whether Vargas "gave" workers their rights is the central historiographical quarrel of the period. The older account, built partly by the regime's own propaganda, presents the labour laws as a gift from a paternal president to a grateful people. Since the 1980s historians — Ângela de Castro Gomes above all — have shown that the rights were fought for, that Brazilian workers had been organising and striking since the 1890s, that many of the protections were drafted under pressure from below, and that the regime's innovation was less the content of the laws than the machinery that channelled workers' demands through the state. The relationship was a bargain, not a donation: rights in exchange for discipline, unions in exchange for loyalty, and a president who presented himself as the only man who could deliver both.

How did Brazil industrialise under the Estado Novo?

The Depression did not create Brazilian industry, but it changed who ran it. Between 1929 and 1933 the bottom fell out of the export economy, the exchange rate collapsed and the government responded with controls on foreign exchange, high tariffs and a coffee defence programme that bought and burned surplus crops — about 78 million bags between 1931 and 1944, roughly three years of world consumption. Keeping the coffee sector solvent — the export economy the empire had built on slavery and railways — preserved the domestic market that São Paulo's factories supplied, and the scarcity of imports gave those factories a captive demand. Industry's share of Brazilian GDP rose from 16.5 per cent in 1930 to 20.8 per cent in 1940, and the manufacturing belt of greater São Paulo grew faster than any other part of the economy.

The state's own contribution was concentrated in the sectors private capital could not finance: steel, ore, electric power, oil, motor vehicles. The centrepiece was the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional at Volta Redonda, on the Paraíba do Sul river between Rio and São Paulo, created by decree in January 1941 and incorporated on 9 April 1941. Its financing is worth stating precisely, because the usual summary — "American money built Brazil's steel industry" — compresses a longer negotiation. The Export-Import Bank of Washington lent the company $20 million under a contract of 22 May 1941, secured by a Brazilian Treasury guarantee; a further $5 million was added in December 1941, and the facility was consolidated at $45 million in June 1943, covering equipment, transport and insurance. The first blast furnace was lit in 1946, under Vargas's successor, and the rolling mills came on stream over the following years. The plant gave Brazil its first integrated steelworks and became the symbolic proof that a state could do what the market would not.

Around it came the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, created in 1942 to mine and export the iron ore of Itabira, the National Motor Factory in the same year, and the São Francisco hydroelectric company (CHESF) in 1945. The National Petroleum Council and the National Steel Council, both founded before the war, gave the state its first planning bodies for oil and steel, and in 1942 a monetary reform replaced the mil-réis with the cruzeiro at a thousand to one. Vargas's rhetoric for the occasion was unambiguous: Brazil would cease to be "a semi-colonial, agrarian country, importer of manufactures and exporter of raw materials" and would shoulder "the responsibilities of an autonomous industrial life". The claim was half true. Steel, ore and power were genuinely built. Consumer goods were already being made. But the machine tools, the patents, the engineers and much of the capital remained foreign, and the state that financed heavy industry did so by taxing exports, controlling imports and inflating, which transferred income from the countryside to the cities and from the poor to the organised.

The social cost was regional. The north-east, whose sugar and cotton economy had been in relative decline since the 1870s, received little of the new investment and lost population to São Paulo; the 1950 census would show the migration stream that the drought of 1951 turned into a flood. The Amazon, which had briefly enriched Manaus and the Bolivian borderlands in the rubber boom before 1914, got a second and brutal boom from wartime rubber — the "rubber soldiers", some 50,000 nordestinos shipped upriver under military-style contracts, thousands of whom never came home — and then nothing. Industrialisation under the Estado Novo was real, and it was also spatially and socially narrow in a way that shaped Brazilian politics for the next half-century.

Why did Brazil go to war in 1942?

Brazil spent the first two years of the European war selling to both sides, while its rival for influence in the Plata basin, Argentina, and the buffer states of Uruguay and Paraguay stayed neutral. Germany had been a major market for Brazilian cotton and coffee, and the country had large German, Italian and Japanese communities; Vargas's own sympathies in 1939–41 were ambiguous enough that the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, despaired of him. What changed the calculation was not ideology but geography and arms. The north-east shoulder of Brazil — Natal, Recife, Belém — was the shortest air route from the United States to Africa and the Middle East, and after the fall of France and the North African campaign began, the Americans were prepared to pay handsomely for it.

The bidding war had been running for two years by the time Vargas and Roosevelt met on the Potenji river in January 1943. The United States financed the Volta Redonda steelworks, extended Lend-Lease credits of more than $370 million, built airfields at Natal and Recife, and pressed Brazil to break with the Axis. Vargas broke diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy and Japan on 28 January 1942, at the Rio de Janeiro conference of American foreign ministers, and allowed the airfields to be used. The Germans and Italians treated this as belligerency in fact. Between February and August 1942 German and Italian submarines sank more than thirty Brazilian merchant ships, with the loss of hundreds of seamen and passengers.

The attack that made war unavoidable came in mid-August. Between 15 and 19 August the submarine U-507, under Korvettenkapitän Harro Schacht, sank five coasters and a small boat off the coasts of Bahia and Sergipe; 607 people died, many of them women and children, and photographs of the bodies on the beaches were printed across the country. Crowds attacked German businesses in Rio and São Paulo. On 22 August the cabinet declared a state of belligerency against Germany and Italy; the formal decree recognising a state of war, number 10.358, was issued on 31 August. Brazil did not declare war on Japan.

The army that was sent to fight was improvised, and its creation was a political act as much as a military one. The Brazilian Expeditionary Force — the Força Expedicionária Brasileira, FEB — was authorised in 1943 after the Natal meeting between Vargas and Roosevelt, and it grew from a planned army corps of 100,000 to a single reinforced infantry division of about 25,000, with a fighter squadron of the air force and a naval escort force that had already been fighting U-boats in the South Atlantic. Its joke-name, the "smoking snakes" (cobras fumantes), came from a Brazilian saying that something would happen "when the snake smokes" — the point being that Brazil would never fight in Europe. The snake appeared smoking a pipe on the FEB's shoulder patch.

The first echelon sailed on 2 July 1944 and reached Naples on 16 July. The Brazilians were attached to the United States Fifth Army and fought in the Apennines through the autumn and winter: Massarosa, Camaiore, Monte Prano, then the endless attempts on Monte Castello, which finally fell in February 1945 after four assaults, and then the spring offensive — Montese, taken on 14 April against heavy counter-battery fire, and Collecchio and Fornovo at the end of April, where the division enveloped and captured more than 13,000 German and Italian troops, including the whole of the 148th Infantry Division. Total Axis prisoners taken by the FEB came to about 20,500. Brazilian deaths were 948 across the three services, the figure most often cited in the literature; other counts give roughly 450 killed in action in Italy and a larger total once wounds, illness and accidents are added. The air force's 1st Fighter Group flew 445 missions out of Tarquinia in P-47s and was awarded a United States presidential unit citation in 1986.

The political effect at home was corrosive. An authoritarian regime that censored its press, imprisoned its opponents and had borrowed its constitution from Piłsudski's Poland was fighting, in the name of the Four Freedoms, alongside the democracies — and Brazilian soldiers in Italy could see that the Italians had overthrown Mussolini while Brazilians had not overthrown Vargas. The FEB's officers included law students who had marched against the dictatorship and had been conscripted as a punishment, and the returning troops were feted as democrats. The contradiction did not by itself bring the regime down, but it made the regime's own legitimising language unusable.

How did the Estado Novo fall?

The first crack was elite defection. On 24 October 1943 a group of Minas Gerais politicians and professionals circulated a Manifesto dos Mineiros, printed clandestinely in 50,000 copies, demanding the restoration of constitutional government; the signatories were sacked from public office, which told them what kind of regime they were dealing with. In February 1945 an interview with José Américo de Almeida in the Correio da Manhã, arranged by the journalist Carlos Lacerda, appeared without censorship and became the signal that the press would no longer be silent. The war in Europe was ending; the censorship that had been justified by the war could not survive it.

Vargas tried to manage the transition rather than resist it. In May 1945 he decreed elections for 2 December, amnestied political prisoners including Prestes, legalised parties and promised a constituent assembly. He also sponsored two parties of his own: the Social Democratic Party (PSD), built out of the state machines and the interventors, and the Brazilian Labour Party (PTB), built out of the unions and the Ministry of Labour. And he flirted with queremismo — the campaign whose slogan was "We want Getúlio" — which proposed that he should stay in office, or return by direct election, with a new constitution. To the army, that looked like a plan to reverse the whole transition.

The coup came on 29 October 1945. It was led by generals from Vargas's own War Ministry, above all Góis Monteiro, and its immediate pretext was the appointment of Vargas's brother Benjamim as chief of police of the Federal District. Vargas did not resist; he resigned, and the presidency passed to José Linhares, the president of the Supreme Court, because the 1937 constitution had no vice-president. In the election of 2 December 1945 General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, the PSD candidate and Vargas's former war minister, took 55.4 per cent of the vote against the UDN's Eduardo Gomes. A new constitution was promulgated on 18 September 1946, restoring the federation, a bicameral Congress, civil liberties and a five-year presidential term. The Estado Novo was over, but its bureaucracy, its labour code, its steelworks, its unions and its two new parties were not.

Why did Vargas come back, and how did it end?

Vargas did not retire. He had been elected senator for Rio Grande do Sul in 1945, and from that seat he built the PTB into a national machine and campaigned for five years as the man who had given workers their rights and been driven out by the generals. In the presidential election of 3 October 1950 he stood for the PTB and the Social Progressive Party and won with 3,849,040 votes, 48.7 per cent, against 29.7 per cent for Eduardo Gomes and 21.5 per cent for Cristiano Machado. He took office on 31 January 1951, at the head of a coalition that had no majority in Congress and no control over prices.

His second presidency was nationalist in economics and improvised in politics. The National Bank for Economic and Social Development was created in 1952 to finance infrastructure, the Banco do Nordeste in the same year, and in 1953, after the "Oil is ours" campaign, Law 2.004 created Petrobras and gave the state a monopoly of prospecting and refining. A doubling of the minimum wage in 1954 — a 100 per cent readjustment that his labour minister, João Goulart, had pressed for and that cost Goulart his post when the army objected — put real money into workers' pockets and confirmed the opposition's fear that Vargas would build a personal following on the labour vote. Inflation ran at double digits throughout, and the cost of living was the opposition's strongest weapon. The press, led by Lacerda's Tribuna da Imprensa, accused the government of corruption daily.

The end came through a shooting. On 5 August 1954 gunmen attached to Vargas's personal guard fired on Lacerda outside his flat in Copacabana and killed an air force officer, Major Rubens Florentino Vaz. The air force ran its own inquiry, the guard's chief, Gregório Fortunato, was arrested, and the trail led into the presidential palace. On 24 August, after a cabinet meeting at which the army and air force demanded his resignation, Vargas shot himself in his bedroom at the Catete Palace. He left a letter, the Carta Testamento, whose last line — "serenely I take the first step on the road to eternity and leave life to enter history" — was read out on the radio that night and reprinted everywhere the next morning. His funeral was attended by crowds that turned on the offices of the opposition newspapers; Lacerda fled the country.

The suicide did what his presidency had not: it fixed Vargas in Brazilian memory as the martyr of the poor and the victim of an ungrateful elite, and it discredited the coalition that had been preparing to remove him. His heir, João Goulart, inherited the PTB and the labour vote, and the fear that he would mobilise it in the same way was one of the arguments used for the coup of 1964. The institutions Vargas built — the CLT, the state banks, Petrobras, the University of Brazil, the interventionist state — survived the 1964 regime, the return to democracy in 1985 and, in amended form, the constitution of 1988. Modern Brazilian politics is still, in a sense, an argument about him.

Common myths about Vargas-era Brazil

Timeline of Vargas-era Brazil

What the map shows next

At 1932 on the map Brazil is drawn as a federation of twenty states, each with its own flag, its own military police and its own political machine, and the federal government in Rio is still feeling its way after the revolution. At 1937 on the map the outline on the screen is identical and the constitution behind it is not: the coup of 10 November closes the state legislatures, abolishes the state flags and hands the whole country to a president who legislates by decree. The difference between those two frames is the argument of this entry.

At 1942 on the map the war arrives: the north-east airfields at Natal and Recife become part of the Allied supply line, Brazilian ships are being sunk off the coast, and the steelworks at Volta Redonda is rising to supply the war and the peace after it. At 1945 on the map the territory is unchanged and the regime is not — the army that made the Estado Novo has ended it, and the next entries in this atlas, the military regime of 1964 and the republic of 1988, are arguments about what to do with Vargas's inheritance.