08/24/2024 – 4:04
As president, he modernized the Brazilian state and institutionalized labor rights; as a dictator and autocrat, he trampled on human rights and laid the foundations for a political paternalism that persists to this day. Around 7:30 a.m. on August 24, 1954, 70 years ago, then-president Getúlio Vargas took his own life. He was in his quarters at the Catete Palace, then the seat of the federal government in Rio, and at the age of 72, he was experiencing an intense crisis in his second term in office – to which he had returned in 1951, elected by direct vote, after the dictatorial period known as the Estado Novo (1930-1945).
From the organization of labor relations to the creation of the public institutional machine, Vargas left a legacy that, in part, still guides the administrative spheres of Brazil today. In addition, his charismatic image as the “father of the poor” and his much criticized populist style of governing still inspire a segment of politics prone to the electoral exploitation of social ills.
From the legacy left by Vargas, historian and professor at the Federal University of São Carlos (Ufscar) Marco Antonio Villa highlights the modernization of labor relations, with the creation of the Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT), and the presence of the State in the economy.
Author of works such as Um País Chamado Brasil, the researcher argues that, in the 1930s, Vargasism meant the “modernization of the Brazilian State”. “You can say that the modern Brazilian State was born there, with the structuring of a State machine, with the construction of a national project and new foundations that were completely different from the first Republic.”
In addition to the CLT, Vargas created organizations such as the then Ministry of Labor, Industry and Commerce, and the Ministry of Education and Health. He also founded the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN). During his second term in office, the president created the National Research Council, later renamed the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and the state-owned oil company Petrobras and the electricity company Eletrobras.
“We cannot forget that Vargas’ legacy is enormous. He was largely responsible for introducing Brazil to the process involving large-scale international industry, especially steel and oil,” says sociologist Paulo Niccoli Ramirez, professor at the São Paulo School of Sociology Foundation (FESPSP) and the Higher School of Advertising and Marketing (ESPM).
“I consider the most important aspect of Vargas’ experience in leading the Brazilian State to be the effort to achieve relative autonomy in Brazil’s insertion into the global economy, both in the 1930s and in the 1950s,” explains historian Paulo Henrique Martinez, professor at the São Paulo State University (Unesp).
For him, this autonomy was marked by the “constitution of a dynamic industrial park and minimally organized and coordinated public administration”.
Historian Isabel Bilhão, a professor at the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), highlights labor legislation as one of Vargas’ main legacies, due to the set of laws that “brought together and consolidated at a national level the protections and guarantees for workers that had been established since the 1920s, as a result of workers’ mobilizations and struggles.”
Bilhão mentions the right to vacation and retirement, as well as “the establishment of a national minimum wage in equality for men and women.” “In my understanding, this legislation is fundamental not only because it recognizes rights and guarantees, but also because it becomes an instrument so that workers can, through their unions, access the recently created Labor Court.”
Rise to power
Born in the rural area of São Borja, in Rio Grande do Sul, Getúlio Dorneles Vargas served in the Army in his youth and later graduated in law from the Faculdade Livre de Direito de Porto Alegre, now the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). From 1909 onwards, he had a long political career: he was a state and federal deputy, governor of Rio Grande do Sul, finance minister and senator.
He became President in 1930 through a coup d’état, after losing the election to Júlio Prestes (1882-1946) from São Paulo and leading the group that accused the system of fraud. He called his government provisional until 1934, when he remained in office after winning an election called by himself. In 1937 he staged a self-coup, inaugurating the dictatorial period known as the Estado Novo.
Threatened with deposition, he resigned in 1945. He returned to power through a vote after winning the 1950 election.
Historical stains
But experts also point out that Vargas has a negative legacy, mainly due to the fact that his first term in power was a dictatorial regime. “The most striking thing, in my opinion, is the association between dictatorships and the achievement of social rights,” says Bilhão. “As if social rights were a concession granted by dictatorial governments, and not the result of the efforts of several generations of workers.”
In the historian’s view, the “regrettable” idea began with Vargas, “reinforced by the civil-military regime from 1964 onwards”, that “things worked during the dictatorship”.
Sociologist Ramirez adds that the Vargas dictatorship also used instruments of censorship and propaganda control.
“In terms of human rights, it was a disaster,” adds Villa. “It is a little-studied issue, but state violence began, in practice, with the Estado Novo from November 1935.”
Martinez agrees: “I understand that the great cursed legacy of Vargas’ time in Brazilian politics was the consecration, on a national scale, of political, public and private violence.”
“Moderate violence against opponents and political adversaries, and extreme violence against popular demands, the poorest, and social demands, with transformative scope,” lists the historian. “In the countryside, through the appropriation and concentration of land in the hands of a few families, in all states; in the urban workers’ movement, through the relentless repression of union leaders and cultural institutions, such as newspapers, associations, clubs and schools.”
Researcher and YouTuber Paulo Rezzutti believes that one negative aspect of Vargas was his paternalistic image. “This had a big impact on his career and is still present in Brazilian society today, through some politicians,” he argues.
In political party politics, he sees similarities between the current modus operandi of the “charismatic man who tries to please various private sectors and also plays with the people” and Vargas’s way of running the country. “He flatters one, then flatters the other. We still find this populist type. It is a legacy of his in today’s society,” says Rezzutti.
Ambivalent figure
“Vargas’ legacy and image remain in dispute, both by political parties and by disagreements surrounding his memory,” says Bilhão. “For some, he would be primarily a dictator who, with his authoritarian and personalist stance, was complicit in various forms of rights violations and the persecution and killing of opponents, also contributing to the naturalization of a culture of corruption in the public sector.”
But she considers that, “for others, what predominates is the image of the ‘father of the poor’, of the politician who established rights and guarantees for workers”.
She concludes that the main Vargas project that “remains most widely consolidated to this day is the construction of a capitalism with a nationalist bias.” “This notion argues that there is no possibility of economic development without the establishment of an internal consumer market and, for it to exist, it would be necessary to reduce the brutal concentration of income that has historically plagued the country.”
“From this perspective, citizenship would be associated both with the population’s right to consume goods and products and to access public services that provide them with a better quality of life and more chances of accessing and remaining in the job market,” explains Bilhão.
Ramirez also recalls that the close relations between Brazil and the United States, which persist historically, are a legacy of the Vargas period, which, after initial hesitation, ended up allying itself with the Americans in the Second World War.
Unesp professor Martinez comments that many of Vargas’ achievements have crumbled in recent decades, from the period of military dictatorship to the neoliberalism implemented in redemocratization, with society increasingly exposed to the “promiscuous relationship between economic interests and public investments”.
“During the military dictatorship, social demands were met by the government of the general on duty with an iron fist, imprisonment, torture and death,” he denounces. “There was continuity and improvement in the techniques of social control, conducted by the national State, to the benefit of the interests of national and foreign economic groups – including as a way of expanding and maintaining the social base of political and ideological support for the dictatorship by the urban middle class, the business community and large landowners.”
“The relative autonomy of the national State in the distribution, albeit meager and punctual, of income and culture in Vargas’ Brazil, disappeared under the military in 1964 and later, was subjected to the interests of big American capital”, criticizes Martinez.
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