Brazil on the Move

Campaign in the Grassroots

The first thing I saw when I stepped out of the hotel our first morning in Manaus was a curlyheaded young man in a doublebreasted caramelcolored suit. He was waving his arms and shouting in the middle of a crowd of market people and longshoremen. He was jumping up and down from sheer earnestness as he talked. He had a loudspeaker attached to his chest which seemed to be operated by a battery in the suitcase that lay at his feet. At first I thought he was selling patent medicine. It turned out he was a political candidate. Though it was early morning, the sun was hot. He’d already sweated through his doublebreasted suit. He was hoarse. His face was red. He was shouting so I couldn’t follow what he was saying except that his platform was to drive thieves and robbers out of the legislature of the state of Amazonas. I remember thinking: if he’s so hoarse and sweaty this early in the morning how is he going to last six weeks to election day?

The campaign of 1962, though only part of the federal congress, the state legislatures, and some governors were up for election, was one of the most hectic in Brazilian history. It looked as if politics had finally forged ahead of soccer. In Rio we found that something like seven hundred candidates were contesting fiftyseven seats, to be distributed according to proportional representation among thirteen parties, in the legislature of the new state of Guanabara. When the capital was moved to Brasília, the old federal district which comprised the area of the city of Rio de Janeiro became what the Cariocas like to call “the citystate” of Guanabara. The streets were so festooned with election posters you could hardly see the trees. A loudspeaker truck bellowed from every corner.

There were so many candidates they had been assigned numbers, like social security numbers.

A young man named Pedro Livio MacGregor — he got the name from a Scottish grandfather — who was a candidate for the Guanabara legislature, explained the electoral system to me. We were sitting at a table at the edge of the sunlight beside the wide swimmingpool in the courtyard of the Copacabana Palace Hotel. This is one of the spots in Rio where everybody meets everybody. Besides being a politician my informant was a Spiritualist minister.

The Brazilian Spiritas believe that they are in continuous communication with the dead; Jesus Christ in person continues to teach them from the other world. At their house of worship young MacGregor conducted a sort of settlement house for the favela dwellers, which included a clinic where doctors were available without charge. They distributed drugs and babyfoods free, along with advice as to how people should live their lives. “When they come, they know nothing,” he said, “they are like animals, we have to teach them to clean their teeth and to wash their faces.”

His enthusiasm for social service had induced him to run for office. As a Social Democrat (PSD), he relied heavily on the support of ex-President Kubitschek in his campaign.

Describing the elective system he emphasized the fact that really free elections were a novelty in Brazil. According to him the first was in 1955. Before that, particularly in the back country, people just took the ballots printed beforehand by the parties and handed out to them by the coroneles (the colonels), as the local bosses were called; and dropped them in the box. In 1955 official ballots were printed, as in the United States, on which the voter could mark his preference. This election of 1962 would be the first in which the printed ballot, with complete lists of candidates, would be practically nationwide. Another innovation would be that up to a certain date all parties would have free time in TV and radio.

“Everybody has agreed that this must be an honest election,” he said with fervor. He was a rather pale man with extremely lucid eyes. His eyes glowed with enthusiasm. “In spite of everything democracy advances.”

Award Winning Journalist

There is great fluidity about Brazilian politics as about everything else in that rapidly evolving country. Ever since the end of the Vargas regime the state governors have been increasing in importance. The first governor of Guanabara was Carlos Lacerda. His term still had two years to run. Although he himself was not a candidate for office, the fact that he is Brazil’s most accomplished anti-Communist made him the chief voice of the opposition against the candidacy for the federal chamber of deputies of a gentleman named Leonel Brizola who was about to retire as governor of the gaúcho state of Rio Grande do Sul.

In Brazil, as in England, you don’t have to be a resident of your constituency to run for offices in the national government. Although there were many local issues and local personalities involved, the underlying national issue of the campaign of 1962 was whether Brazil, in the so-called cold war, should incline towards Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Communist powers, or towards the United States, and its Alliance for Progress program. Lacerda opposed the Communists. Brizola spoke their language. In our curious age, when, among the Western peoples whose institutions the Communists are undermining, anyone who vigorously opposes them is spoken of as a controversial figure, Lacerda has been, almost since boyhood, the most controversial of controversial figures in Brazilian public life.

It was in Washington that I first met Carlos Lacerda.

Ever since our uproarious motor trip into the hills of Minas Gerais in the days when driving a car in backcountry Brazil was a sporting proposition I’ve always had my face fixed for a laugh when I went to call on the Whites. By the fall of 1952 they had moved to Washington from Rio. This time I could hear Bill’s and Connie’s voices laughing inside when I rang the doorbell of their Georgetown apartment.

From the livingroom I could hear a voice with a foreign accent pronouncing the words: “Oopaylong Ca-seedy.” Immediately I was introduced to a tall strikingly handsome man. In one hand he was brandishing a pearlhandled cap pistol. A glittering holster was draped over one shoulder. Perched on his head above his shellrimmed glasses was a small boy’s cowboy hat.

The Whites explained him as a Brazilian journalist who had come to Washington to receive an award from the Inter-American Press Association. His English was fluent but erratic. His high spirits were catching. He shared our taste for the absurd. We all laughed our heads off about Oopalong Ca-seedy.

Connie had been helping him buy Wild West equipment for his children before starting home. They had been showing it off to Bill with appropriate gestures. The Whites’ living room was littered with wrapping paper, striped jumpers, cowboy suits, towheaded dolls, assorted gadgets from the Five and Ten.

His taxi was waiting to take him to the airport. We helped him pack up his purchases into a couple of shoppingbags and very reluctantly bade him goodby.

In the excitement I’d failed to catch his name. “He’s the nicest man in Brazil,” the Whites told me after he’d gone. “His name is Carlos Lacerda.”

A number of years went by before I ran into Carlos Lacerda again at a luncheon in one of the mountain resorts near Petrópolis. The Brazilian friend who was driving us up from Rio started to tell his life history as soon as we were free of the dense traffic of the city.

In those days the Petrópolis road climbed the steep slope hairpin by hairpin through great trees and flowery underbrush. My friend would catch his breath in the middle of a sentence while he swung the little car around another curve. His wife could talk of nothing but how excited she was about meeting Carlos Lacerda. She’d voted for him twice, she said she was going to vote for him again. We were going to pick him up at his country place and take him along to lunch with a lady named Lota de Macedo Soares.

Dona Lota had just built the modernest of modern Brazilian houses. We were looking forward to seeing the house. Our friend’s wife said she had seen plenty of modern houses. It was Lacerda she wanted to see.

“He’s charming to meet,” the husband said, “but when you put a typewriter in front of him he becomes vindictive. He’s a terrible man. Didn’t he kill Vargas?”

“I thought Vargas shot himself.”

“Lacerda’s attacks in his newspaper drove him to it … Carlos Lacerda’s the most dangerous man in Brazil.”

“How come?”

My Brazilian friend couldn’t answer. He was busy avoiding an onrushing truck on a particularly sharp curve. We all breathed again when he pulled off the road at the top of the hill to a stall where he bought us coffee and crisp little meatpies. While we munched, and looked down over the tops of the trees at the incredible view of the bay of Guanabara simmering in the sunny haze between purple toothshaped mountains, he continued his briefing.

Weaned on Controversy

Lacerda’s ideas, began my friend, are those of many generous-minded men in our time in many different countries the world over, but he takes them so seriously. He began to laugh. The trouble with Carlos is that once he starts talking he doesn’t know when to stop. Controversial. He can’t open his mouth without stirring up controversy.

He was brought up from the cradle in an atmosphere of controversy. The whole family was in politics. Carlos was born in Rio the year the First World War began, but his grandfather, Sebastião Lacerda, who was a justice of the Brazilian Supreme Court, insisted on registering his birth at the old family home at Vassouras on the Paraíba River in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

The state of Rio, a weirdly beautiful region of halfabandoned great houses and plantations that have been running down ever since the emancipation of the slaves, has always been separate from the city, which in the days before the federal district was moved into the interior, was the capital of Brazil.

Carlos’ father, Maurício Lacerda, was a rather erratic Socialist deputy. He came back from Europe after the Russian revolution declaring himself to be a Maximalist. The Maximalists were the extreme left wing of the Russian Socialists before Lenin taught everybody in Russia to think the same way. The father was too busy with a number of things to pay much attention to his family, so young Carlos was raised at his grandfather’s place on the Paraíba River. This was a small fruit farm established by Carlos’ greatgrandparents. The wife, who was Portuguese, sold mangoes while the husband, by profession a baker, baked bread. Out of the proceeds they sent Carlos’ grandfather to study law in São Paulo where another member of the family had already made a name for himself as a jurist. Perhaps Carlos’ countryman’s fondness for growing things originated in these early days at Vassoura. He says the Paraíba River was as important to his boyhood as the Mississippi was to Mark Twain’s.

Carlos was a precocious lad. At sixteen he was already on his own in Rio, studying law and picking up a little money writing for the newspapers. He was developing a prodigious ability for hard work.

This was in 1930, the year when a widespread rising of military men and politicians installed Getúlio Vargas in the presidency. Brazil was suffering its share of the political upheavals that followed in the wake of the Great Depression.

Vargas ousted the business-oriented regime of President Washington Luíz, who was such a good friend of the White House that Herbert Hoover sent him home on a battleship after a state visit to the United States. Washington Luíz was the last of a line of Brazilian statesmen who considered friendship with the United States virtually part of their oath of office. Now the stockmarket crash had made a dent in American prestige.

Portugal, Spain, and Italy were already under various sorts of Fascist dictatorships. Hitler’s baleful star was rising in the north. Among the people of Europe Fascism was the rage. Vargas looked to Europe for guidance rather than to the United States.

Up to Vargas’ time politics in Brazil had been the business of oligarchical groups. Vargas appealed to the masses. His eventual denial of any of the rights of political agitation helped by a spirit of contradiction to arouse the public and make politics one of the great Brazilian preoccupations.

Carlos Lacerda took to politics like a duck to water. He early showed a sharp pen for invective and a talent for public speaking. He had charm, good looks, and reckless personal courage. He was fired by all the enthusiasms of his father’s utopian socialism.

Vargas’ first administration started out in a New Dealish kind of way, aiming towards universal suffrage, including votes for women, the encouragement of labor unions to protect working people, the colonization of the west, the elimination of poverty and epidemic disease, a beginning of the social reforms progressive Brazilians had been demanding for years. Vargas had plans for Brazil that won the support of the young idealists.

Vargas had been Washington Luíz’s Minister of the Treasury (Fazenda), but his political rearing was in the school of Borges de Madeiros, the ironfisted boss of his home state of Rio Grande do Sul on the turbulent southern border. This was gaúcho country where politicians still talked with the gun. Not that Vargas was a man of violence. Far from it. A small stoutish fellow with a benevolent smile and friendly wrinkles round his eyes, he was a conniving man who preferred to triumph by corrupting his enemies rather than by a direct show of force.

As Vargas watched the success overseas of Hitler’s National Socialism and of Mussolini’s Corporate State he began to plan something similar for Brazil. He began to appreciate the demagogic possibilities of an appeal to the masses. Through government subsidies and by planting his own men in their management he geared labor unions and student organizations, and much of big business, into his own political machine.

His twenty year rule determined the shape of Brazilian society for years to come. As the only politician who had ever paid attention to them he had the devotion of the urban working class. The coffee barons and the new industrial magnates of São Paulo trusted him to keep the working class in order. It was under Vargas that the strange link was formed between Brazilian big business and the Brazilian left. He dominated the Army and Navy through appointments and promotions, the press through his censorship bureau. Where he couldn’t intimidate people he bought them.

His appetite for power grew with the exercise, until in 1937 he was ready to proclaim his Estado Nôvo (the New State). Patriarchal government has deep roots in Brazil. In colonial days the father had power of life and death. Plumpfaced subtly smiling innocent appearing Getúlio Vargas was presented as a benevolent father to the poor. This was Fascism Brazilian style.

Every career was closed to a nonconformist. The newspapers were forbidden to mention the word democracy.

For a while the Communists offered the only vocal opposition. It is easy to see how a fiery young law student with a passion for civil liberties should be attracted to them. In those days all oppression seemed to come from the Fascists. The Communists operated under the banner of the popular front. In Brazil particularly the Party had taken over a certain romantic aura with the conversion to Marxism of Luís Carlos Prestes. Captain Prestes was a romantic young officer of engineers who, after the failure of one of the many popular outbursts against the oligarchical regime of the twenties, led a column of revolting troops and assorted revolutionists through thousands of miles of the wilderness of Mato Grosso and kept them together for many months before he was forced to seek asylum in Bolívia. The adventures of the Prestes column turned all the young men’s heads. Lacerda now says it was only the tactics of the popular front that kept him from formally becoming a party member.

As student leader of a protest organization called the Alianza Libertadora he traveled about the country addressing meetings in behalf of laborleaders and anti-Fascists. When there was a strike he was for the strikers. His heated protests appeared in clandestine publications. Whenever Vargas’ police scented trouble Carlos Lacerda was among those they carried off to the jug. When he wasn’t in jail he was in hiding.

He married at twentythree. When his first child was on the way he had to come to grips with the problem of making a living. Friends talked Vargas into letting the young firebrand out from one of his many jailings on the understanding that he would forego politics.

He went to work for a nonpartisan journal of economics. He did spreads for an advertising agency. He won fame as reporter for O Jornal, the key newspaper of the Diários Associados, Chateaubriand’s national chain, which was the Brazilian counterpart of the Hearst or Scripps-Howard chains in the United States. In 1943 he was made city editor.

How Vargas Became a Good Neighbor

After the American entrance into the war against Hitler, and particularly when the military fortunes of the Axis powers began to dim, a change came over the Estado Nôvo. Fascist was becoming a term of abuse. Vargas began to model his image more on Franklin D. Roosevelt and less on Mussolini. The good neighbor began to win over the screaming dictator.

Lacerda by this time was the outstanding journalist in Rio. He did everything he could to help the process on. He scooped the nation on the Normandy landings.

It was Carlos Lacerda who accomplished the first break through Vargas’ press censorship. José Américo, a revered political oldtimer who had supported Vargas in his reforming days, gave Lacerda an interview in which he demanded free elections and a free press. O Jornal wouldn’t print it. For twenty days Lacerda tramped about Rio looking for an editor with nerve enough to print Américo’s statement.

When the Correo da Manhã took the risk the result was sensational. The logjam broke. Protests against dictatorship erupted all over the country. The Correo da Manhã featured Lacerda’s columns from then on.

By breaking with the Diários Associados, Lacerda, without a second thought, gave up an assured career as one of Brazil’s best paid journalists. During the same period he became estranged from the Communists. When Lacerda called for civil liberties and a government of law, he meant what he said. Stalin’s purges and the Hitler-Stalin pact convinced him that nothing was to be hoped from the Communists towards the sort of reforms he wanted. When the Brazilian Communists, after Moscow’s scrapping of the tactics of the popular front, took to supporting the Vargas dictatorship, Lacerda’s disillusionment was complete.

The incident he says revolted him most was the appearance of Luís Carlos Prestes, by this time a docile party puppet, on the same platform with Getúlio Vargas. Vargas not only had nabbed Prestes and kept him in jail for years when he ventured home from exile, but at the height of his pro-Nazi enthusiasm he had turned Prestes’ German-Jewish wife over to the German authorities to be done to death in one of Hitler’s concentration camps.

It took the threat of a military coup to induce Vargas to allow presidential elections in 1945. Lacerda jumped back into politics with both feet.

He now hated Vargas and the Communists with equal fervor. The candidate for the presidency whom José Américo brought forward as spokesman for the hastily improvised anti-totalitarian coalition, which took the name of the Unhão Democrático Nacional, was one of the few army officers of rank who could not be accused of collaboration with the dictatorship, Brigadier Eduardo Gomes. Gomes was highly esteemed in democratic circles in the army, navy and aircorps as the sole survivor of the forlorn uprising of the Fort of Copacabana in the early twenties. Lacerda threw everything he had into campaigning for Gomes.

In the course of the campaign he vented his bitterness against the Communists by daily taking the hide off a gentleman named Iedo Fuiza whom they were running for the presidency. Lacerda claimed that Fuiza had made a fortune in real estate while he headed the National Department of Railroads, and could not possibly believe in the Communist aims; he ended every speech by calling him a hypocritical rat.

The response of the Communists was to turn Lacerda in to the police as a Trotzkyite. For one last time he found himself in Vargas’ hoosegow.

That genial despot, though at one time he hadn’t allowed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speeches to be printed in the Brazilian newspapers, was proving the sincerity of his conversion to the cause of democracy by encouraging the Americans to build and operate airfields on the eastern bulge for the airlift to Africa. He further conciliated pro-Allied opinion at home and abroad by letting the Brazilian Army send an expeditionary force to Italy which gave a good account of itself fighting alongside the Americans.

The wily old dictator was executing a skillful retreat from the Estado Nôvo. The Brazilians wanted political parties? Well they should have them. He set up a labor party, the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, based on his own subsidized labor unions. He did grudgingly allow free unions but they had to pay their own bills. To make sure the Labor Party should carry out his wishes, he put his own son in as chairman.

Opposition? Very good, but it must be loyal. To keep the opposition in the family Vargas saw to it that his daughter’s husband should preside over the competing Partido Social Democrático. Having assured his machine of control of a majority of the votes he felt it safe to allow the orators of the Democratic Union to talk as much as they wanted to.

The Tribune of the Press

Carlos Lacerda became the Patrick Henry of the Democratic Union. He discovered that his voice was effective over the radio. All Rio listened to his broadcasts lambasting the corruptions of the Vargas regime and its Communist supporters. The argument became highly personal when a Communist gang waylaid him one night on his way home from the radio station and beat him up severely. His answer was to take a course in judo for selfdefense and to redouble the sarcasm of his attacks. At the same time he conducted a vigorously controversial column in the Correio da Manhã which he called Tribuna da Imprensa (the Tribune of the Press).

Vargas’ Minister of War, General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, was elected President for a fiveyear term by a large majority in 1945. The Vargas machine conducted the election. The electoral boards ruled that approved members of Vargas’ labor unions should be registered automatically. They could be trusted to vote as they were told. Other people had to establish their right to vote by a literacy test.

Though Dutra was elected by the Vargas machine, he was a somewhat independent minded man and could rely on the support of a large body of pro-Allied opinion which had become increasingly vocal with the decay of the censorship. Brazilian historians speak of Dutra’s presidency as a period of democratic convalescence.

Parties were allowed to develop independently. Released from the threat of intervention by the federal government, political organizing began to center in the states. In São Paulo and Minas Gerais local machines flourished.

In Rio Carlos Lacerda was in 1946 elected to his first public office as vereador (city counselor) by a large majority. The very violence of his enemies helped bring him support. Three years later he gave the name of his column “Tribuna da Imprensa” to a newspaper of his own. It was the first newspaper in Brazil established by public subscription. People from all walks of life bought stock. Several wellknown soccer players chipped in. One day a group of cleaning women turned up at Lacerda’s office offering to contribute a few crumpled ten-cruzeiro bills.

President Dutra’s term would end in 1951. According to the current wording of the so often rewritten Brazilian constitution he could not succeed himself. Vargas, who had spent the five years in rural retirement on his estate at São Borja on the Argentine border, was urged to try again.

He had been watching his apt pupil, Juan Perón, apply his own version of the Estado Nôvo to the distracted republic on the River Plate. President Roosevelt’s death and the breakdown of leadership from Washington had left a political vacuum in the world. Communism poured in. The stock of democracy was sinking again on the international market.

Getúlio’s Return

Vargas was old and tired but his henchmen were hungry. The old machine was still intact in the Labor Party and the labor unions. He had an active yellow press at his disposal. His supporters united the Communists, whose watchword was now down with everything connected with the United States, with the leftovers of Fascist nationalism, the frustrated radicals who still dreamed of a socialist utopia, and with local industrialists who feared foreign competition. An adept in the corruptions of politics Vargas played on these factions with a master hand and easily defeated the colorless candidate of the Social Democrats and the Democratic Union’s virtuous brigadier.

The Brazilians were a youthful people, was how Lacerda explained the defeat of his party, statistically more than half the population was under eighteen. Many of the voters in 1951 were too young to remember the oppressions of the Estado Nôvo. Lacerda himself was bitterly reproached for libeling a good old man.

The old dictator’s victory threw the moderate politicians into confusion. People braced themselves for a new bout of dictatorship. The Democratic Union almost fell apart. Lacerda’s Tribune of the Press, with much greater influence than could be accounted for by its circulation, remained as a rallying ground for those opposed to totalitarian schemes.

After five quiet years, busied only with his ranches and his family, the good old man from São Borja moved back into the presidential palace in Rio. The ex-dictator felt a fatherly gratitude towards his people for having re-elected him their constitutional President. He sincerely believed he knew what was best for the Brazilians, but the Brazil he returned to was a changed country.

American financing during the war had given Brazilian manufacturing just the push forward it needed. Volta Re-donda was already turning out steel. Fortunes were being made producing consumer goods in São Paulo in spite of the collapse of the world market in coffee. Industries were spreading out from Rio and São Paulo into the hinterlands of Minas Gerais. Roads were beginning to improve. Public health measures stimulated the growth of population. The cities were bursting at the seams. Contractors were getting rich building apartments. In spite of an adverse balance of payments, inflation, bluesky speculation and every fiscal ill on the calendar, Brazil was on the verge of an industrial boom.

President Vargas, now a satisfied aging man with the old benevolent smile on his face, only wanted an easy life. He wanted everybody to think well of him without worrying too much about overcrowded cities or the problems of financing a vast irregularly developing nation.

The trouble was that his supporters, the party stalwarts who had dragooned the workingclass voters into electing him, weren’t satisfied. They were hungry. They couldn’t wait to fill their pockets. Even the members of Vargas’ own family became infected by the get rich quick fever. The lobbies of the presidential palace swarmed with influence peddlers and fixers, many of them gangsters and lowlives with police records. In the memory of man no one had seen such barefaced thievery as went on in Vargas’ last administration.

The Voice of Opposition

As scandal after scandal boiled to the surface, Carlos Lacerda made it his business to see that nobody forgot them. He was determined to stave off a dictatorship. After a second term as city counselor he was planning to run for the federal Chamber of Deputies.

He had discovered television. His face on the screen became a trade mark. The firm jaw, the clearcut nose between the dark shell rims of his glasses, through which glowing dark eyes burned into the consciousness of the audience, were unforgettable. Without talking down to the crowd he developed a way of explaining complicated problems so that they became understandable to a great many different sorts of people. Spoken, his editorials were even more effective than in the printed column.

As Vargas’ presidential term drew to a close the old man began to see retirement staring him in the face. Though a presidential campaign was already underweigh, designing voices whispered in the President’s ear that maybe all these elections weren’t in the national interest after all. The Vargas politicians wanted to hold onto their jobs. Rio hummed with rumors of a new dictatorship.

In his column in his afternoon paper Lacerda analyzed each new revelation. Evenings on TV he brought in facts and figures to back up his assertions. He drew charts of government malfeasance on a blackboard. His voice stung like a whip. It began to be reported that the men of Vargas’ personal bodyguard were threatening to kill him if he didn’t cease from his attacks. Lacerda shared his scorn of these threats with his TV audience.

Among the military there was considerable sympathy for Lacerda’s campaign. His support of Brigadier Gomes had made him popular among the younger officers. They couldn’t help admiring his courage. They shared his dismay at the corruption of the Vargas administration. Supporters in the Air Force took turns accompanying him home at night. They wanted to be sure he had a witness in case there was an attempt on his life. None of them imagined anybody would be so reckless as to shoot at an army officer.

The manifesto of a group of colonels had forced the resignation of one of Vargas’ ministers. The Ministry of Labor was politically the keystone of his administration because it controlled the patronage of the labor unions. Vargas’ Minister of Labor was a young neighbor from São Borja whom the old man had taken a fancy to and whose debut in politics he had sponsored in his home state. João Goulart was an attractive young landowner of great wealth reputed to be a crony of Perón’s. The colonels accused him of planning a syndicalist republic, Peronista style. Reluctantly Vargas submitted to the retirement of Minister Goulart.

Not long after, Lacerda was slated to address a political meeting. That night it was the turn of Major Rubens Vaz to see that he got home safely. Lacerda lived at that time in Copacabana, the famous beach resort which the first building boom of the thirties had made part of the city of Rio, in a new apartment house on a treelined street overshadowed by the mountain and the tall buildings. Broadleaved trees overgrowing the streetlamps made the sidewalks dark. The litter of construction was everywhere. As Lacerda and Major Vaz climbed out of their car at Lacerda’s front door somebody started shooting at them from across the street. Lacerda returned the fire. Major Vaz, who was unarmed, was killed. Lacerda was shot in the foot. The assailants escaped.

The Crime on Toneleros Street

When Vargas’ police appeared on the scene they tried to make it appear that it was Lacerda, while firing at an imaginary gunman, who had killed Major Vaz.

Major Vaz had a wife and children. He was a popular young officer. His murder infuriated his comrades in the Air Force. Brushing the police aside, a group of senior officers decided to hold their own inquest. It became clear that the murder was instigated by a Negro named Fortunato Gregório who was known as the “black angel” of Vargas’ personal bodyguard. He eventually confessed to having hired the gunman to do the job and was sent to jail for twenty years, there being no death penalty in Brazil.

The press, the houses of Congress, the military clubs rang with denunciations of the crime on Toneleros Street. Demands for President Vargas’ resignation were heard on every hand. The old man was terribly shaken by Gregório’s confession and by definite proof which was placed on his desk that his own children were trading on his name in all sorts of financial deals. At a meeting of his Cabinet the night of August 23 he spoke despairingly of “the sea of mud” under the presidential palace and consented, after much urging, if not to resign, at least to retire from the government.

After the cabinet meeting President Vargas went to his room in the early hours of August 24 and there shot himself through the heart.

“The odd thing about it,” said my friend when he broke off the story, “is that Vargas’ suicide made him a national hero … the Brazilians are a sentimental people.”

“But how can they blame Lacerda for it?” cried his wife impatiently. “It was Lacerda who was the hero.”

Sunday Lunch in Petrópolis

We had driven out beyond the cobbled treeshaded avenues of Petrópolis into a broad rimrocked valley. Brilliantly green vegetation sprouting with all kinds of flowers overflowed the stone garden walls on either side of the road.

When we reached Lacerda’s country place my friend parked his little car in an embrasure in one of the walls and led the way up some stone steps through a tunnel of bougainvillaea into a flagged patio. Everything was so full of flowering plants you couldn’t tell which was the garden and which was the house.

Lacerda set down a flowerpot as he came out to greet us. He was tanned, very much the sunburned Apollo in shell-rimmed spectacles. He was completely preoccupied with his gardening operations. As we walked about his orchard and vegetable garden he introduced each plant and tree as if it were a person.

He had reason to be proud of his plantings. The valleys in the mountains around Petrópolis are one of those marvelous regions where plants from the tropical and temperate zones flourish with equal profusion. There are orchids along with nasturtiums. Cabbages grow next to pineapples. Beside mangoes grow guavas, oranges, and apricots, and even occasionally an apple tree. Lacerda was particularly proud of his apple tree.

Somebody said the place was like the Garden of Eden. “Naturally. We are in my native state of Rio de Janeiro,” Lacerda answered dreamily in English. “It is truly a paradise”—he laughed—“where only man is vile … Maybe not so vile. Let’s give him a chance.”

We met his wife, who looked much too young to be the mother of two wellgrown boys and a girl. Lacerda himself looked younger than I had remembered. There was an air of youthfulness and closeknit intimacy about the whole family. You felt they were all in it together.

Dona Lota’s house, built by Sérgio Bernardes of glass and steel beside a cascading brook, was something to see, though one skeptic did mutter into another skeptic’s ear that it did look a little like the model of an oldfashioned railroad station. There was a pleasant gathering at lunch: the architect Bernardes, an eminent historian, a number of people interested primarily in painting and sculpture. The talk, half in English, half in Portuguese, was about Picasso and Léger and books and St. John Perse and the new museum for modern art which was going up in Rio. Lacerda was at home in all this. He showed a flair for painting. He expressed the reasoned likes and dislikes of a man who did his own reading and used his own eyes and his own ears. His remarks had a humorous tone that kept us all laughing. Not a word about contemporary politics.

On the way back down the mountain my friend’s wife said she was a little let down. It was as if we had been lunching in Paris, instead of Brazil. She had expected Lacerda to be more forceful. “It’s a Sunday,” said her husband soothingly, “a man can’t be forceful every day of the week.”

The Cruise of the Tamandaré

A few nights later at the apartment on Toneleros Street, where he still lived, Lacerda himself described the scramble of events so unfortunate for his Democratic Union that followed Vargas’ death. He didn’t spare himself. He gave a comical cast to the recital of his political misadventures.

After Vargas’ death Vice-President Café Filho, a wellmeaning gentleman from one of the small northeastern states, took over the presidency in due form. He had been on good terms with the old man and took the attitude that as interim President his only business was to see that the elections were peacefully conducted.

The country was preoccupied with the funeral eulogies of the great Getúlio. The industrial workers felt that they had lost their best friend. Even among the growing middle class, who tended to sympathize with the Democratic Union, it was admitted that Vargas had broadened the base of participation in political life. Every Brazilian now felt himself a citizen. The crimes and corruptions of the dictatorship were forgotten in the general mourning.

Lacerda, in speeches and editorials, was driving for a complete cleanup of the remnants of the Vargas regime. In his Tribune of the Press he called for an end of machine politics. He was piling up votes for his candidacy for the Chamber of Deputies.

Party labels have little meaning in Brazil. With the relaxation of Vargas’ heavy centralizing hand the national parties fell under the command of local leaders in the different states. The state governors became powerful figures. Groupings of local politicians resulted in splinterings and coalitions. Dozens of minor parties came into being. In São Paulo, for example, a pokerfaced politico named Adhemar de Barros used his patronage as governor to build up a Social Progressive Party of his own. In Minas Gerais the governor, Dr. Juscelino Kubitschek, was being groomed for the presidency by his local Social Democratic machine. From their stronghold in Rio Grande do Sul, under the banner of a testament supposedly written out by Vargas before his death, João Goulart and his brotherinlaw Leonel Brizola kept Vargas’ Labor Party intact, though its greatest strength still lay in the labor unions of the city of Rio.

In the 1955 election, through a deal with the Labor Party which resulted in João Goulart’s being chosen Vice-President, Kubitschek carried the presidency. The Communists claimed that it was their backing that clinched his election.

Reform was in the air all the same. A brash young man whose emblem was a new broom and whose motto was a clean sweep had defeated Adhemar de Barros in São Paulo the year before. Honesty in office and efficient administration were Jânio Quadros’ warcries. His first act was to have his predecessor indicted for peculation. The same reform movement carried Carlos Lacerda to the Chamber of Deputies by a very large vote.

The Democratic Union, to which Lacerda belonged, questioned Kubitschek’s election as having been put through with the support of the illegal Communist party and by the discredited methods of the Vargas machine. There was a head-on confrontation of forces.

In such moments in Brazil the armed services tend to be the decisive factor. A large part of the Army went along with Café Filho’s Minister of War, General Teixeira Lott, in endorsing Kubitschek’s election. On the other hand there were groups of officers, particularly in the Navy and Air Force, who wanted a general housecleaning under the auspices of Brigadier Gomes. All Rio whispered of a coup d’état. The tension reached such a point that President Café Filho collapsed from a heart attack and was placed by his doctors in an oxygen tent in a hospital, incommunicado.

Congress forthwith declared the presidency vacant and installed Carlos Luz, the Speaker of the House, as constitutional President. Carlos Luz was a Social Democrat with reformist sympathies. It seemed the Godgiven moment for the reformers to take power. Luz demanded General Lott’s resignation and appointed another general in his place as Minister of War.

General Lott resigned all right, but immediately he sent troops he could trust to occupy key points in Rio. A coup to forestall a coup, he called it. Labor and some Social Democrat factions in the congress declared Luz deposed, and appointed their adherent, Nereu Ramos, who, as presiding officer of the Senate, was next in order of succession, President in his stead.

For a few hours it looked like civil war. Café Filho lay helpless in his oxygen tent. Brigadier Gomes, still the hope of the Democratic Union, started for São Paulo where he hoped to recruit adherents. Claiming he was still constitutional President, Carlos Luz gathered his supporters about him and they all trouped aboard an old American cruiser renamed the Tamandaré. The commander, a sympathizer, received him with full honors. Carlos Lacerda, still only deputy elect, went along.

The cruise of the Tamandaré proved a fizzle. Orders were issued to proceed at full steam to Santos, where the harbor forts were in the hands of officers favorable to Carlos Luz, but there was very little coal in the bunkers and part of the crew was on shore leave. During the hours that went by before the cruiser could put to sea General Lott had Gomes intercepted and sent emissaries to win over the garrisons of São Paulo and Santos.

Lott’s orders were for the Tamandaré to stay in port. When the cruiser, with barely enough steam for half speed, did manage to weigh anchor and to head out across the bar for the open sea, the Ministry of War sent word to the forts to stop her, by gunfire if necessary. When the shells came shrieking across the water the group on the bridge of the Tamandaré decided not to return the fire. They were afraid of missing the forts and hitting the civilian buildings behind. Most of them had families in Copacabana. Several shells came perilously close until a freighter got between the cruiser and the forts. The skipper didn’t seem to notice that a battle was in progress. That caused the forts to cease firing, for fear of hitting the freighter.

The cruiser continued down the coast until the radio announced that the Santos forts had gone over to General Lott. Then the Tamandaré ignominiously turned tail and steamed back to her berth in the navy yard.

The deposed President and his entourage were branded as mutineers by the new government. They scattered through the city to seek political asylum. Carlos Lacerda took refuge in the Cuban embassy. He’ll tell you laughingly that politically speaking this was the lowest moment of his life. A few days later he was allowed to leave with his family for the United States in voluntary exile.

Nereu Ramos turned over the presidency to Juscelino Kubitschek in due course.

The Lacerda family remained in the United States for several months. The boys went to school in Norwalk, Connecticut, and Carlos worked as a translator for subtitles for motion pictures, and as foreign correspondent for the Estado de São Paulo. He set himself with his usual feverish energy to improve his knowledge of English. Money ran low so the Lacerdas went to Lisbon, where living was cheaper than in Norwalk. When Carlos got word that the Chamber of Deputies had refused to declare his seat vacant he took his family home. As a deputy he would be immune to arrest.

He was re-elected to congress by an even larger majority in 1958. Reformist sentiment was strong. This was the year when in scornful protest a hundred thousand people in a state election in São Paulo wrote in on their ballots the name of Cacareco, a rhinoceros in the city zoo that was a great favorite with the schoolchildren.

The Politics of the Broom

Kubitschek proved an energetic President. He had the knack of getting cooperation out of the most diverse factions. Political bitterness diminished during his sixyear term. Industrial growth was immense.

As a native of an inland state he was convinced of the need to move the federal capital to the central plateau. Brasília was a colossal achievement, but it proved a colossally expensive achievement.

All the economic ills which resulted from the narrow views of the nationalists, and from the highhanded neglect of fiscal problems that had been the rule for years, began to come home to roost. The loss of value of the cruzeiro and the daily rise in the cost of living became the dominant facts in Brazilian life.

Jânio Quadros, with the assistance of sound economic advisors and, particularly, of Carvalho Pinto, the hardworking fiscal expert who was to succeed him as governor, had made good his promise to put the finances of the wealthy state of São Paulo back in order. When he announced his presidential candidacy to succeed Juscelino Kubitschek, the voters believed he would do the same thing for the federal government. His emblem was still the new broom. As a mass meeting orator he had no rival. No one paid any attention to stories of his drinking, of his emotional instability, of the passes he made at nubile young women who found themselves alone in his office. He aroused overwhelming enthusiasm. He was elected President by six million votes.

By a quirk in the constitution the Vice-President could seek re-election, though the President could not. In spite of a split in the labor vote João Goulart marshaled enough of Vargas’ old following to become Vice-President once more.

The same hopes for a thoroughgoing reform of the government that carried Jânio Quadros into the Palace of the Dawn at Brasília, carried Carlos Lacerda into the governorship of the new state of Guanabara. Next to the presidency, being governor of Guanabara was the toughest political assignment in Brazil.

The preceding administration had been so taken up with Brasília that the beautiful old capital was left in the doldrums. The city kept growing. New quarters were springing up in every nook of the difficult terrain between the bay of Guanabara on one side and the lagoon on the other. The close-packed buildings were hemmed in everywhere by the tooth-shaped basalt peaks that form the chief beauty of the city’s landscape. Transportation was in a snarl. A complete new highway system was needed. Electric light, power, water were insufficient. The telephone service was years behind the times. The sewers mostly dated from the mid-nineteenth century when Rio was rated as having one of the best systems in the world. Even the handsomest residential quarters were flanked by hillside slums, the famous favelas. By this time almost a million squatters lived in these shantytowns without policing or public services of any kind. The condition of Rio would have been a challenge to a man who had spent his life in public administration.

To the amazement of friend and foe, Governor Lacerda, after a little preliminary fumbling, developed one of the most efficient administrations the city had ever seen. He collected about him a group of townplanners and architects and engineers and laid plans for new electric light plants, for a new water supply, for renovating the sewerage system and for dealing with a long list of what he called skeletons, projects started by previous administrations that had been halted for lack of funds. When the Alliance for Progress came along he eagerly took advantage of American money. He announced his administration’s aim to “make Rio once more the Marvelous City.”

“Oh, marvelous city,” went a popular song. “By day we lack water, and by night we lack light.”

The President Breaker

It was at Jânio Quadros’ suggestion that Carlos Lacerda ran for the governorship of Guanabara. During the early months of Quadros’ presidency the two men continued to see eye to eye. Quadros’ first administrative reforms had Lacerda’s hearty approval. The governor’s plan was to keep pace in his local administration with the President’s reform of the federal government.

The trouble that began to develop between them stemmed from the fact that the problems Quadros had to meet at Brasília were much tougher than the problems he had coped with in São Paulo. There he had the advantage of able collaborators, since the city and state of São Paulo had for years enjoyed the most competent administration in Brazil. In São Paulo the new broom could be placed in the hands of men who knew how to use it.

In Brasília everything was chaotic. The capital city had been only recently inaugurated. More than half the government offices were still in Rio. Politicians, and particularly their wives and families, balked at exchanging the familiar amenities of the old capital for the windswept immensities of bare red clay and the dust of construction work of the fantastic new city on the plateau five hundred miles inland. Nie-meyer’s new congress building was striking to behold but inconvenient to operate. Even when the President could coax enough senators and deputies out to Brasília for a quorum he found it hard to keep their minds on constructive legislation. He was confronted by the fact that running a vast sprawling nation, where the problems of government were different in each different region, was a far more exacting task than acting the spellbinder as figurehead for that nation’s best organized state. Failure stared him in the face.

Lacerda now says that Jânio was a charlatan all along. He points out his slovenly working habits, his lack of education, that his only reading had been some Shakespeare and a little Zola. His taste in art Lacerda found atrocious. Though immensely clever at picking ideas out of other men’s mouths, Jânio, says Lacerda, always lacked the inner cohesion needed to face adversity. Still he can’t help admitting that at the time of Jânio’s inauguration, like millions of other Brazilians, he expected a miracle.

Unable to cope with the complications of reforming the federal government, Quadros began to listen to advisers who brought up the parallel of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Castro wasn’t plagued with a recalcitrant congress, with a faultfinding press or with powerful financial interests all tugging in different directions. Castro was having it all his own way. Instead of piecemeal reform, maybe Brazil needed a Castro-type revolution. Jânio’s gift for swaying the crowd was equal to Fidel’s. With dictatorial powers he could really use his new broom.

Quadros wanted Lacerda’s help in this half formulated enterprise. Members of his administration turned up in Rio, suggesting that Lacerda’s own work would be easier if the President and the state governors had more power. Lacerda’s answer was that Quadros had all the power he needed. He had the prestige. He had the backing of the whole population. What he must do was present an itemized program to congress. Popular clamor would do the rest.

Gradually it dawned on Lacerda that Quadros had no program to offer. He wanted power first. The program could wait. The newspapers were full of the handsome reception the President was giving to Fidel Castro’s mission to Brazil.

The old watchdog of democracy was aroused. He talked with other state governors and federal senators. He became convinced that something unhealthy was brewing at Brasília.

Although it was second nature to Lacerda to make his every thought public in his newspaper or on the air, he kept his doubts to himself until at last he could contain himself no longer; he must have it out with President Quadros.

Quadros was in Brasília. His wife, Dona Elvá de Quadros, whom Lacerda speaks of as a really nice sensible woman, was in Rio. Lacerda went to see her at the presidential residence and explained to her that he had to have a quiet talk with her husband. The answer was an invitation to dine that same night and the appearance of the President’s jet to transport Governor Lacerda to Brasília.

It was from the President’s military attaché, who met him at the airport, that Lacerda learned that Quadros had just given the most important Brazilian decoration to Castro’s chief assistant, “Ché” Guevara. The President’s household was caught by surprise.

Sensing that he was in for a rough time Lacerda sent his secretary to engage a room at the hotel and proceeded to the palace. There he was met by someone he described as “a sort of Gregório” who took his little black overnight case and showed him to a suite. The first sour note was that the President had already dined. Governor Lacerda dined alone.

Then President Quadros suddenly put in an appearance. He greeted Lacerda warmly and gave him a friendly hug. It was obvious that he had had a few drinks. Lacerda immediately started to tell him of his doubts and suspicions. He asked for an explanation. He said he didn’t want to go back to his days of wild attacks but he owed something to his voters and to the country. He explained that he couldn’t go along with Jânio’s pro-Castro foreign policy. Maybe he’d better resign as governor. The country had a right to a little peace and quiet.

He added that he had personal reasons too. When he took over the governorship he had turned his newspaper over to his son Sérgio. The boy was having a hard time. He didn’t want him to meet failure so young. Jânio gave Lacerda a sharp look and cried out that if it was money he needed for his newspaper he would attend to that.

Lacerda answered that he didn’t want money. His newspaper could take care of itself. He wanted some assurance that Jânio Quadros wasn’t trying to behave like Fidel Castro.

Quadros is a smallish man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. Lacerda, who had always been on good terms with him, tried to kid him: Come now he wasn’t Charles de Gaulle.

“Let’s go to the movies,” said Jânio.

Seeing movies every night had become an obsession with him. The big hall in the palace was rigged up with a motion picture screen. There were tables piled with sausages and cold meats, bowls of popcorn, beer and whiskey bottles. Quadros had the reputation of having a good head for liquor, but by this time he was showing it.

They started with a serious picture but the President shouted that he wanted something funny. He called for Jerry Lewis. He didn’t like Jerry Lewis and switched to a Western. He was a great fan of Westerns.

In the middle of the reel the President went to the phone. He came back and told Lacerda he wanted him to confer with two of his ministers who were having a private talk in a room at the hotel.

When Lacerda reached the hotel all the ministers would talk about was some articles Lacerda had written in the period after Vargas’ suicide, suggesting that elections be postponed. Why didn’t he favor direct action now? Lacerda told them that the situation today was very different. He added that he was planning to resign his governorship since he could not go along with the national administration. He would try to keep his opinions to himself to give them a free hand.

After that, he returned to the palace, under the impression that he’d been invited to spend the night there. At the entrance he was met by the doorman who handed him his little black bag. The doorman intimated he’d better go to the hotel.

Lacerda tells of the ride back to the hotel as one of the worst moments of his life. He was oppressed by the vast loneliness of the unfinished city, the great buildings with nobody in them, the ghost town look. There was a Nazi atmosphere about the crazy scene at the palace, the incoherence, the drinking, the silly movie. From his hotel room he called up one of the ministers he’d been talking to before. The minister came to his room. They argued until four in the morning. Lacerda insisted that this sort of thing couldn’t go on. It was the Stalin way of running a country. The minister told him the President said to go to hell.

Lacerda flew back to Rio the next day. A couple of days later he had a date to lecture to university students in São Paulo. He tried to make a figurative speech as a warning to Jânio. An organized group kept interrupting him, shouting, “Jânio sim, Lacerda não.”

This was for Lacerda a period of terrible indecision. He couldn’t sleep nights. Then on August 24, the anniversary of the downfall of Getúlio Vargas, he made up his mind. That night he spoke to the nation over TV. He told the whole story of the trip to Brasília, his frustration, the efforts to induce him to fall in with Jânio’s plans. “The man we elected doesn’t want to be President, he wants to be dictator.”

Next day Jânio Quadros resigned. With his resignation he gave out a confused statement that hidden interests at home and abroad were sabotaging his program. He may have thought that a wave of popular outbursts would force the congress to ask him to reconsider his resignation. There was no such outburst. A few months later Adhemar de Barros, who is not lacking in humor, announced on television that he didn’t know about the sinister domestic interests that had ruined Quadros’ program, but he could name the foreign interests. They were Haig & Haig, Teacher’s, Johnnie Walker, and so forth.

Quadros’ resignation left João Goulart, Vargas’ political heir, the President of Brazil. All parties, except for the left wing of labor and the Communists, were thrown into dismay. Congress, under the influence of the Democratic Union, immediately started tinkering with the constitution. The President was shorn of his powers. The executive power was placed in the hands of a Prime Minister responsible to the Chamber of Deputies.

Politically the period between Quadros’ resignation in the summer of ’61 and the October elections in the fall of ’62 was the story of a continuous tug of war between the leaders of the Democratic Union, who wanted ministerial government, and the Labor Party men who wanted full presidential powers restored to their leader. National administration was at a stalemate, with the result that no constructive legislation could be passed. Inflation went unchecked. The cost of living soared. In spite of occasional hikes in the minimum wage, the middle classes were pinched and working people’s families went hungry. In the hinterlands the unemployed starved.

The Reactionary Governor of Guanabara

After his crucial television speech Lacerda says he was at last able to sleep soundly in his bed. He awoke to a chorus of praise and vituperation. Jânio Quadros’ resignation was as great a shock to the Brazilian electorate as Vargas’ suicide. Men and women of all levels of society had placed their hopes in his hands. The first reaction was of despair.

The conservative newspapers came around to the view that, shocking as it was, Lacerda’s unmasking of Quadros saved Brazilian democracy. The leftwing press, led by the dashingly edited Ultima Hora with its nationwide circulation, claimed that having brought about Vargas’ death the reactionary governor of Guanabara had now deprived the country of the services of its most dedicated reformer. The man was a monster. Some people have been called kingmakers. Lacerda was the destroyer of presidents.

No man loves a fight more. Breathing deep of the dust of battle Lacerda threw himself into an almost nightly vendetta over television with the supporters of President Goulart. As the campaign for the congressional elections of 1962 neared its climax, he seemed to foreign observers to be engaged in a sort of hand to hand combat over the airwaves with Leonel Brizola, the President’s brotherinlaw.

Brizola was nearing the end of his term as governor of Rio Grande do Sul. In spite of the backing of some of Vargas’ henchmen in the state which had been the center of the old dictator’s political web, his administration had been so unpopular that he was facing a voters’ revolt at home. By following the anti-American line in Guanabara, where there was a compact Communist-inspired vote, he would be sure of election to the Chamber of Deputies. By bearding Lacerda in his own citystate he could hope to win national leadership of the Brazilian Labor Party.

So long as he was governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Brizola could use other weapons than oratory. A severe drought had resulted in a scarcity of rice and beans throughout the northern and central part of Brazil. Rio Grande do Sul had a surplus. Brizola could use his control of his home state’s export of vital foods to cut off supplies from Guanabara. Beans and rice are basic articles in the diet of all classes in Brazil. The rich can eat other things. If the poor can’t get beans they go hungry. The sight of long queues waiting for beans and rice in markets and foodstores was a more cogent argument against Lacerda’s administration than all the oratory in the world.

While Brizola, supported by an active political organization which controlled the flow of cash to labor unions and students’ organizations, fought Lacerda over the air, his brotherinlaw’s administration in Brasília made life as hard as possible for the state of Guanabara. Everything the federal government could do was done to sabotage Lacerda’s program.

It was a mighty struggle. Lacerda’s capacity for work has always been prodigious. While he carried on the debate with Brizola in almost nightly television appearances, he worked all day superintending every detail of his rebuilding of Rio. He wore out secretaries and assistants. He had to prove to himself and to the world that his plans for the “marvelous city” were not just politicians’ talk. He had to show results that the voters could see.

As governor he lives on the top floor of an old apartment house facing the bay in a somewhat rundown residential section known as Flamengo Beach. First thing in the morning he’s out on the balcony looking down to see how the work is going on one of his favorite projects.

Early in his governorship he took steps to insure the public use of a large area of made land through which the new four-lane highway runs from the downtown district out along the bay shore to Copacabana and the new seabeach suburbs. He wants to develop this region into a park which will surpass in beauty the old parks that are part of the imperial heritage, and, at the same time furnish playgrounds, small boat harbors, soccerfields and beach facilities for the city’s growing population.

To superintend the project he appointed a committee under the active management of his old friend Lota de Macedo Soares. As a great hostess Dona Lota numbered among her personal cronies many of the world’s best architects and sculptors and townplanners. A small woman in black striped pants, she drives them with fair words, but she drives them hard. She has Burle Marx, Brazil’s most internationally admired landscape architect, doing the overall design and has dragged in the best talent in the country to help. Many of them work without pay. They’ll tell you that not a tree is planted, nor a stretch of shrubbery set in position which escapes the governor’s early morning gaze. Usually he’s after Dona Lota on the phone before eight o’clock to find out why some part of the work isn’t going along faster.

Next, after a couple of early morning hours at his administrative office, Governor Lacerda will be out on his rounds to see for himself. He has to see and be seen. The people must be made to know he’s working for them.

First he’ll turn up at a hilltop favela, climbing the goat-paths with a springy step while a subordinate pants after him with a bundle of documents. The documents are to declare the hill expropriated by right of eminent domain from the original owners. The owners haven’t been getting any profits anyway as they are helpless to evict the squatters and in some cases they are compensated by special privileges as to zoning and building heights in the more accessible sections of their land.

Lacerda’s program for the squatters is twofold. Where the land must be used for other construction, they are offered cheap substitute housing in rows of small dwellings which, though not luxurious, are at least better than the hovels they will be leaving. In the majority of cases it is not practical to move the people out. Then the city services bring in light and water. Something is done about sewage. Receptacles are set up for garbage where trucks can reach them. The governor furnishes cement, lumber, and technical help for these projects, but the heavy work is done by the faveladwellers themselves.

Lacerda is delighted by the success in the favelas of the institution of mutirão, mutual help. Since most of the squatters are recent immigrants from the backlands they are used to the old peasant system. If a man is building a house the neighbors pitch in to help. They work the same way in the favelas. The governor’s plan is to give the squatters title to the little plots they have already built their houses on, and gradually to draw them into the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship. “We want them to feel,” he says, “that they are regular people … just like anybody else.”

Leaving the favela the governor will pick up his chief engineer and visit the excavations where they are laying a new sewer, or check on the work on the tunnels being drilled through the mountains for the new water supply, which is to be chlorinated and treated with fluorine at the source. Then he’ll dedicate a clinic that is part of his program for renovating the obsolete hospitals, or cut the tape on a new thoroughfare designed to alleviate some of Rio’s unending traffic jam. Almost daily he opens a school. There are so many new schools he’s run out of names for them and asks his visitors to make lists of suggestions. Next it’s a viaduct or the beginning of a great traffic tunnel to link an isolated part of the city into the highway system.

He seems to carry all the details in his head. He gives the impression of knowing more about each project than the men in charge. Though he’s death on incompetence, he keeps the enthusiasm of his staff at a high pitch. Good work is immediately recognized. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” said one of Lacerda’s oldest friends, a lawyer who had helped him set up his newspaper fifteen years before. “We thought of him as the editorial writer, the fearless orator. To have him turn into an administrator is the surprise of the century … Why, he’s actually happy in administration.”

Brazil is a land of thoroughgoing social democracy. A public man has to be open to anybody who wants to talk to him. On his rounds Lacerda has to be ready with a little speech for every occasion. Humorous hardhitting casual discourses come easy as breathing. Everywhere the crowd presses around him. He seems to have time for everyone, for old women whose sons are in trouble, for a lame man who can’t get into a hospital, for a young man who wants him to start a school for television technicians. Doctors, engineers, hospital nurses, all whisper their problems in his ear. By night the men on his staff are worn out. Governor Lacerda is still ready to talk with a foreign visitor, or to dine with a group of American students.

Tonight a couple of the students have managed to get lost. At going home time between five and seven in Rio taxis can’t be found. Buses and trolleys are packed tight as sardinetins. We sit waiting on a sofa in the livingroom. In spite of his punishing schedule the governor shows no sign of impatience.

He does admit to having a bad cold. Though his voice is hoarse his talk flows on. He has an extraordinary flow of words in Portuguese and in English. He starts to tell about the loneliness of his position. It is the custom in Brazil for a public man to find jobs for all his friends and relatives. Lacerda has kept them at arm’s length. He sees nothing else to do. This has done him more harm than anything. So many people who used to be fond of him now think he’s a terrible fellow.

There are other things he’d like to do, other things than fighting Communists and fellowtravelers, he’d like to take time off to write a novel. He’d like to be Minister of Education in a federal administration he had confidence in, or ambassador to Washington. He feels he knows Washington well enough to get past the pundits and the knowitall columnists and to explain Brazil to the American people in Brazilian terms.

The phone rings. A secretary comes in to announce that the lost students are on their way.

We go down in the elevator. Two uniformed militiamen who guard the front door stiffen to salute. We get into the governor’s old model black car. Still no students. It’s against the traffic rules to park in front of the apartment house so Lacerda tells the chauffeur to drive around the corner. We wait in a dark and solitary street.

There’s no bodyguard, only the little chauffeur.

This is at the height of the political war. A few days before, Lacerda read off the list of Moscow-trained Communists in key posts in Goulart’s administration. The answer was a demand that the federal government “intervene” in Guanabara. “Intervention” was Vargas’ way of removing uncooperative state governors. Lacerda replied that he had been legally elected by the people of the state and if they tried to take him out of his office they would take him out dead.

There have been a few small riots between Lacerda supporters and Brizola’s people. Brizola is in town. When he addresses a public meeting he has a military bodyguard. There have been new rumors of threats against Lacerda’s life.

The minutes drag on. We three are alone in the dark empty street. It is obvious that the thought of personal danger never crosses Lacerda’s mind. While he chats cheerfully of one thing and another part of his brain is busy planning what he is going to say later tonight after dinner when he appears on TV. He grumbles a little about Brochado da Rocha, Goulart’s Prime Minister. As a lawyer in Rio Grande do Sul he had a good reputation, but as a politician he’s proved an absolute ninny. Though a man of moderate opinions Lacerda says he’s turned to putty in the hands of the Communists.

After twenty minutes the American students appear. They are full of apologies, with bright shiny faces. Lacerda seems happy airing his American slang. He’s happy having the Americans there though he knows very well that this is one campaign when contact with an American is a liability. Nobody defends the Alliance for Progress. Yankeebaiting is the order of the day. Lacerda’s never been a man to give in before popular clamor. We all eat dinner at the yachtclub very much in the public eye. Afterwards he goes off to the television station to lash at his enemies in a twohour speech.

One, Two, and Three, Cried the Count of Montecristo

When Lacerda went on the air and called Brochado da Rocha the cheerful vivandière of the Goulart regime, that hitherto rather colorless politician blew his top. At the next cabinet meeting he threatened to resign as Prime Minister unless Lacerda were removed as Governor of Guanabara. He cried out passionately that he would not be able to look his children in the eye if he went home without some punishment for Lacerda. The leftwing press went into an uproar. However, military influences made themselves felt in Brasília. Brochado da Rocha had to be satisfied with a vote of censure on Lacerda by the council of ministers.

Juscelino Kubitschek had been busy rebuilding his old coalition between Goulart’s party and his Social Democrats. His aim was seemingly to strengthen the right wing of the Labor Party and to wean the President away from Brizola and the Communist apparatus. Now he had to go flying to Brasília to apply the healing oil. He had already come out for a return of full powers to the presidency. Why not? He was planning to be President again himself. He could appeal with some authority to João Goulart not to let the situation get out of hand.

Not long after, in a reshuffling of the Cabinet to bring it more in line with Goulart’s ambitions, Brochado da Rocha was forced out. He went home to his state capital at Pôrto Alegre and a few days later was taken with a cerebral hemorrhage and went to bed and died.

The Communist-inspired press attacked Lacerda as a murderer. He was a Lucifer of reaction. He was plotting with American imperialists. Subsidized by American funds he had again brought about the death of an eminent Brazilian statesman. Vargas dead, Quadros ruined, and now Brochado da Rocha. The nation must be rid of this sinister influence.

Postmortem

In spite of the clamor the elections passed off in peace and quiet on October 7. Just before election day Lacerda obtained a two months’ leave of absence from his legislature to go to Europe to study European subway systems. If he could start the construction of a subway while his governorship lasted he would have accomplished one more benefit for his “marvelous city.” Already he could point out that the rate of new industrial investment in Guanabara had for the first time surpassed the rate in São Paulo.

The governor needed a rest indeed. Weeks and weeks of working eighteen hours a day had broken down even his robust health. The cold which had troubled him for weeks went to the brink of pneumonia before his doctor put him to bed. Candidates friendly to his policies had to finish their campaigns with little help from their leader.

The election returns, like those in similar elections held in the United States a month later, could be interpreted almost any way you wanted them. Communist-supported candidates won and anti-Communists won. The commentators however did point out that for Brazil it was a democratic victory. The forms of democracy were rigorously observed. There was no violence or intimidation at the polls and even very little talk of corruption. The turnout was large.

On account of the proportional system of representation it took a very long time to count the votes. The number of candidates for office was everywhere staggering. This meant a scattering of the independent vote which was an advantage to politicians with wellorganized machines.

In Guanabara, Lacerda’s enemy Brizola was elected deputy by the largest vote on record. Anti-Americanism paid off. Lacerda’s friends carried the state legislature but lost the vice governorship, which would mean difficulties for the governor during the rest of his term. The Alliance for Progress proved a liability.

In Pernambuco, the northeastern state where such efforts had been made by the Catholic Church and by influences from the United States to undercut the Communist peasant leagues, Miguel Arraes, the Communist-supported candidate won the governorship by a small margin. His campaign was largely financed by Brazil’s second richest man, a manufacturer from São Paulo named Ermírio de Moraes. Moraes himself, who took the precaution of hiring every taxicab in the state capital of Recife to carry his voters to the polls on election day, went to the federal senate. These developments were a severe blow to Washington’s hopes for an Alliance for Progress in Brazil.

However, in the key state of São Paulo the story was entirely different. Jânio Quadros tried for a political comeback and was defeated by his old enemy Adhemar de Barros, whose campaign was frankly directed against Communist and Castro influences. In President Goulart’s own state of Rio Grande do Sul the voters made a clean sweep of his brotherinlaw Brizola’s supporters. Menighetti, a conservative who had opposed Brizola’s seizure of the American public utilities, was elected by a large majority. When news came of Brizola’s election to the Chamber from Guanabara streamers appeared across the streets of Pôrto Alegre reading THANK YOU CARIO-CAS.

The Unhão Nacional Democratico came out badly. For a while it looked as if the chief beneficiary of the 1962 elections might be Juscelino Kubitschek, who wasn’t running for any office at all. Certainly his position was improved as a contender for presidential nomination by the Social Democrats in 1965, but at the same time the figure of the present governor of Minas Gerais, Magelhães Pinto, began to loom as presidential timber. It is too early to say whether Lacerda has lost political prestige. This isn’t his first political reverse. Growing enthusiasm for his presidential candidacy in 1965 is reported from São Paulo. At fortyeight he is just reaching political maturity. His is the most compelling presence on Brazilian television. He somehow finds words every voter can understand to explain the difference between the reorganization of society under freedom and the Communist or Castro way. The direct approach, the straight talk, the burning dedication of the dark eyes behind the shellrimmed glasses still hold his audiences spellbound.

Friends tell you laughingly about his European “vacation.” Not an idle moment. In Paris he spent his time negotiating a deal with a French concern to install a subway in Rio which is to be financed largely by French funds. In West Germany he contracted for a hospital. He is not known to have done any work during the week he spent in Sicily. On the steamboat back from Italy he whiled away his time preparing a volume of his speeches for publication, and translating a Broadway play, Come Blow Your Horn, which he had found amusing one night in New York, from English into Portuguese for production in Rio.