Vargas Revolution
Brazil's First Republic (1889-1930) was governed through the 'café com leite' (coffee with milk) arrangement: the presidency alternated between the coffee oligarchy of São Paulo and the cattle ranchers of Minas Gerais, with state governors controlling electoral outcomes through coronelismo — local political bosses mobilising compliant votes. Coffee exports to the United States generated the revenues that sustained the system. When the 1929 Wall Street Crash collapsed coffee prices and the outgoing president from Minas Gerais broke the rotation by supporting another São Paulo candidate, the arrangement's legitimacy disintegrated. Getúlio Vargas, the defeated presidential candidate from Rio Grande do Sul, allied with dissident military officers — the tenentistas, junior officers who had led repeated uprisings through the 1920s demanding modernisation and the end of oligarchic rule — and with urban business interests that resented São Paulo's dominance. In October 1930 the movement seized power in eighteen days without serious resistance from the old regime's army. Vargas became provisional president, abolished the constitution, dissolved congress, and replaced state governors with federal interventors. Over the following fifteen years, Vargas built a centralising, state-led model: industrialisation funded by state banks, labour legislation that created a formal urban working class incorporated through official trade unions, and a nationalist economic policy that challenged the dominance of British and American capital. He governed as provisional president until 1934, as constitutional president until 1937, and then as dictator of the Estado Novo until 1945.
- Year: 1930 CE
- Category: Political
