Vargas Revolution
Getúlio Vargas lost the Brazilian presidential election of 1930 and took power in October. The republic had been governed since 1894 by an arrangement known as café com leite, under which the coffee interest of São Paulo and the cattle interest of Minas Gerais alternated the presidency between them and the state political machines delivered the votes. The arrangement broke when the outgoing president from São Paulo nominated another paulista instead of a mineiro. Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul and Paraíba formed a Liberal Alliance and put up Vargas, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul. He lost the official count in March and the alliance alleged fraud, which was certainly present on both sides. The assassination of his running mate João Pessoa in July, for reasons that were mostly personal, supplied a martyr. The rising began in Rio Grande do Sul on 3 October and moved north with almost no fighting; senior officers deposed the president in Rio on 24 October and handed the government to Vargas on 3 November. He governed for fifteen years, dissolved the congress, appointed federal officials to run the states, and in 1937 announced a coup against himself and declared the Estado Novo on the strength of a forged communist plot. What he built was durable: labour law, a minimum wage, a steel industry, and a national state where there had been a federation of oligarchies. He returned by election in 1951 and shot himself in 1954. The moment usually reproduced is the photograph of the gaucho horsemen tying their mounts to the obelisk on the Avenida Rio Branco in Rio. It is a staged picture of a revolution that had almost no fighting and changed the country more than any of the ones that did.
- Year: 1930 CE
- Category: Political
