Getulio Vargas

Getulio Vargas governed Brazil for eighteen of twenty-four years, as revolutionary chief, as dictator and then as elected president, and shot himself in the presidential palace rather than resign a second time. He was a lawyer and state politician from Rio Grande do Sul who lost the presidential election of 1930 and took power by armed revolt a few months later, ending the Old Republic in which two states had alternated the presidency between them. He centralised a federation that had been almost a confederation, created ministries of labour and education, and built the legal framework of Brazilian labour relations - the minimum wage, the eight-hour day, paid holidays, the union structure - on a corporatist model in which the unions answered to the state. In 1937, on the pretext of a fabricated communist plot, he cancelled elections and proclaimed the Estado Novo, with censorship, a political police and a propaganda department. He courted both Germany and the United States before joining the Allies in 1942 in exchange for the finance that built the Volta Redonda steelworks, and Brazilian troops fought in Italy. The army removed him in 1945. He was elected president again in 1950 on the labour vote, created Petrobras under the slogan that the oil was Brazil's, and was destroyed by a corruption and assassination scandal involving his bodyguard. On 24 August 1954, facing an ultimatum from the officers, he shot himself in the heart, leaving a letter that ends by saying he left life to enter history. He was called the father of the poor by the labour movement and the mother of the rich by his critics. The Estado Novo's propaganda office ran a national radio hour that carried his voice into towns with no newspaper. His suicide letter was read on radio within hours and turned an imminent coup into a wave of public grief that kept his party in power for another decade.

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