The final hour was drawing near. At the start of 1945, the Allies’ military advances in Western and Eastern Europe accelerated. In January, the Soviet Union launched a major offensive that liberated Warsaw, the capital of Poland; on March 7, US troops crossed the Rhine River at Remagan, entering Germany. Hitler’s defeat seemed imminent. The final German offensive in the west had been launched on December 16 of the previous year, culminating in the agonizing Battle of the Bulge. But this desperate bid to reverse Germany’s fortunes had failed, and in all probability, the war would end by the middle of the year.
This was an extremely challenging time for President Vargas. His confidence appeared rattled, and his energy and ability to work long hours appeared once again to be on the wane. Vargas retreated to the Rio Negro Palace in Petrópolis for the summer months of early 1945, but while the cooler climate at the summer retreat was more conducive to clear-headed thinking, Vargas could not escape his problems. Prime among his concerns was the question of whether to end the Estado Novo and restore some form of democracy when World War II ended.
Seeking inspiration, Vargas took long walks alone around the town, which was full of rich summer homeowners from Rio and local diplomats, among them the British ambassador. Vargas was much more eager to deal with such men than with his internal foes; he was also keen to sign as many deals with the United States as possible—for rubber, coffee, and whatever else Brazil had to sell. Yet his decision-making process appeared frozen when it came to internal issues, especially those related to his own future. Vargas, somewhat vainly, had convinced himself that he needed to lead Brazil for at least one year after the conclusion of the war. This, he argued, would allow him to ensure that the country would be able to maximize its returns from the war and would also give him a chance to shore up—with the support of the United States—Brazil’s newly prominent role in regional and international affairs. In public, Vargas refused to commit himself to any course of action regarding the country’s leadership, but most of his opponents expected that he would try to hang on to power for as long as possible.
No longer able to turn to his old friend Osvaldo Aranha, and with an inner circle that appeared weak and divided, President Vargas relied ever more heavily on Alzira—and increasingly on her husband, Ernâni do Amaral Peixoto—for advice. The wild card in the pack continued to be the president’s younger brother, Benjamin, yet Vargas appeared completely blind to his brother’s shortcomings and lack of ability. During previous times of crisis, such as in 1937 and 1938, Vargas had been able to call on far greater minds than he now had available to him in 1945. Francisco Campos and General Góes Monteiro had, to varying degrees, edged out of the president’s camp, and their replacements were more concerned with pleasing the president than challenging his decisions. To make matters worse, these “yes” men appeared to be goading the president into a fight with those of their countrymen who demanded a return to democracy. By the start of 1945, it had become clear that President Vargas still had reservations about introducing full democracy in Brazil, preferring a local version that took into account the country’s political culture.
Vargas received reports from Rio of challenges to his authority on an almost daily basis—and the reports were growing. The president, however, was reluctant to break from his summer routine to return to the city, fearing that any such move could be interpreted as a sign of weakness. He would soon have cause to regret his decision.
The gathering opposition found its mouthpiece during the first Brazilian writers’ conference, which opened on January 22, 1945. Dominated by communists, the conference issued a list of demands, first among them the holding of free and fair elections.1 What surprised many people were not the demands themselves, but rather the fact that the conference’s participants had been confident enough to openly challenge the president by issuing them.
The writers’ conference was merely the start of a campaign to effectively oust an increasingly isolated President Vargas. Much worse followed on February 22, when José Américo, who had run for the presidency as the opposition candidate in 1937, published an article in Correio da Manhã. This article amounted to, as the British ambassador put it, “the most savage attack on President Vargas and his regime that had appeared for many years.”2 The article articulated the policies and demands of the writers’ conference from the previous month, and it—unlike the original list of demands—was not submitted to censorship. The gauntlet had been thrown down.
Brazilians waited anxiously to see how Vargas would respond—and were shocked by the outcome. Vargas had instructed the DIP not to intervene, and so, with something of a political bang, years of censorship in Brazil came to a dramatic end. What followed was a predicable free-for-all, with anti-Vargas articles appearing in many newspapers, boldly demanding that the president step down and allow for free elections to choose his successor. The articles’ authors were mainly old political foes of Vargas from the pre–Estado Novo period who had been biding their time, waiting for the opportunity to strike. One article, however, was different from all the rest.
One Brazilian newspaper published an interview with Osvaldo Aranha, in which the former minister of foreign affairs explained the reasons for his resignation. Needless to say, it didn’t make pleasant reading for Vargas. Aranha claimed that Brazilian internal politics had impinged on his foreign policy and that once this interference became too great, he had little choice but to quit. Aranha refused to comment on his relationship with the president, except to say that while Vargas was not his enemy, Aranha no longer liked the regime that Vargas led.3 The message from Aranha to his old friend was clear: Vargas needed to reform or risk becoming politically irrelevant, perhaps even before the war’s end.
In his office at the Rio Negro Palace, Vargas read the piece by Américo and whatever other articles his nervous aides allowed him to see, and pondered how best to proceed. He didn’t feel he could submit to the opposition’s demand for free and open elections, but he knew that he could wait no longer to make a decision about elections. He opted for what was, in effect, a compromise; he allowed a vote, just not from the Brazilian people.
President Vargas summoned a full cabinet meeting at the Rio Negro Palace, demanding that all his ministers travel up to Petrópolis from Rio to decide on the fate of the Estado Novo. All of this went against Vargas’s intuition; he disliked cabinet meetings and the surprises they often unleashed. Indeed, when he brought the meeting to order, Vargas was taken aback by his ministers’ recommendations. One by one, the officials warned the president that “the manifest desire for public elections must be met.”4
Vargas took these comments under advisement, but continued to play for time. After the cabinet meeting, he released an official statement assuring Brazilians that the necessary measures for changing the country’s constitution would be studied immediately.5 Soon thereafter, on March 1, 1945, the administration announced that Vargas had signed a constitutional amendment—constitutional amendment No. 9—calling for free elections to be scheduled within ninety days. The amendment laid down various conditions including, rather bravely, the disenfranchisement of all enlisted men, excluding officers.6 Constitutional amendment No. 9 also called for federal elections for the president (who would serve for a fixed, six-year term) and parliamentary legislators, as well as for state elections for local governors and parliaments.
At this stage, the opposition’s proposed candidate, Brigadier Eduardo Gomes, was the only official contender for the presidency. Gomes commanded the air routes and bases in northeastern Brazil. The United States liked Gomes immensely, and had invited him to tour the North African front in 1943. Gomes was, however, not the obvious choice for the opposition. The British pointed out:
He is a great patriot and a man of unshakable integrity and decency, but is no statesman and only accepted the nomination after great hesitation and because no other candidate with his moral qualifications was available. But he has no program, is no economist, and is probably too simple a soul not to be outmaneuvered by the intrigues of the president and his friends.7
Gomes had other strikes against him, too. His supporters were a motley group of liberals, including a number of older, mostly discredited politicians, whose careers had been at their height in the pre-Vargas era.8
One man who almost immediately offered Gomes his support was Osvaldo Aranha. His backing, however, was limited in value—not to mention disingenuous. In private, the former minister of foreign affairs hoped that Vargas would see the light, get rid of the “forces of darkness” that Aranha—like the British—believed were surrounding the president, cast off Dutra, and run for the presidency in a democratic election. For all Vargas’s many failings, Aranha believed him to be capable of arousing great populist support that no other Brazilian politician—let alone Gomes—could match. For this reason, and surely also because of their long-standing friendship, Aranha never entirely cut ties with Vargas. The political divorce between them was painful for both men, but Aranha never really gave up on Vargas and was certainly not willing to put a knife in his back, as many others in Rio were by this point.
Dutra, a more willing political assassin than Aranha, agreed—a little too quickly for comfort, Vargas thought—when the president asked him to stand as the government’s candidate in the presidential election. The minister of war’s candidacy was unofficially announced in São Paulo on March 15, 1945, though he could not formally accept the nomination until August 9. Vargas still hoped that Dutra would be dismissed as unelectable and that in the ensuing crisis, Brazilians would demand that he put himself forward for election. The president also wanted Dutra to split the military vote, since it would severely complicate matters for Vargas if the armed forces rallied behind Gomes, who, like Dutra, was an officer. Splitting the military, Vargas concluded, would also help to weaken its influence in the postelection era.
Dutra’s unhesitating acceptance of Vargas’s offer was a clear sign that he was going to take the campaign seriously and did not consider himself a benchwarmer for Vargas. As Vargas had expected, however, during the first weeks of the unofficial campaign—and despite the fact that all government ministers declared their public support for him—Dutra made little progress. His poor oratory and complete lack of charisma were ill suited to the campaign trail, and he was politically out of sync with the times; opposition figures pointed out that Dutra was perhaps more responsible than anyone for the cancellation of the previous elections and the establishment of the Estado Novo. All seemed to be going to plan; Dutra was splitting the military vote, just as Vargas had intended.
While he attempted to play his domestic enemies off against each other, Vargas also continued to steer Brazil through a complex and rapidly changing moment in world history. Aranha’s departure from the ministry of foreign affairs had not changed the foreign policy goals he had outlined in his memorandum for Vargas’s meeting with President Roosevelt in January 1944. Vargas, however, had a new item on his agenda: winning Brazil a permanent seat on the world council, a mission that would help strengthen Brazil’s international position. Changes in the Roosevelt administration were also forcing Vargas to rethink his priorities.
During the first part of 1945, as the war in Europe moved rapidly toward its conclusion, a number of personnel changes took place at the highest levels of government in the United States. Jefferson Caffery, the ambassador to Brazil and confidante of Aranha (and, to some extent, of Vargas as well), departed Rio in January 1945, headed for France, where he was to become Washington’s representative to that newly liberated country. Segments of the Brazilian press welcomed Caffery’s departure, because they viewed the ambassador as having to come to represent US imperialism.
Brazilians were certainly subjecting US interests in their country to renewed scrutiny as the war wound down. For some time prior to Caffery’s departure, the fate of US bases in Brazil after the war had been the subject of intense debate in both Rio and Washington. Several US officials and military officers argued that since the United States had invested so heavily in the creation of the air bases and navy facilities, it should continue to have full access to them in peacetime. President Vargas took the view that Brazil should retain control of the bases—he knew this was vital for maintaining Brazil’s regional military superiority in the postwar era. The president did, however, demonstrate a willingness to accommodate US requests to use some of the bases after the war.
The timing of Caffery’s departure—coinciding as it did with the increase in internal challenges to Vargas’s rule—complicated matters for the Brazilian president. For one thing, the US State Department’s decision to remove Caffery from Brazil effectively denied President Vargas his direct line to Washington and increased mutual suspicions in both countries about the state of relations between Brazil and the United States. But Caffery’s replacement as ambassador also proved to be a problem in his own right.
Adolf Berle, the new US ambassador to Brazil, presented his credentials to President Vargas on January 30, 1945. His bosses in Washington thought of Berle as a high-class appointment, one that was meant to flatter the Brazilians. A fellow diplomat summed up Berle in hyperbolic terms:
He has a restless, brilliant, and independent mind with a messianic complex and an utter conviction that he was born to set the world right. Ready to defy the State Department at any moment and in any connection, but trusting ingenuously that he can control them, he must at all times hold the center of the stage.9
Put simply, Berle was a meddler, and his presence in Brazil would prove anything but pleasing to the embattled Brazilian president.
At first, Brazilians were indeed flattered by Berle’s appointment, but the ambassador soon attracted a growing wave of criticism from various quarters in Brazil. Berle had many new ideas about US-Brazilian relations and about President Vargas’s regime—central among them the conviction that Vargas must allow free elections to take place in Brazil. From his very first day in the country, the ambassador set about making this happen by any means necessary. Berle felt that a failure to hold free elections would spell “disaster for Brazil,” and in his zeal he intervened so heavy-handedly in the country’s internal politics that he managed to antagonize both the government and the opposition forces.10 The State Department took note, and by the end of the year Berle would be recalled to Washington for consultations—a move the Brazilian press would speculate was a direct result of Berle’s having “intervened unduly in internal Brazilian politics.”11
Berle’s recall lay relatively far in the future when Caffery departed Rio in January 1945, but Caffery’s new position was not the only US personnel change at this key juncture in the war. At the end of November 1944, the longest-serving US secretary of state, Cordell Hull, had resigned from his post due to ill health. Hull’s resignation, along with Sumner Welles’s earlier departure from the State Department, had removed from the Roosevelt administration the principal architects of the Good Neighbor Program. Hull and Welles had been the two individuals who had done most to promise that—in return for Brazilian support in World War II—the United States would help facilitate Brazilian aspirations in the realms of economic development and the creation of modern, well-equipped armed forces. Whether Brazil could still expect such assurances from the US government was now an open question.
The departures of Hull, Welles, and Caffery were offset to a degree by another development in Washington: Nelson Rockefeller’s promotion to the rank of assistant secretary of state for American regional affairs. Rockefeller continued to be an invaluable supporter of Brazil, specifically in regard to its economic ties with the United States. The trouble was that as a result of his promotion, Rockefeller’s brief was much wider than it had been previously, and the time he could devote to Brazil was much reduced.
Hull’s successor as secretary of state, Edward Stettinius Jr., proved to be an additional complication for Brazil. Stettinius appeared, on the surface, to favor maintaining strong ties between the United States and Brazil. He visited Rio, arriving in the city on a scorching hot day in the third week of February 1945 to meet with President Vargas. He brought a personal gift for the president—a high-powered radio receiver, which the local press caustically claimed would finally allow Vargas to find out what was really going on in the outside world.12 Vargas requested that the meeting take place at the Rio Negro Palace in Petrópolis, rather than in Rio. He explained to Stettinius that Rio was simply intolerable for any sort of work at this time of year. The president failed to mention that he was also maintaining a healthy distance from the mounting opposition that was manifesting itself in Rio’s press.
The secretary of state’s motorcade made its way up the winding mountain road to Vargas’s summer retreat. Vargas was pleased to have such a high-placed member of the US administration come to visit, but he and the secretary of state had differing agendas for the meeting. Stettinius wanted assurances that in the postwar era, the United States would have access to the bases it had helped to build in Brazil. Vargas, meanwhile, demanded a permanent seat on the world council. Neither man made any promises about either issue.
The two men discussed in some detail the situation in Argentina, and specifically US policy toward the regime in Buenos Aires.13 As Stettinius explained to Vargas, the United States hoped to conclude a deal with Argentina that would have the country enter the war on the side of the Allies in exchange for restored diplomatic ties between Buenos Aires and the capitals of the Allied nations. In addition to declaring war on Germany and Japan, the Allies also demanded that Argentina hold free elections and take action against pro-Nazi elements in the country—of which, by 1945, there were more than ever. As Germany crumbled, Nazis were already beginning to trickle into Argentina, marking the beginning of an exodus that would eventually earn the country notoriety as a safe haven for Hitler’s henchmen.
The Argentine minister of war, Juan Perón, sensing that the Allies were about to win a total victory in the war, feared that Argentina would be isolated in the postwar order unless it met the Allies’ demands. Argentina would eventually declare war on Germany and Japan on March 27, 1945; and on April 10, the United States, Great Britain, and France, along with the Latin American countries, restored full diplomatic relations with Argentina.
During their meeting in late February, the US secretary of state impressed on Vargas America’s strong desire for Argentina to hold free elections at the end of the war, and the implications for the Estado Novo were not lost on the Brazilian president. Stettinius stopped short of making a similar demand for Brazil, but the writing was on the wall: the Estado Novo would need to reform, or it would perish.
The coverage of Stettinius’s visit in the Brazilian press was less than flattering. A number of articles pointed to the fact that, as the British noted, “The visit was designed to put pressure on the president and to increase the United States hold over the country, whether militarily or politically.”14 Yet while Washington appeared to be flexing its muscles in late February, flush with confidence about the direction of the war and its clout in the postwar era, that self-assurance would soon be shaken.
On April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died of a stroke. His death received enormous coverage in the Brazilian press; Correio de Manhã, for instance, devoted the entire front page of its April 13 edition to the news. Interestingly, the Brazilian press gave greater prominence to, and carried in greater detail, the tribute to President Roosevelt by the opposition candidate, Eduardo Gomes, than it did to the tribute by President Vargas.15 The latter described President Roosevelt as the leader of democracy against Nazi fascism.16
The timing of Roosevelt’s death could not have been worse for Brazil. Two weeks earlier, on March 31, the Brazilian and US militaries had signed a secret document laying out postwar military arrangements between the parties.17 It was a detailed document, one intended to determine the mechanics of postwar military cooperation. But with Roosevelt’s death there was a real risk that these accomplishments would be overturned.18
Despite vague assurances from the new administration in Washington that its policies toward the Americas would be in keeping with Roosevelt’s, there was a feeling in Rio that Brazilians had lost their ally in the White House. Newspapers waxed nostalgic about the key moments in Roosevelt’s dealings with Brazil, naturally focusing on his meetings with President Vargas.19 For Vargas, moreover, Roosevelt’s death would likely deal a blow not only to Brazilian relations with the United States, but also to Vargas’s tenuous hold on power. Roosevelt had been more preoccupied with Brazil’s foreign policy than with its internal political system, but now—as Stettinius’s recent visit had made clear—Washington’s stance seemed to be changing. Vargas could expect internal challenges to his rule to increase accordingly.
At least Vargas still had the FEB. Its ongoing contributions in the Italian theater were perhaps Vargas’s last, best opportunity to recover some internal support and to maximize his military and economic returns from the United States. Fighting in Italy resumed in February 1945, with an Allied offensive that saw the FEB taking part in the Battle of Monte Castello—a fight in which the German forces were dug in on high ground, and put up fierce resistance. But unlike in their previous clashes with battle-hardened veterans of the eastern front, the Brazilians who fought at Monte Castello in 1945 were not facing the elite of the Nazi war machine. Many of the German soldiers based in the area were either young, first-time combatants or older, inexperienced fighters.20 The German officer class, meanwhile, was by this point in the war primarily made up of survivors from the Russian front, many of whom were exhausted and suffering from the mental scars of that brutal campaign.
The Brazilians, for perhaps the first time in the war, found themselves on relatively equal footing with the enemy. The soldiers of the FEB had traveled to the Italian front essentially untrained, and received proper combat training from the US military only after they had arrived in Italy. While still extremely green, the Brazilian troops were also handicapped by inadequate leadership. The Brazilian officer class appeared, at times, overeager to please, and they failed to grasp that warfare rarely went exactly to plan. They, like President Vargas, wanted quick results to illustrate the scale of their contribution to the Allied war effort, and this sometimes manifested itself in overly aggressive battlefield strategy—and high numbers of casualties among Brazilian forces.
Not until February 21, after several failed assaults, did Monte Castello fall to the FEB. The taking of Monte Castello was a key Allied aim of the spring 1945 Italian offensive, but in accomplishing it the FEB had suffered the loss of several hundred men and many more were wounded. In spite of—or perhaps because of—these casualties, the Battle of Monte Castello came to represent the FEB’s contribution in Italy more than any other clash. Much was made of the congratulations offered to the Brazilian forces by General Clark. Back in Rio, the coverage was equally celebratory. The special edition of the Brazilian paper O Cruzeiro do Sul devoted its entire front page to the “conquest of the Castello hill.”21 Correio de Manhã ran the headline, “Big Brazilian Victory in Italy,” and recounted the difficulties that the FEB faced in securing the mountain.22 Tributes to the FEB by US officers in the field were also given extensive coverage.
The battle represented, in a sense, the coming of age of the FEB, but the expeditionary force paid a high price for its success. Brazilian casualties outnumbered German ones at a rate of more than ten to one. During one failed attempt to secure the hill, the FEB incurred nearly 150 casualties to a total German figure of just under twenty dead or wounded.23
Still, it was a heady time for the Brazilian military. In April 1945, General Masarenham de Morais received the first unconditional surrender of a German division in Italy. This was a prelude to the surrender of all German forces in Italy on May 2, 1945, just two days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin and five days before all of Germany surrendered to the western Allies, on May 7, 1945. The Germans would hold out for two more days against the Soviets, finally succumbing on May 9, 1945.
The Brazilian army, air force, and navy had collectively earned the respect of their US commanders. Likewise, the initial tension between US and Brazilian soldiers had given way to mutual respect and friendship. Back in Rio, Brazil’s military commanders were quick to seize the success of the FEB as a means to increase their own political power and leverage over the politicians.
The FEB had performed much better than expected, but the importance of its role in the Italian campaign was—and still is—heavily debated. Although the fighting in which Brazilian troops took part was indeed important, it was never decisive; the campaign in Italy would have been a success with or without the FEB’s contribution. Yet it was a mark of distinction for Brazil’s military that whereas the United States had originally planned to essentially sideline Brazilian troops during the conflict, they had held their own on the battlefield and even scored some hits against the Germans. The major reason for these successes, aside from the bravery of the men who served in the FEB, was the extensive training they received on arriving in Italy. The Brazilians’ initial resentment at the US army’s rigorous methods was eclipsed by their pride at having become a disciplined fighting force—one that had sacrificed for the Allied cause just like any other. Of the 25,300 Brazilian soldiers originally sent to Italy, the majority took part in combat. By the end of the war, 451 Brazilians had been killed and nearly two thousand wounded in the fighting or in training accidents.24
The first squadron of the FEB returned home on July 18, 1945. Thousands of Cariocas gathered in downtown Rio, frantically waving Brazilian flags to greet the returning heroes. President Vargas led this outsized welcoming committee, well aware that the triumphant return of the FEB served to improve his own political fortunes. The victory parade that followed the troops’ debarkation contrasted markedly with the previous year’s farewell parade. The men of the FEB showed off their US equipment and uniforms, which made them look like an alien army in their own country. Modernized, highly trained, and disciplined, the force barely resembled the motley crew that had departed Rio in the winter of 1944.
Yet the soldiers received disappointing news after their initial reception in Rio: the FEB was immediately broken up and its members dispersed back to their original regiments throughout Brazil. The Americans were saddened, as well, for they had hoped that the FEB would remain in Europe and help with the occupation of the liberated territories there. Indeed, President Vargas’s decision to get Brazilian troops out of Europe as quickly as possible would prove to be a huge mistake; by pulling out of Europe before the United States felt the job there was finished, he effectively cut Brazil off from much of the economic spoils of the war—and the political rewards that the Americans were beginning to dole out to their allies.
In the meantime, the wolves were at President Vargas’s door. While he was still looking for a way to remain in office to oversee Brazil’s first steps into peacetime, an orderly transition looked to be a distant prospect.