An exhausted Osvaldo Aranha climbed into his ministerial car after embracing Alzira and the other surviving members of the Vargas family.1 As the sun started to burn off the morning mist that hung over Rio’s coastline, the finance minister’s car pushed its way through the angry, pro-Vargas crowds that had gathered outside the Catete Palace, and made its way back downtown.
As he rode along the city’s long avenues, Aranha thought of his old friend’s achievements and the changes that Brazil had undergone in the years since Vargas first seized power.2 Aranha’s mind may well have drifted back to the foreign policy document he had produced for Vargas’s meeting with President Roosevelt. The document had become something of a yardstick for measuring Brazil’s foreign policy goals during the war, and it now revealed the distance the country had come since the war.
The original document concluded by listing the eleven objectives that Brazil should aim to achieve in the war, and by the middle of the 1950s, it was clear that Vargas’s wartime policies had gone a long way toward helping Brazil to achieve these goals. Perhaps most importantly, Vargas had won Brazil a much better position in world politics than it had enjoyed before the war. True, the nation had not achieved its goal of securing a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. At a regional level, however, Brazil emerged from the war and its immediate aftermath as the dominant force in South America. To be sure, Brazil’s rivalry with Argentina would continue, but the professionalization of Brazil’s military during World War II would enable it to rest easy in its national security. Argentina had developed and strengthened with US assistance during the postwar period; indeed, Brazil’s military confidence may well have helped to prevent a military confrontation with Argentina. Thanks to World War II, the Brazilian army, air force, and navy collectively became the most powerful armed forces in South America.
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of postwar Brazilian foreign policy was its failure to develop closer cooperation with the United States. Aranha’s dream of a formal alliance between the two nations was never truly fulfilled. Then, too, Brazil’s militarization had its dark side. Trained and armed by the United States during World War II, the Brazilian military continued to intervene in civilian politics in the post–World War II era. Much of the political instability that characterized Brazilian postwar politics was attributable to the influence of the armed forces.
Perhaps Vargas’s greatest achievement during the war was his development of Brazilian industries—especially the creation of the huge steel mill at Volta Redonda with the help of US funding. President Vargas proved himself to be a clever negotiator with the United States on this project; his victory was a huge boon for Brazil and for its ability to develop a modern economy.
Overall, however, there remains a sense that Brazil could have extracted more from the United States had it made the decision to break with the Axis powers sooner than it did, and had it formally entered the war before the conflict’s outcome was certain. Had the FEB been dispatched to Europe before the middle of 1944, moreover, and had it remained there in the immediate postwar era, Brazil might have won from the conflict even more than it did.
The Vargas “revolution” in Brazil continued after his death. His political style was dominated by a powerful survival instinct, and he never succeeded in fully taking on the interest groups whose influence often rivaled his own. Ironically, the war strengthened some of Vargas’s strongest opponents, particularly those in the military, who were willing to challenge and ultimately remove him from power on two occasions, in 1945 and in 1954.
Vargas’s closest political allies never regained the same heights they had enjoyed while he was alive. Shortly after Vargas’s death, his left eye, Osvaldo Aranha, retired from politics. He died on January 27, 1960, following a heart attack.3 His role in the development of Brazilian foreign policy had been profound, and his close relationship with the Roosevelt administration had been critical in securing US support for the modernization of Brazil’s economic infrastructure and armed forces. Today, he is remembered as the man who helped develop the close ties between Brazil and the United States at a crucial time in the nation’s history.
As for Vargas’s right eye, following his death Alzira became the spirited guardian of her father’s political legacy. She worked with great vigor to record the key events of his career and to defend his memory against attacks from his political enemies.
And what of the legacy that Vargas worked so hard to cement in his final hours, and which Alzira spent the rest of her life protecting? The Vargas era remains a divisive issue in Brazil. For all his international pretensions and grandiose visions, the domestic implications of Vargas’s politics remain the most hotly contested. Today, half a century after he took his own life (and that “first step toward eternity”), there is still no definitive answer to the charge by his critics that Vargas was the father of the poor and the mother of the rich.