By PAULO NOGUEIRA BATISTA JR.*
Vargas must be considered the greatest president of all time for his extraordinary number of great achievements, which left indelible marks
To my mother, who has just died
On the day that the greatest president in our history killed himself, on August 24, 1954, 70 years ago, I was right inside the mother's womb, who was facing a difficult pregnancy, with the risk of losing the child. Bedridden, she was strictly forbidden to get up. However, upon hearing the news of the President of the Republic's suicide, she jumped out of bed and ran around the house shouting: “Getúlio killed himself!” I almost didn't get better (which might not be a bad thing, since, as Heine wrote, “sleep is good, death is better, it would be even better to never have been born”).
Dominated by Getulistas, my mother's family, the Pinheiros of Minas Gerais, was devastated, as was the vast majority of the Brazilian people. The death of Getúlio Vargas triggered unprecedented popular commotion and postponed for ten years the coup that military and civilian reactionaries and surrenderers were plotting to overthrow him. This commotion is one of the many proofs that he was, in fact, the greatest president in the history of Brazil.
Lulistas forgive me, but the current president would be in second place, in my humble opinion, ahead of two other great presidents who governed Brazil for a shorter time: Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961) and Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979) , both for a five-year term. Lula has already governed for almost ten years and, if re-elected in 2026, as we hope he will be, he will have completed 16 years as President at the end of his fourth government. Getúlio Vargas remains, however, the longest-serving president in history, with 19 years in office (1930-1945 and 1951-1954).
It is not due to his length of office, obviously, that Getúlio Vargas should be considered the greatest president of all time. What matters is his extraordinary number of great achievements, which left indelible marks.
Before listing them, I make two quick digressions. First: no one can deny that Lula is a giant, perhaps today one of the main leaders on the planet. He accomplished a lot in his first two terms, especially in the second. He heroically resisted relentless persecution. He now seeks to achieve even more, facing, however, the very heavy inheritance received from Jair Bolsonaro and the permanent sabotage of the buffoon gang.
Lula stands out among all presidents, for what he has done and is doing in terms of combating poverty and income distribution. He can be considered a successor to Getúlio Vargas, despite his and the PT's certain ambivalence regarding the Vargas era.
Second quick digression: the four presidents mentioned have at least one thing in common: they led governments marked by the combination of development and nationalism and aroused the hostility of the most conservative sectors of Brazilian society. This applies mainly to civilian presidents, but even Ernesto Geisel had to face the insubordination of General Ednardo D'Ávila, commander of the Second Army in São Paulo, a den of torture and political murders.
He also had to abort an attempted coup led by his Army minister, Sílvio Frota, a hard-line leader. This was what allowed the continuation of the “slow, safe and gradual political détente” initiated by Geisel and which would put an end to the military dictatorship in the early 1980s. A parenthesis: the inclusion of Ernesto Geisel among the most important presidents may cause surprise; I promise to explain better on another occasion.
Getúlio’s economic and social achievements Vargas
Lula and Juscelino are democratic presidents, elected by direct vote. Getúlio Vargas only became president in his second phase, when he returned to power by direct election with a resounding victory in 1950.
Even so, anyone suffers in comparison with Getúlio Vargas. I don't know if Brazilians, even those who had the opportunity to educate themselves, have an idea, even if remote, of what their governments were like. The list of achievements is long, I will try to summarize them, without the intention of even mentioning all the main ones.
In the economic field, Getúlio Vargas reacted to the great depression of the 1930s with a policy of economic intervention and defense of the price of coffee, then our main export product, which made it possible to soften and shorten the impact of the international crisis on the Brazilian economy. He practiced what Celso Furtado called “Keynesianism before Keynes”. As a result, the Brazilian economy recovered before most others.
Argentina, attached to the great success of its primary-export economy until 1929, adopted a liberal economic line and experienced a much more severe crisis. While Argentina was sinking, Getúlio Vargas's Brazil began the most intense phase of Brazilian industrialization, with the dynamic center of the economy moving from the agro-export sector to the domestic market, as highlighted by Celso Furtado.
In 1941, Getúlio Vargas created Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional, exploiting the rivalry between the Third Reich and the United States, and thus obtaining American support for the establishment of the company. In 1942, he created Vale do Rio Doce, whose first president was Israel Pinheiro, my great-uncle and grandfather of the economist André Lara Resende.
In his second term, in 1952, Getúlio Vargas created the BNDE (today BNDES). And Petrobrás in 1953, under strong resistance from foreign capital and its domestic allies. He just failed to create Eletrobrás, which would appear in 1961 with JK.
Many of the state-owned companies strategic for Brazil's development therefore date back to the Vargas Era. Not by chance, it was up to President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, neoliberal and surrenderer, leader of “privataria”, to pretentiously announce that he would put an “end to the Vargas Era”. What FHC put in place we are still looking for today. What happened during his governments was an accelerated and poorly conducted process of privatization, from 1995 onwards, which would lead to the infamous privatizations of Paulo Guedes during the government of Jair Bolsonaro.
But it was not only in the economic field that Getúlio Vargas brought fundamental changes. He was the one who instituted labor laws in 1934, providing rights for workers, such as a minimum wage, an eight-hour day, paid vacations and freedom of association. It was during his government that women's suffrage was established in 1932, fulfilling the long-standing demand of female leaders.
It is no coincidence that Getúlio Vargas returned to the Presidency in 1951 “in the arms of the people”, as he would say in his testament letter three years later. It is no coincidence that his policies aroused intense hostility from a large part, probably from the majority of the backward and predatory Brazilian elite.
The fake democrats
Getúlio Vargas was overthrown by a military coup in 1945. Then came the presidency of Marshal Eurico Gaspar Dutra, with a sad memory, marked by the implementation of a disastrous liberal policy and subordination to the interests of the United States. In 1950, however, he resumed developmentalism after defeating the candidate of the National Democratic Union (UDN), Brigadier Eduardo Gomes, whose campaign motto was “vote for the brigadier, he is handsome and single” and who went so far as to say that “no I needed the votes of this bunch of unemployed people, who support the dictator [Getúlio], to elect me president of the Republic”.
The UDN was only democratic in name. He had little electoral competitiveness, lost almost all of them to Getulism and was soon knocking on the doors of barracks, asking for military intervention. She was defeated not only in 1950, but in 1955 when Juscelino was elected. And JK would probably have been elected in 1965, had it not been for the military coup of 1964, instigated and led by the UDN “democrats”.
In passing, the Brazilian right only managed to win presidential elections when they appealed to exotic and clumsy, yet charismatic, figures – Jânio Quadros in 1960, Fernando Collor in 1989 and Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. The election and re-election of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a politician without charisma and until then without great projection, an “accidental president”, as he himself said, were only possible in very special circumstances – with the Plano Real in 1994 and a gigantic electoral fraud in 1998.
FHC's Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), successor to the old anti-Getúlio UDN, was also only democratic and social democratic in name, with its members and followers, in the vast majority, happily embarking on the parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff in 2016. It was the UDN, led by Carlos Lacerda, a radical right-wing demagogue, who engineered, together with the surrendered military, the coup that would be aborted by the suicide of Getúlio Vargas 70 years ago.
Getúlio Vargas left life to enter history, as he said in his testament letter, a document that deserves to be read even today, as it masterfully expresses the aspirations for development and social justice that we continue to seek.
*Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr. is an economist. He was vice-president of the New Development Bank, established by the BRICS. Author, among other books, of Brazil doesn't fit in anyone's backyard(LeYa)[https://amzn.to/44KpUfp]
Extended version of article published in the journal Capital letter, on August 23, 2024.
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