80 years ago, on October 29, 1945, he resigned as President of the Republic. The act, carried out at the request of the military, put an end to the dictatorship of the Estado Novo, which, from 1937 to 1945, arrested, exiled and tortured opponents, centralized the government and inserted Brazil into the .
Despite being less remembered today than the 1964 dictatorship, the Estado Novo used many devices similar to the regime that would come almost two decades later.
To persecute opponents, Vargas created the TSN (National Security Court), linked to the Superior Military Court, after the 1935 Communist Revolt, still under constitutional government.
In TSN, proceedings against the accused took place within a period of just five days, and it was only possible to appeal to the court itself for a change in sentence.
Between 1936 and 1937, before Vargas’ self-coup, 1,420 people were sentenced by the court, according to FGV (Fundação Getúlio Vargas). From the beginning of the Estado Novo until Getúlio’s resignation, more than 10,000 people were tried and 4,099 were sentenced by the court.
Exact numbers on the number of victims of the Estado Novo are not known, as there was no initiative like the National Truth Commission, which identified and cataloged the abuses committed by the military dictatorship.
Despite this, documents from the period report the scenario of crimes committed. Among those arrested by the regime are the communist militants Luís Carlos Prestes and Carlos Marighella, the writers Graciliano Ramos and the artist, intellectual and activist Patricia Galvão, known as Pagu. Prestes, Marighella and Pagu reported being tortured.
The Vargas political police were commanded by Filinto Müller, chief of police of the Federal District (at the time the city of ). Müller had joined the tenentista movement and was part of Coluna Prestes, but was expelled by the future communist leader for threatening to desert the movement.
The command of the torture machine by the military had the component of “almost like a personal revenge against Prestes”, says Alberto Cantalice, leader of the PT and the Perseu Abramo Foundation, which coordinates the Memorial da Democracia project.
Communists, especially those accused of involvement in the 1935 Intentona, were prime targets for Vargas torture. Arthur Ewert, a German activist and former deputy, was arrested and tortured for months throughout 1936.
“There’s a hair-raising scene: with him tied up, the executioners place a wire inside his urethra, leave the tip out and heat the wire with a blowtorch”, says Fernando Morais, journalist and author of the book ‘Olga’, which tells the story of Olga Benário, wife of Prestes, Jewish and communist, handed over by Vargas to be killed by the Nazis in 1936, shortly before the Estado Novo.
During the dictatorial period, the repressive machine strengthened. Pagu was arrested and tortured for opposing the regime; was released in 1940. Hermínio Saccheta, journalist who worked at Folha da Noite in the 1940s and Folha de S.Paulo in the 1970s, he was detained between 1938 and 1940 for his links with the Communist Party, from which he had been expelled a year earlier.
Cases of torture were gathered by journalist David Nasser in texts published in the magazine O Cruzeiro and later compiled in the book “Falta Someone em Nuremberg”, which makes reference to the court that judged the crimes of the Nazis after the Second World War. The “someone” in the title is Filinto Müller.
Morais classifies the torture of the period as “savagery”. “It was a business of unprecedented brutality.”
For him, one difference in relation to the military dictatorship is the profile of the victims. While the Estado Novo turned against the rebellious communists of 1935 and the integralists who attempted a coup in 1938, the military dictatorship persecuted opponents within the Army, in public bodies and even conservative politicians, such as Carlos Lacerda.
With the end of the Vargas dictatorship and the redemocratization of the country, there were two attempts to investigate the regime’s political crimes, both led by General Euclides Figueiredo, father of the future dictator João Figueiredo (1979-1985). Euclides was convicted and arrested by the TSN accused of having participated in the organization of the 1938 integralist uprising.
Elected deputy for the UDN, in opposition to Vargas, he managed to get the 1946 Constituent Assembly to install a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the regime’s abuses, but the investigation did not progress, and the body’s meetings rarely had a quorum to follow. The constituent ended without any report on the topic.
The deputy managed to have a new committee installed in the Chamber. Despite initially being more successful, this commission also lost strength and was closed without a report.
Cantalice mentions that the communists themselves allied themselves with Vargas in the last year of the dictatorship, participating in the Querista movement, which aimed to keep the dictator in power, but as constitutional president, which helped to improve his image.
“If the communists, the biggest victims of the Estado Novo, climb onto Getúlio’s platform, then in the eyes of the people he was right. It’s the same thing as [seria se] the left climb onto the platform [ditador João] Figueiredo”, he says.
Even with flagrant violations of human rights (a concept ratified only after the end of the Estado Novo), the crimes of the Vargas Era are less remembered in relation to the abuses of the military regime and have less impact on Getúlio’s perceived legacy.
For Morais, this is due to a pro-Getulist feeling in society at the time, due to the consolidation of labor rights, industrialization of the country and improvement in the population’s quality of life. This feeling would have been confirmed by the election of Eurico Gaspar Dutra, Vargas’ candidate for succession, in 1945.
“The pro-Vargas feeling existed mainly among the poorest and also among those who had some feeling of sovereignty, of nationality. This feeling was stronger because the repression was specific, not generalized as in the 1964 dictatorship”, he says.
Cantalice agrees. “Getúlio in 1950 is the founder of the modern Brazilian State. He is the first manager to place workers in government. What remains is more positive than negative.”
