The Government of Eurico Gaspar Dutra lasted from 1946 to 1951 and began the period known as the Fourth Brazilian Republic . This period began with the deposition of Getúlio Vargas and lasted until 1964, when the Military Coup took place. The great highlight of the years of Eurico Gaspar Dutra's government were his government's alignment with the United States during the Cold War and the consequent persecution of communists in Brazil.
Campanha 1945 election and political parties
At the beginning of 1945, as a way of getting around the opposition he suffered, Getúlio Vargas decreed the Ato Additional , responsible for scheduling the holding of presidential elections for the end of 1945 and for creating the conditions for the organization of political parties in Brazil. It is worth remembering that free and direct elections for president had not taken place since 1930 and political parties had been closed in 1937.
From the Additional Act, the parties that were at the center of the political dispute in Brazil during the period of the Fourth Republic began to organize themselves. The first major party that organized itself in this scenario was an opposition party:the Union Democratic National (UDN). The UDN, at its birth, housed a heterogeneous group of people and even had some allegedly socialist members.
However, as the party organized and its ideology took hold, left-wing politicians abandoned the UDN. Thus, the UDN established itself as a fierce liberal opposition to the political legacy of Getulismo in Brazil. The great representative of the UDN during the period of the Fourth Republic was Carlos Lacerda . Regarding the UDN, historians Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling state:
[The UDN was] a conservative, moralistic, anti-democratic party with an undisguised coup vocation. The UDN had the habit of defending democracy while cooking the coup d'état in a bain-marie, its members were incapable of going beyond a strictly moral vision of public life and they valued the personal behavior of those in power to the extreme. |1| .
The other two major political parties that existed during this period emerged around the figure of Getúlio Vargas. First, the Party Social Democratic (PSD) was created by the interveners appointed by Getúlio Vargas during the Estado Novo. The PSD was one of the biggest Brazilian parties of that period and knew as few others the importance of the political game to stay in power.
Another very important party that was under the direct influence of Vargas was the Party Labor Brazilian (PTB). This party was founded by Getúlio himself with the objective of mobilizing the working classes around his political project:trabalhismo . As defined by Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling:
Trabalhismo - as this project became known - identified in the social question the great problem of the working masses in Brazil, it understood that the solution to this question required intervention of the State, and saw the social legislation introduced in the 1930s as the basis of a broad reform program that aimed to offer legal protection to workers|2| .
Throughout the Fourth Republic, the PTB grew exponentially, winning an increasing number of votes. His political project, little by little, was approaching a democratic socialist political project.
A small but still important party during this period was the Party Social Progressive, centered around the figure of Ademar from Barros .
In view of the main party forces of the period, the 1945 elections were fought by the following candidates:
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Brigadier Eduardo Gomes (UDN)
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General Eurico Gaspar Dutra (PSD-PTB)
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Iedo Fiúza (PCB)
Throughout the electoral campaign, Eduardo Gomes' candidacy seemed to be the most consistent and there was a strong impression that the victory of the udenista candidate was the most likely scenario. However, about a month before the elections, disaster struck for the UDN. During a lecture in Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Gomes disdained the votes of the Getulistas and called them “a bunch of unemployed people”.
Eduardo Gomes' speech was distorted by his opponents, who associated it with the term “marmiteiros”, thus, the opponents of the UDN took advantage of this speech to claim that he dispensed with the vote of the marmiteiros . The expression marmiteiro, at the time, was used in reference to the urban poor workers.
This mobilized workers against Eduardo Gomes' candidacy and in favor of Dutra's victory. Another important symbolic event that sealed Dutra's victory was the formalization of Getúlio Vargas' support for his candidacy. With that, the result of the elections determined the election of Dutra as president of Brazil, receiving 55.39% of the votes.
Dutra's Government
Firstly, during the government of Eurico Gaspar Dutra, the writing of a new Constitution for Brazil was organized. The new Brazilian Constitution was promulgated on September 18, 1946 and restored a series of democratic and political rights to citizens who had been suspended for years.
However, despite some advances, the 1946 Constitution is criticized by historians for remaining excluding the right to vote for the illiterate and for maintaining the exclusion of rural workers from labor rights . Furthermore, the 1946 Constitution considerably restricted the worker's right to strike.
The main highlight to be made about the years of Eurico Gaspar Dutra's government is related to the context of the Cold War . From 1946 to 1947, the picture of the bipolarization of the world was already evident, and the high interest of the United States in Brazil transformed the country into a territory of high strategic importance.
There was great fear about the growth of communism in Brazil, as the PCB (Partido Comunista do Brasil) had won about 9% of the votes in the candidacy of Iedo Fiúza and, in addition, the presence of communists among workers' organizations was very strong. Thus, Dutra's government aligned itself with US interests and adopted a policy against communism.
The result was the disruption of Brazil's diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and the PCB shutdown after the functioning of the party was banned by determination of the STF (Superior Federal Court) in 1947. Shortly thereafter, in January 1948, the candidacy of politicians elected by the PCB was revoked .
This persecution of communists justified the state's interventionist policy in labor unions. During his term, the Dutra government intervened directly in dozens of unions, and the workers' right to strike was significantly harmed, since the conditions for doing so were imposed by the government itself.
In the economic field, the Dutra government imposed a policy of import incentives of consumer goods as a way of fighting inflation. The result was the depletion of the country's foreign exchange reserves, which forced the government to abandon this policy of encouraging imports in 1948. The Dutra government also did not promote adequate investments for the industrialization of Brazil and contributed to the increase in the cost of life.
To circumvent the delicate economic situation, Dutra's government proposed the Plan Salte, in which the State would determine public investments in some essential areas for the country's development (Health, Food, Transport and Energy). Despite everything, Dutra's government achieved an average annual economic growth of 8% between 1948-1950 |3| .
|1| SCHWARCZ, Lilia Moritz and STARLING, Heloisa Murgel. Brazil:a biography. São Paulo:Companhia das Letras, 2015, p. 392.
|2| Ditto, p. 394.
|3| FAUST, Boris. History of Brazil. São Paulo:Edusp, 2013, p. 344.
*Image Credits:Rook76 and Shutterstock
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