The Tide of Government: From Colony to Constitutional Democracy
by AFONSO ARINOS DE MELO FRANCO
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THE Brazilian Constitution of 1640 is an important attempt to employ the methods of public law, which are well developed and of long standing in Brazil, for adapting the American presidential system to the special conditions of our historical and cultural growth and of our people’s psychology.
The development of government in Brazil was a slow but logical process growing out of the need to bring order first to the commercial exploitation of the country and secondly to its colonization. The concession granted by King Manoel to Fcrnão de Noronha in 1503 was the first of many intended to achieve these ends and was implemented by the necessary political power. In 1534 a captaincy system was set up which allowed the organizers of the twelve original settlements such great feudal and economic powers that the authority of the Crown was limited forever. Fifteen years later a Captain General was appointed to Bahia, the first colonial capital, who centralized the administration of these captaincies, thereby curbing abuses of power and setting up a common defense system and a fiscal center for the Crown.
During the sixty years of Spanish rule which started in 1580, the only great change in the governmental pattern was the creation of the Council of the Indies (1604) which prepared laws and supervised the administration of the colonies.
The thirty years of Dutch occupation of the territory around Pernambuco (1624—54) came to an end with the re-establishment of the High Court of Bahia, and the extension of the authority of the central government, from then on designated a viceroyalty. In passing, it might be mentioned that the leaders of the resistance to the Dutch were a Negro, an Indian, and a white man.
The captaincies with subdivisions were frequently set up during the first half of the eighteenth century to take care of the expanding activities of mining and commerce and at the mid-century mark the government began to buy back the land from the various captains. In 1763 the Viceroy followed the economic trend to the South and established his capital in Rio de Janeiro.
While the relationship between Lisbon and Brazil grew more complicated as the colonies expanded, the affairs of each town and city were increasingly managed by the chief citizens, who set up city councils which kept an eye on local matters and influenced many of the decisions made in Rio and Lisbon. The administrative and military assistants in the captaincies, as well as the large landowners, accumulated vast powers and the same degree of authority was exercised by the missionaries over thousands of Indians.
By 1808 Brazil, though far from integrated or truly democratic, had the most stable government in Latin America and was projected into adulthood by the capture of Lisbon by the armies of Napoleon and the arrival in Rio of the Portuguese Court.
In 1821 King João VI returned to Lisbon, leaving his son Pedro as regent in Rio, but so secure and powerful had the Brazilians become that they were unwilling to return to colonial status. Pedro acceded to their demand for independence and in 1822 peacefully became their first Emperor.
The country’s emergence from its former rural, patriarchal regime to one of incipient commercial capitalism took place during the nineteenth-century reign of Emperor Dom Pedro II under the auspices of the Constitution of 1824 (and its single amendment, the “Additional Act" of 1834). Jurists and political theorists who have studied Brazil never fail to admire the stability of its institutions and the lofty plane of its political life between the coming of age of Pedro II, the second Emperor, in 1840 and the fall of the Empire in 1889. This period must be understood in the light of many complex factors, of both a general and a personal nature, which I shall try very briefly to summarize.
The first factor is the patriarchal system, economic and social, with its prime ingredients of agrarianism, plantations, and slaves. The feverish era of gold-mining had come to a close by the end of the eighteenth century — after leaving handsome evidence of its brilliant but ephemeral civilization in the towns and architecture of Minas Gerais— and Brazil entered the dramatic period of financial crisis and political instability which included the independence years (reign of Dom Pedro I, 1822-31) and the years of the Regency (minority of Dom Pedro II, 1831 40). The younger Pedro’s coming of age coincided with the spread and intensification of coffee-planting which, in spite of the many ups and downs of that commodity, was thenceforth to be the mainstay of our economy. In fact, the advent of coffee as a source of internal fiscal revenue and of foreign exchange was, perhaps, the primary factor in the stability of the Empire.
Material progress was insignificant and was restricted to the coastal regions. With most of the expenditures going for railways, port facilities, gas-lighting, water and sewage systems, and other urban services, such progress was almost always achieved by means of foreign concessions and enterprises that enjoyed guaranteed interest rates and other privileges. The nation s exports, therefore, of which coffee was by all odds the most important, were called upon to supply the exchange market with merely enough funds to import industrial products for consumption by “society’s" privileged few. Petroleum was not yet in use. Imported wheat was sold almost exclusively in the cities, for the rural areas generally used domestic corn. The consumption of foreign coal was very small, as there was v irtually no industry and only an undersized network of railroads.
Upon this foundation rested a constitutional system extremely favorable to the formation of a ruling elite which, if it did not truly represent the mass of the people, nonetheless had undeniable capacities for governing, among them a sincere and effective attitude of tolerance. The electoral machinery of the Empire was specifically designed to form such an elite and to entrust it with the destinies of the country. In the first place, the number of citizens who took an active part in public life was restricted, owing to property qualifications for voters and the use of indirect suffrage. This electoral system lasted nearly as long as the Empire and encouraged the growth of an aristrocracy, not of bluebloods but of landholders, the latter being mostly rural at first hut subsequently joined by urban owners. It also favored an intellectual aristocracy, composed principally of those with legal training.
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THE Brazilian Empire — agrarian, slavoholding, old-fashioned and patriarchal — was to all appearances the opposite of the industrialized, individualistic, progressive, and liberal Empire of the British. Paradoxically, however, there flourished in Brazilian public life a class of men who, if the proper differences and ratios are not forgotten, can he thought of as exemplifying the English parliamentary system, Joaquim Nabuco’s classic book A Statesman of the Empire, a broad and profound study of political life under the Empire, indicates the great extent to which this flexible and complicated English system was adaptable to ihe backward environment of South America. Here as in England the Conservative and Liberal parties alternated in power, although in Brazil the Crown exercised a more decisive influence in forming cabinets. Here as there, the integrity, culture, and urbanity of those who were elected allowed one to forget the irregularities and inequities of the elections themselves.
The onerous and bloody war with Paraguay (1864-70) gave rise to a political party that had always existed in republican Latin America, although it had been unknown till then in monarchical Brazil: the party of the Army. Finally, conditions related to the evolution of world capitalism, by which slave labor had become outmoded and doomed, brought about the Abolition Law. The three factors — federalism, militarism, and abolition— in conjunction with other secondary ones overturned the throne of Dom Pedro II in 1889.
The Republic, scorning the English model, turned naturally toward the American system. The Constitution approved in 1891 was therefore presidential and federalist, and it expressly recognized arbitration by the judiciary in conflicts of a political nature. Two circumstances, however, prejudiced the effective adaptation of the American presidential system to the Brazilian scene: the absence of truly national political parties and the lack of political authority for the Federal Supreme Court. Contrary to what had happened in the United States, where special historical circumstances had caused the currents of public opinion to separate at the beginning into two main streams, the regional, patriarchal society of Brazil gave rise to as many parties as there were states. These parties, in turn, remained mere instrumentalities of the various state governments — or rather, of the state governors or presidents.
The fragmentation of the legislative power into twenty parties (corresponding to the number of states, aside from the Federal District) dispersed the political currents irremediably and in so doing undermined the power and authority of the Congress. Thus, the inevitable happened. Internally divided, powerless to impose its authority upon the President of the Republic, the Congress of the republican period began to abdicate its constitutional responsibilities and to place itself—despite the protests of less and less articulate minorities—under the tutelage of Catete Palace, the building which symbolizes the presidential power.
As for the Supreme Court, it was never able in our country to assume the preponderant role which it has played in the United States. A number of causes brought about its failure as a political organ. Perhaps the principal one is the fact that, during the nearly seventy years of the Empire, Brazilian judges did not develop a mental outlook capable of exercising the important functions which the American judiciary was gradually taking over.
Justice in imperial Brazil was by preference administered along the lines of the French model, even though the parliamentary system had been copied, as described above, from the British. It is well known that the French tradition, after the era of the great Revolution, favored placing ihc judiciary under the aegis of the legislature; for this reason certain French writers consider the judiciary less as an independent power than as a kind of branch of the executive. The Constitution of the Brazilian Empire, in accord with French tradition, expressly included the function of interpreting the laws within the competence of the legislative power (Art. 15, No. 8). It thus withdrew from the judiciary that attribute which, in the United States, had existed in embryo during the colonial period and was developed after promulgation of the Constitution into a keystone of that country’s political organization. As emphasized above, when the Brazilian Republic was proclaimed after the long period of the Empire, the nation’s judiciary, with headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, the chief city of the Federal District, and capital of the country, possessed neither the technical training, institutional traditions, nor political power to serve as watchdog against excesses of th(' legislature (whose sins were more frequently of omission than of excess) or of the executive, which in the absence of a counterweight became the aggressive power under the Republic. But the latter drew its main strength from the governors of the states, and especially of the two big ones, Minas Gerais and São Paulo. Between these two existed a sort of gentlemen’s agreement regulating an almost predestined alternation of control over the most important positions in the federal government.
Circumstances which there is no space to enumerate caused this agreement to collapse in 1930. São Paulo and Minas became alienated and then hostile over the presidential election of that year, and the mineiro politicians decided to look for an ally in the state which was third-ranking in political importance and which, in terms of fighting spirit and the militancy of its sons, led the whole nation: Rio Grande do Sul.
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THE entrance upon the scene of the impetuous gaúchos —led there by the mineiros, who had won renown for their prudence and their mastery of political stratagem — had the effect after 1930 of completely upsetting the familiar historical patterns of the republican era. An important agent of that transformation was the personal influence of Getúlio Vargas who, after leaving the presidency of Rio Grande, became successively the candidate of the alliance of mineiros and gaúchos (1930), leader of the national revolution and dictator (1930-34), constitutional President (1934-37), dictator once again (1937-45), President once again (1951-54), and, in brief, the central figure on the stage for nearly a quarter of a century.
The intricate personal history of Getúlio Vargas united three elements that made him, if not an authentic revolutionary, at least a man wholly indifferent to the fate of legal institutions, which existed merely as obstacles to the fulfillment of his enormous ambition for power. Those three elements were gauchismo, militarism, and positivism. As a gaúcho from an old family of the southern frontier, Vargas carried in his blood the mixed tradition of the guerrilla wars of the pampas, and of a social life that was regulated more by the arms of the dominant patriarchy than by effective law and order. A soldier in his youth, Vargas did not continue his military career; from his barracks days he did however keep his taste for the methods of direct action, of radical intervention in political life, and for eliminating the lengthy and at times confusing delays generic to the functioning of democratic institutions. It should be pointed out that this interventionist militarism, from which the Empire was almost exempt and which became an influential factor only after the war with Paraguay, always had its main locus in the garrisons of Rio Grande do Sul. Finally, Vargas’ family belonged to the Republican Party of Rio Grande, a party founded under the auspices of the political philosophy of Auguste C omte and nourished by its doctrines. Rio Grande was the Brazilian state in which positivism had its liveliest political repercushions. For that reason its constitution represented an unusual and immoderate brand of law by comparison with the other states, guaranteeing and encouraging the dictatorship of the executive over the other powers, a dictatorship that was in fact exercised for decades by President Borges de Medeiros — today still alive and over ninety — the chief and mentor of Vargas and of the whole generation of gaúchos which came to dominate Brazil in 1930.
To these elements of his background Vargas added personal qualities that contributed in large measure to his historical destiny. Keen intelligence, personal courage, serenity, deliberation in making decisions, a taste for listening, and a talent for keeping quiet (in contrast with the Latin penchant for oratory), a startling lack of sentiments, either of hate or of affection, that guarded him against passionate impulses — these were some of his character traits. Although he was personally honest, his general cynicism and, in some measure, his scorn for the men who habitually surround those in power left him wholly unscrupulous in his choice of means for coaxing support from anyone who might be necessary or useful to his ambitions. This was the most unfortunate mark of his character and the one which, accentuated by the weariness natural for his age, carried his final constitutional government to the phase of disintegration and corruption in which it tragically foundered.
As a public figure Vargas was a patriot; he sincerely loved his land and his people. His ambition for power, his love for the game of politics, and his irrepressible bent for demagogy perverted those noble sentiments into unfortunate excesses. His love of country led him gradually into a kind of elementary nationalism; at first, perhaps, this served merely as a useful weapon, but it came to be the natural characteristic of a man who, in spite of his intelligence, was not truly cultured and lacked a broad vision of the world — and who had never left Brazil except for formal visits of a few days to neighboring countries. His love of the people, which became manifest only after he had been chief executive for several years, was transformed into deliberate rabble-rousing—the socalled “ populism ” of Vargas; its principal aim was to capture, by instilling fear of the masses, the support of the elite and of the military, who he felt were becoming alienated by the universal suspicion that he might be planning to restore the dictatorship.
It was in that tense and unpredictable atmosphere that I took on the arduous task of leading the parliamentary opposition against Vargas. I carried out the assignment as best I could, and lived through the Brazilian crisis of 1951 to 1954 at peak intensity. Although I of course feel myself unqualified to analyze my own conduct, I believe myself well enough informed to be able to summarize the causes and nature of the political struggle which broke out in Brazil, the most dramatic in our history as a republic and one of the most important of the century in all of Latin America. As I see it, the facts can be set forth and interpreted in the following manner.
With the diversification of the Brazilian economy, and particularly with its strides toward industrialization, the economic pattern of the first Republic (1889-1930), dominated by coffee-planting, underwent profound change. The slogan of the times had been: “Brazil is basically an agricultural country.”In certain respects this ceased to be true. Although it is a fact that coffee continues to account for the lion’s share of our foreign exchange, it is equally true that, in the domestic market, industrial production has acquired a social and even economic importance substantially larger than that of coffee.
This diversification of the economy made impossible— in a free country, as Brazil has nearly always been — the onetime political unity of the state parties under the command of state presidents who were more or less submissive to the President of the Republic. Significantly, it was in São Paulo, the most wealthy and progressive stale, that the new economic and social forces began to find expression through new political organizations, distinct from the old statewide republican parties. At first these new opposition parties represented the demands of the liberal urban bourgeoisie, such as elimination of electoral fraud, closer control of administrative acts, a curb on the powers of the President of the Republic, and extension of the inherent powers of the Congress.
The vigorous and powerful personalities of the last three Presidents of the first Republic, Epitácio Pessoa (1919-22), Artur Bernardos (1922-26), and Wáshington Lius (1926-30), all of them committed to an obstinate defense of the traditional presidential prerogatives which were now being threatened, aggravated the conflict instead of allowing the concessions that would have lessened it. The national revolution of 1940 broke out and swept into power the gaucho, Getúlio Vargas.
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VARGAS, who was leader more in name than in fact of the triumphant revolutionary forces, little by little made himself the fulcrum of events by virtue of both his qualities and his defects. By 1934 the change was complete. Having made no commitments of any sort and cherishing the desire, after the example of his master, Borges de Medeiros, of keeping himself indefinitely in power, he became ever more convinced that the liberalism of the revolution represented merely the thinking of an elite. The masses, he felt, awakened by industrialization and other factors, were making social demands of a very different nature; these were not to be confused with the legalistic ideals of the revolution of 1930 that he had stood for. The more he became aware of this fact, the more Vargas identified himself with these new longings and disengaged himself from his former liberal involvements. With characteristic acumen and intelligence, he began to establish himself as the knight of the new crusade.
It was, indeed, not true that social progress could be attained only at the expense of freedom. To maintain himself in power, however, Vargas increasingly associated his policy of meeting popular demands with anti-liberal practices. He was perhaps truly convinced at the end of his life that the future of the Brazilian people depended upon his remaining in power and that therefore to oppose his tenure was the same as to work against bettering the living standard of the people. After the defeat of world fascism, however, it became impossible to keep up this equivocation in a country with Brazil’s liberal traditions. The liberal demands of privileged groups were decisively confirmed by the people, and after 1943 one could predict an early end of the dictatorship. Vargas was turned out in 1945 by the armed forces, who were now thoroughly converted to the democratic cause by the allied victory to which they had contributed in Italy—but only to find himself spectacularly returned to power in 1950. This, in contrast to his election to the presidency in 1934 by the Constituent Assembly, was his first elevation to the office by a popular vote, although the election was more nearly a plebiscite in favor of a single man and against the organized parties.
Restored to power, and still in possession of his nimble intelligence and his talent for accommodation, Vargas soon perceived that his tenure depended upon other elements than that of force. When he had established the dictatorship in 1937 he had done so with the support of the military, who were hostile to communism and impressed with the success of the Italian and German dictatorships. In 1950 the situation was different. The armed forces were sincerely and firmly committed to the democratic camp and would never again serve as an instrument to destroy the Constitution. Vargas therefore turned to the proletariat as the point d’appui of his perennial ambition for power; and the indefatigable politico began to make use of the labor unions, which were now converted into mere cat’s-paws of the palace; strikes arranged by his most intimate agents; and the direct pressure of the masses upon existing institutions. However, this new brand of action, or rather, of conspiracy, demanded methods of corruption and violence which soon became public knowledge and caused widespread repugnance.
Vargas, who had newer east off his gaúcho habits of the guerrilheiro and of the provisional troop commander, resided in his palace like certain princes of the Renaissance, surrounded by his little army of personal guards. These men, recruited from the common people, were one of the most important agents of his downfall. Getting on in years, strangely isolated although constantly in company, badly informed, possibly weary and bereft of faith, Vargas was little by little losing control of the situation which had crystallized around him. Then, when the crime took place which had been plotted inside the palace itself with the aim of eliminating Carlos Laccrda, the most notable newspaperman of the opposition — a crime in which the journalist escaped and a young air corps officer lost his life—an intolerable stale of affairs within the government was suddenly revealed to the startled country. It is only fair to make clear that Vargas, although blameworthy for that state of affairs, was not responsible for the crime itself or for the more unsavory aspects of his environment. His vehement condemnation of the “river of mud" flowing through the cellar of his palace, made to an intimate colleague during his last days, allows the belief that his surprise at this reality of his own making was almost as great as that of his enemies. Psychologically oppressed by such numerous and diverse emotions, in August 1954 Vargas turned to suicide.
A man’s self-destruction is always a mysterious act which, in combination with the psychological pressures of the moment, distant and more profound influences may be expected to precipitate. Vargas’ suicide, which produced a world sensation, caused tremendous shock in Brazil itself. His friends and his enemies gave contradictory explanations. Probably both were right in much of what they said. It seems certain that Vargas killed himself so as lo defend the Constitution, under which he was the chief executive, and so as not to yield to a dismissal which, in spite of the euphemism of forced “vacation,”he fell would be permanent. He furthermore wished to save the lives of his most devoted friends, who were at his side in the palace and who might have been sacrificed had they offered armed resistance to the popular and military demonstrations that urged the President’s resignation.
In addition, however, it must be recognized that through his suicide Vargas wished also to redeem himself in the eyes of history. By killing himself he became dissociated from the crimes and blunders which had engulfed his government, and thus assured his survival for posterity. Had he lived out the few remaining years of his life he might have been forgotten by the distant future. Therefore’ his death was a kind of resurrection. It was most probably this last consideration which fortified his spirit — the spirit of a man who was, before all else, a public figure.
Translated by Richard M. Morse