The New Régime in Brazil

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ON November 10, 1937, Rio de Janeiro awoke to find the Senate and Chamber of Deputies surrounded by pickets of mounted Military Police. A few hours later President Getulio Vargas abolished the existing Constitution and imposed one of his own manufacture. Brazilians as well as foreigners have referred to those events as a coup d'état. But that term implies illegality, violence and surprise, and is not quite accurate as a summary of what happened. The illegality of Dr. Vargas' act was of course flagrant: the Constitution was abolished by the very man who was its chief custodian. But there was no violence, for army chiefs had seen to it that there could be no resistance. As for surprise, those who had followed the course of events in Brazil during recent years scarcely did more than raise an eyebrow.

It is in its implications, however, that Dr. Vargas' act is most liable to misapprehension. A coup d'état introduces a change of government, whereas in this case no real change was effected. What Dr. Vargas did was to give the coup de grâce to a fiction, the fiction that Brazil was a free republic. The truth was that ever since he had first seized power in October 1930 Dr. Vargas had been paramount in Brazil. The new Constitution was imposed merely by a pronunciamento, with a slight variation on that classic South American process: Dr. Vargas has not been an insurrectionist for seven years; he has become an evolutionist, determined to remain in power. The fundamental question in Brazil today is whether he carries the nation with him in imposing a régime designed to give effect to that determination...