Vargas Era - Era of Populism

Era of Populism

As a candidate in 1930, Vargas had utilized populist rhetoric to promote middle class concerns, thus opposing the primacy—but not the legitimacy—of the paulista coffee oligarchy and the landed elites, who had little interest in protecting and promoting industry.

The 1930 Revolution ushered in a coalition favoring protection of Brazilian manufacturers, backed by the bourgeoisie and landed interests. Between 1930–1934, Vargas followed a path of social reformism to attempt to reconcile these radically diverging interests. Reflecting the influence of the tenentes, he even advocated a program of social welfare and reform with striking parallel to New Deal in the United States, prompting U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to proudly refer to him as "one of two people who invented the New Deal."

Vargas sought to bring Brazil out of the Great Depression through statist-interventionist policies. He satisfied the demands of the rapidly growing urban bourgeois groups, voiced by the new (to Brazil) mass-ideologies of populism and nationalism. Like Roosevelt, his first steps focused on economic stimulus, a program on which all factions could agree.

Favoring a state interventionist policy utilizing tax breaks, lowered duties, and import quotas to expand the domestic industrial base, the populist gaúcho linked his pro-middle class policies to nationalism, advocating heavy tariffs to "perfect our manufacturers to the point where it will become unpatriotic to feed or clothe ourselves with imported goods!" In his early years, Vargas also relied on the support of the tenentes. His policies can best be described collectively as approximating those of fascist Italy under Mussolini, with an increased reliance on populism.

Vargas sought to mediate disputes between labor and capital. For instance, the provisional president quelled a paulista female worker's strike by co-opting much of its platform and requiring their "factory commissions" to use government mediation in the future.

Opposition arose among the powerful paulista coffee oligarchs to these unprecedented mass interventionist policies, as well as to the increased centralization of the government, its increasing populist and fascist stance, its protectionist/mercantilist policies (protecting politically favored producers at the expense of consumers) and the increasing dictatorial stance of Vargas himself . His tenuous collation also lacked a coherent program, being committed to a broad vision of "modernization", but little else more definitive. Having to balance such conflicting ideological constituencies, regionalism, and economic interests in such a vast, diverse, and socio-economically varied nation would, thus, not only explain the sole constancy that marked Vargas' long career—abrupt shifts in alliances and ideologies—but also his eventual dictatorship, modeled surprisingly along the lines of European fascism, considering the liberal roots of his regime. By 1934, however, many shifts were still awaiting Brazil.

Vargas's appeasement of the landed wing of his coalition soon revealed the reactionary nature of his government, especially after 1934. To placate friendly agrarian oligarchs, the modernizing state not only left the impoverished domains of the rural oligarchs untouched, the government even helped the sugar barons cement their control over rural Brazil.

Likely to the detriment of that region's long-term economic development, Vargas' static conservatism on matters of the countryside arguably exacerbated the disparities between the impoverished, semi-feudal Northeast and the dynamic, urbanized Southeast to this day. In return for the support of the sugar barons, the state crushed a wave of peasant revolts in the Northeast known as the cangaço, marking the reversal of the drastic but gradual decline of the Northeastern latifundios from the 1870s to the 1930 revolution. Northeastern latifundios had been collapsing from within amid inexorable decline and peasant revolts. In the more prosperous past during the reign of Dom Pedro II (1831–1889), the peasantry under this system remained quite subordinate to the fazendeiros. Each planter retained his own private militia responsible for the maintenance of law and order within his domain, and these private militias were often responsible for kin feuds that arose between various dynastic groups. Consequently, the Northeastern fazendeiros had grown accustomed to their iron grip on the rural countryside.

But the peasantry, to the surprise of many accustomed to overlooking Brazil's peripheral regions, was not that servile. Banditry was a common form of peasant protest. Other forms included messianism, anarchic uprisings, and tax evasion, each of which was common practice before 1930. With the Northeastern oligarchies now incorporated into the ruling coalition, the government focused on restructuring agriculture. The increasingly reactionary state intervened, suppressed the cangacieros, and restored order to the Northeast.

At the expense of the indigent peasantry—85 percent of the workforce—not only did Vargas renege on his promises of land reforms, he denied agricultural workers in general the working class' gains in labor regulations, a strategy reminiscent of contemporary leaders Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and António de Oliveira Salazar.

Appeasement of landed interests, traditionally the country's dominant forces, thus required a realignment of his coalition, forcing him to turn against its left-wing. After mid-1932 the influence of the tenente group over Vargas rapidly waned, although individual tenentes of moderate tendency continued to hold important positions in the regime. With the ouster of the center-left tenentes from his coalition, his rightward shift would become increasingly pronounced by 1934.