Vargas Era - Revolution of 1930

Revolution of 1930

Aside from the depression and the emergence of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, Brazil's historic dynamic of interregional politics was a significant factor encouraging the alliance that Getúlio Vargas forged between the new urban sectors and the landowners hostile to the government in states other than São Paulo during the Revolution of 1930.

Along with the urban bourgeois groups, Northeastern sugar barons were left with a legacy of longstanding grievances against the paulista coffee oligarchs of the South. Northeastern landowners bitterly opposed Washington Luís' 1930 discontinuance of the drought projects of his predecessor. These tensions, however, can be traced back far earlier. The decay of established sugar oligarchies of the Northeast began dramatically with the severe drought of 1877. The rapid growth of coffee-producing São Paulo state was the flip side of the same coin. After the abolition of slavery in the 1880s, Brazil saw a mass exodus of emancipated slaves and other peasants from the Northeast to the Southeast, thus ensuring a steady supply of cheap labor for the coffee planters.

Under the Old Republic, the politics of café com leite rested on the domination of the republic's politics by the Southeastern states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, which were Brazil's largest states in terms of population and richest. The first presidents of the republic were from São Paulo and thereafter succeeded by an alternation between the outgoing governors of the two leading states in the presidency.

Given the grievances with ruling regime in the Northeast and Rio Grande do Sul, Liberal Alliance opposition leader Getúlio Vargas chose as his vice-presidential candidate in 1930 João Pessoa of the Northeast state of Paraíba. With the understanding that the dominance of the landowners in the rural areas was to be absolute under any Liberal Alliance government, the Northeastern oligarchies were thus integrated into the Vargas alliance in a subordinate status via a new political party, the Social Democratic Party (PSD).

However, behind the façade of Vargas' populism lies the intricate nature of his coalition—ever-changing from this point onward. Consequently, these locally dominant regional groups—effectively the gaúchos of Rio Grande do Sul and the sugar barons of the Northeast—themselves ushered the new urban groups into the forefront of Brazilian political life in a revolution from above, tilting the balance of the central government in favor of the Liberal Alliance.