Can you put the old man's portrait back on?

During the 1951 carnival, the march “Retrato do Velho” excited the people who filled the streets of Rio de Janeiro. The excitement of the population of Rio, as well as in many other cities in the country, was due to the election of Getúlio Vargas in the 1950 election. Once again, Vargas occupied the Palácio do Catete and from there he intended to continue his government project, interrupted in 1945 with his resignation.

In fact, since his departure from office, part of the population has been asking for his return. Wantism moved the news and kept the flame of hope alive among a people already accustomed to the “father figure” who held the presidency. It is an indisputable fact that Vargas' long stint as president left deep marks on the popular imagination and on the way people understood what a president would be like.

His governments, known in history books as the Vargas Era, were and continue to be the template for governments and rulers to this day. His political “exploits”, guided by populism, exacerbated nationalism, control of the media, censorship, arrests, deaths, civil disarmament and the cult of his self-image, are the archetype of fascism in its most genuine configuration. Fascism, a word so distorted today that, from a government regime with well-defined characteristics, it has become a mere instrument of verbal aggression, devoid of a true meaning.

The return of the old man's portrait to the walls of public offices in 1950 represented the victory of a model country that had been born under the promise of restoring democracy and federalism, but which contradictorily, hypocritically, merely replaced one oligarchy with another. It structured and equipped the unions to serve the capillarization of state power, reaching the most remote regions. Now, what purposes did coronelismo and its colonels serve if not themselves? For the purposes for which they were initially used, unions were a new form of coronelism. With the aggravating factor of co-opting urban workers and rural workers, with labor benefits that hampered industrial growth, keeping the country completely out of any possibility of real competition for international markets. The granting of such benefits, compared to the ancient practice of panem et circenses (bread and circuses), it does not seem so absurd to us when analyzed in terms of its tacit objectives. If the population of Rome was content with the distribution of wheat in the Forum and rejoiced in the Circus Maximus, remaining peaceful in their dealings, in the same way the working class under Vargas remained peaceful, believing themselves protected by the State, living the illusion of being in a privileged situation. Driven by the unions, their ability to react to state numbness was kept practically null.

His return to the head of state came with 48.7% of the electorate's votes. But this time his passage would be met with even more direct and fierce opposition from Carlos Lacerda. The journalist and his Tribuna da Imprensa daily undermined Vargas' self-constructed image, presenting complaints, promoting investigative articles that exposed the rottenness of the government day by day. Yes, there was a time when the press informed and did not distort public opinion. We had men of value in the national press who did not sell themselves to the petty interests of politics.

The attack on Carlos Lacerda on August 5, 1954, carried out by Gregório Fortunato, head of the president's personal guard, was possibly the closing of the barrel of the gun that was aimed at Vargas' heart. On August 24 of that year, the culmination of a sequence of tragedies for the country occurred: the president's suicide, which removed him from life, but did not destroy his legacy, on the contrary, it strengthened it. Vargas' final act did not just represent his exit from life by suicide, but a kind of final ritual for his own mythification and perpetuation of his dictatorial project.

The fundamental question in this article is whether the Brazilian people will allow (by default) the old man's portrait to be put back on the walls. This time, Vargas will not return, but his legacy remaining alive in leftist models of government maintains the threat of a return. The old man is now different, as cunning and rogue as his model, he doesn't come from São Borja, but from Garanhuns. Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ‘unconvicted’ for his crimes against the Brazilian nation, intends to resume his old practices. Defender of the giant State that has imposed so much delay and stagnation on the country; patrimonialism very much in the style of socialist matrices; social control through welfare and populist programs; from censorship to the right to free expression of thought; civil disarmament; among many other promises they have made in recent months. It is surprising that his proposals still find ears willing to accept them.

If Vargas were still alive, he would be proud of the pupils he formed, the most obvious example of which is Mr. Lula, but we cannot forget Ciro Gomes who loses nothing in terms of his even more explicit and shameless fascism.

A sad fate for a president who defends Christian agendas, family values, economic liberalism, the autonomy of his people and freedom in all its aspects. Sad and difficult is the journey of leading a country still structured and equipped under Vargas' fascist model, which has a large part of its political elite and civil servants supporting this retrograde and statist model. Old Lula's portrait, nor that of Ciro Gomes, can litter the walls of offices throughout Brazil. Returning to the past is a path of destruction for defenders of freedom, but equally so for the unwary defenders of fascism. Yes, those who today are plotting the gang's return to the site of their crimes will, at some point in the future, be possible victims of their guides. Criminals do not have friends, they have cronies, and this category betrays and corrupts the impetus of their personal interests.

A model that for almost a hundred years has kept Brazil at a slow pace, with education, health care, sanitation, technology and industrialization rates far below the minimum expected, given the overwhelming volume of taxes charged. Taxes that, as we know, serve more to maintain the structure than its founding objectives. A system like this cannot be continued as it has already provided more than enough proof of its inefficiency. Brazil and its people deserve better portraits.

The corruption that became institutionalized during the years of Lula and Dilma's governments, the government's spurious cronyism with the old press, public money serving the interests of other nations, all of this reminds us of the late voice of Lacerda, who should inspire our parliamentarians today. His words spoken in 1953 are as current as if they had been spoken today.

“My friends, we set out on what appeared to be a crusade for freedom of the press and turned out to be a crusade for national liberation.

And this did not happen by chance. that when you want to poison a nation, you start by poisoning the sources of public knowledge, you start by poisoning the sources of information, without which the people don't know what's going on, or, even worse, they only know wrong what's going on right.

It is through the corruption of the press, it is through the intimidation of the press, that the people's own opinion is corrupted and intimidated.

If it was set up in Brazil, it wasn't just a business for a group of power's godsons. It was not just a deal made at the expense of the misery and plundering of the people. It was also a business to destroy the people's trust in democracy.

It was a deal made to make the people disbelieve in themselves, to make the people think that there was no point protesting in the public square, because the men in power would think for them and act for them from the beginning to the end. (...) Well, very well, Mr. Getúlio Vargas finally intends to punish corrupt people and corruptors! But where, where was he when corruption was rampant? What did he do when the doors of the Banco do Brasil opened to let out the money that a foreigner and an adventurer were busy with? May he understand! That he understands that if the relative majority of Brazilians gave him a respectable vote of confidence, since he cannot respond to that confidence, he should at least respond to his feeling of respect for himself, and not disrespect himself. We do not want to disrespect Mr. Getúlio Vargas as the President of the Republic. To do this, it is essential that he takes his son out of this mess! It is essential that he immediately punishes those who involved his son in this mess! It is essential that he stops holding his breath and that he, who had no qualms about tearing up a Constitution, rips up the 'Ultima Hora'!”

With very small adaptations, this speech could be addressed to the old Lula. Faced with the cyclical repetition of facts, always involving the same ideals, we will not shy away from our duty to state: definitively, we will never put up the portrait of the old man again!

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Article published in Revista Conhecimento & Cidadania Vol. I No. 11 May 2022 edition – ISSN 2764-3867