"Necessities"

To the Presidents of the 20 more or less democratic republics of Latin America Franklin Roosevelt last fortnight dispatched copies, inscribed and handsomely printed at his own expense, of the enthusiastically democratic speeches he delivered during his junket to the Pan-American Peace Conference in Buenos Aires last year. Last week came a singularly disappointing response from Good Neighbor Roosevelt's "good friend" President Getulio Dornelles Vargas of Brazil.

Strong Man Vargas was not given his office by popular suffrage. He seized power after his defeat at the polls in 1930 by marching into Rio de Janeiro with an army of his neighbors from the State of Rio Grande do Sul, bottling old President Washington Luis up in jail, cockily proclaiming himself Provisional President instead. That coup has been known as the "Coffee Revolution," since Brazil's former dominant States, Sao Paulo and Minas Geraes, had been weakened by a collapsing coffee market. Dressy but small (5 ft. 4 in.), President Vargas proclaimed himself a foe of the tottering coffee barons, set out to consolidate his political position by binding Brazil's 20 jealous, bickering States, most of whose governors supported their own armies, into a tightly centralized commonwealth. Having put down revolution in Sao Paulo in 1932, he had himself elected President by a Constituent Assembly in 1934, promulgated a new constitution reducing States' rights. This act shortly produced further revolutionary rumblings. These Strong Man Vargas has dealt with chiefly by governing vast Brazil from his white Guanabara Palace under a succession of "State of War" decrees which have kept his 45,000,000 fellow citizens, who live in half of South America, virtually under martial law.

Still safe in a State of War was Brazil this year when Strong Man Vargas, constitutionally unable to succeed himself, announced he would hold an election January 3, nominated as his Presidential candidate squint-eyed Jose Americo de Almeida (TIME, June 14). But big Brazil reacted unexpectedly to this news. Commotion broke out in the Rio Grande do Sul bailiwick of swashbuckling Governor Jose Flores da Cunha, whom President Vargas had to replace with a Federal military interventor. A temporary lifting of the state of war for campaign purposes soon had Brazil's Leftists noisily at the throat of Brazil's green-shirted Fascist Integralistas, whose leader Plinio Salgado wears a Hitler mustache and advocates in misty Portuguese a "corporative State." Last fortnight more serious trouble appeared. The Departmento Nacional do Cafe, which has destroyed $638,750,000 worth of Brazil's surplus coffee to keep up the world price, announced that its deficit of $72,000,000 was becoming unmanageable, threw up its efforts at stabilization altogether.

When coffee promptly skidded from 11 1/2 -c- to 6.8-c- on the New York Exchange and Brazil developed a strong case of the jitters, Strong Man Vargas decided that democratic gesturing had gone far enough. To Guanabara Palace last week he summoned his Minister of Justice, bespectacled Francisco Campos. The document which Minister Campos soon scuttled out with was Vargas' Constitution No. 2, whose nub was to make Getulio Vargas an even more unassailable boss. Under it he will not only be President for six years more but he will be able to suspend Parliament to govern by decree, reduce Brazil's remote poorer States to the impotent status of territories, control the rest by disbanding their legislatures at will, overrule Brazil's hitherto mildly independent Supreme Court, in general make his already functioning dictatorial power not only stronger than ever but 100% constitutional. Since most of Brazil's $760,000,000 foreign debt is already in default, Vargas' Constitution No. 2 further enshrined the status quo by enabling Dictator Vargas to declare a formal moratorium. All this Getulio Vargas coolly described as "neither fascism nor communism but democracy molded to Brazilian necessities." When two of Brazil's 20 State governors demurred, Dictator Vargas promptly replaced them by military officers.

Approached for further light at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University where he is a sophomore student of chemical engineering, swart Getulio Vargas Jr. observed: "I don't have anything to do with what's happened in Brazil. I'm just a Hopkins man."

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