[Excerpt from: The Stolen Revolution by João Almeida (1989) (2003 English Translation) - Editora Pátria, pp. 1–5]
It is tempting, after nearly half a century, to describe the Republic as the peaceful conclusion of the Revolution.
It was not.
The Republic was born in blood.
Before the Constitution was proclaimed, Brazil had already endured attempted coups, regional rebellions, mutinies, and the continuing struggle between those who had followed Vargas and those who had decided that Vargas must never rule. Vargas himself attempted to overturn the settlement imposed upon him. In the south, men who had once spoken of federal reform began speaking instead of separation. The generals in Rio governed a country which was still fighting over who had the right to govern it.
Even after the Constitution was proclaimed, the guns did not fall silent.
Just six months later, Congress declared war upon the Reich following the sinking of the Vital de Oliveira. Brazilian soldiers would leave their country not to settle an old domestic dispute but to fight a war which had engulfed half the world.
There was no miraculous moment in which Brazil stepped from revolution into peace.
There was, however, something else.
There was progress.
This is the part of the story that the defenders of the old Revolution would prefer us to forget, and which no honest historian can afford to.
The Republic was built.
Rio de Janeiro was electrified.
Roads reached places to which roads had never reached before. Communities which had spent generations separated from one another by mud, mountains, rivers and distance were drawn, slowly and painfully, into a national economy. Ports were expanded. Railways were extended. Factories received machinery. New industries appeared where previously there had been little beyond agriculture and extraction.
And beneath all of it ran the oil.
The discovery of large oil reserves in Campos, which would finally begin large-scale extraction in 1934, is probably one of the most important discoveries in the history of this great nation.
In the following years, the price of fuel fell by approximately half. That single fact changed more than the price at the pump because before the oilfields were developed, Brazilian industry lived at the mercy of foreign suppliers. Every factory which needed fuel, every transport company which needed petrol, and every machine which required imported petroleum products represented another demand upon Brazil's scarce foreign exchange. Industrial expansion could be strangled not because Brazil lacked workers, engineers, factories or customers, but because the fuel necessary to keep those factories running had to be purchased abroad.
For the first time, Brazilian industry did not have to compete with the industrial powers of Europe and North America while simultaneously paying the cost of importing the fuel upon which industrial production depended.
This is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of our history.
The Republic was not merely a political settlement imposed upon Brazil after the Revolution. It transformed Brazil. To deny that is not patriotism. It is dishonesty.
The cities grew. Industry expanded. Infrastructure spread. The state became capable of doing things that the old republic had repeatedly demonstrated itself incapable of doing. The power of the agricultural oligarchies was smashed. The interior became less distant. The Brazilian economy became less dependent upon the whims of foreign markets and foreign fuel.
The reforms under the triumvirate and later republic gave Brazil something it had failed to achieve before: the beginnings of a genuinely national economy.
But we must be careful with the word success.
A government can succeed in building a road without being justified in taking power.
A government can halve the price of oil without possessing the right to decide the political future of a nation.
A constitution can create institutions which endure without making the act which brought those institutions into existence legitimate.
This distinction matters because the central question of 1930 has never been whether the regime which built the Republic accomplished anything. It plainly did.
The question is whether Brazil was entitled to it. We were not given that choice.
That is the theft.
The men of the Junta would later point to the Republic and say, in effect, 'Look at what we built.'
And it is a powerful argument.
They could point to Rio illuminated at night. They could point to factories which had not existed twenty years earlier. They could point to roads crossing territory that had once been practically inaccessible. They could point to the oilfields, the refineries, the pipelines, the machinery, the expanding cities and the generations of Brazilians whose lives were materially better than those of their grandparents.
And they could ask, quite reasonably: What more could Vargas have done?
That question cannot be answered, and that is precisely why it remains so important.
We do not know.
Perhaps Vargas would have built the roads.
Perhaps he would have developed the oil.
Perhaps he would have electrified Rio.
Perhaps he would have broken the power of the oligarchs more completely than the Junta ever managed.
Perhaps he would have built a dictatorship.
Perhaps he would have built a stronger democracy.
Perhaps he would have done all of these things in some combination, as governments so often do.
We do not know because Brazil was never permitted to find out. The Junta did not defeat Vargas after he had governed Brazil and demonstrated what kind of government he intended to create. They stopped him before he had the opportunity, and that is the entire case against them.
History has given us the luxury of hindsight. We know that the Republic eventually became stable enough to survive its founders. We know that its institutions endured. We know that the great regional oligarchies which had dominated the old order did not return to their former supremacy, and their illusions of independence were crushed. We know that the economy expanded. We know that Brazilian industry ceased to be merely an aspiration and became a fact.
But none of those things existed in October 1930.
In October 1930 there were only three generals, an army, a country in revolt, and a man named Getúlio Vargas waiting for the office which had been promised to him.
The future had not yet happened.
And three men decided who would be allowed to try to create it.
That is why the old argument that the Republic is justified by its achievements is so seductive.
It is also beside the point.
If a man steals your house and then spends twenty years improving it, the improvements may be real. The roof may be better. The walls may be stronger. The electricity may finally work.
You still did not give him the house.
Brazil did not choose the Republic in 1930.
Brazil inherited it in 1944.
There is a difference.
And perhaps that difference is what the Republic's defenders fear most, because the Republic's greatest achievements cannot answer the question that has followed it from its birth:
What if Vargas could have done it?
What if the man who was denied power had built the roads?
What if he had developed the oil?
What if he had electrified the cities?
What if he had broken the oligarchies?
What if he had industrialised Brazil?
And what if he had done all of this without destroying democracy and giving in to foreign interests?
Are they truly loyal to Brazil, or did they do it for their own benefit? After all, the benefits they receive were obvious. The Fragosos are still the wealthiest family in Brazil.
There is no answer.
There can never be one.
The Republic may have given Brazil prosperity where the old republic gave us stagnation. It may have given us institutions where the oligarchs gave us patronage. It may even have given us, eventually, a political stability which Vargas might never have achieved.
But it did so on a road chosen for us.
And no amount of economic growth can change that fact. And that is the point of this book: to convince you that they in fact stole your revolution.