SOO #80 - Getúlio Vargas
The father Brazil loved, feared, and could never outgrow
When you hear the name Getúlio Vargas, you probably imagine a stern man in a dark suit—Brazil’s answer to stern men in dark suits everywhere. You might picture him looming over the nation like a brooding cloud of regulation; a bureaucratic monolith whispering sweet nothings about order into the ears of a carnival-mad populace. And yet, beneath that sombre façade was a paradox: a man who spoke of freedom while strangling dissent, who championed the working class even as he built an apparatus that co-opted their unions, who deified himself in propaganda even as he brooded over the solitude of power.
To millions, he was more than a president—he was a father. Not in the benevolent, bedtime-story sense, but in the paternalistic, “I know what’s best for you” sense. He dressed the nation, fed it, disciplined it, and told it what to dream. Like many fathers, he could be generous; like many fathers, he could be suffocating. Brazil was his household, and he its unruly, adoring, exasperated child. Vargas was, above all else, a contradiction made flesh—Brazil’s reluctant dictator, its overenthusiastic ghost, and the patriarch it could neither wholly embrace nor entirely escape.
Born on 19 April 1882 in the dusty expanse of São Borja, a frontier town nestled near the border with Argentina, Getúlio Dornelles Vargas came into the world not as a child of struggle, but as the favoured son of a local aristocracy. His family belonged to the gaúcho elite—wealthy cattle ranchers who lorded over vast lands with a mixture of rugged independence and old-world paternalism. His father, Manuel do Nascimento Vargas, was a former military officer and local caudilho, a kind of southern strongman who combined martial swagger with political cunning. His mother, Cândida Dornelles Vargas, descended from influential Azorean stock, brought a quieter but no less formidable presence to the household, imbuing her son with an acute sense of duty and discipline. This was no household of humble beginnings; it was a breeding ground for ambition, the kind of home where boys were expected to become masters of men.
At the time of his birth, Brazil was still adjusting to the aftershocks of imperial collapse. The monarchy had been abolished in 1889, less than a decade earlier, replaced not by a flourishing democracy but by a republic carefully tailored to suit the ambitions of powerful regional oligarchs. The so-called República Velha, or First Republic, was a political theatre dominated by the café com leite pact—a rotating hegemony between São Paulo’s coffee barons and Minas Gerais’s dairy interests. The institutions of state were maintained with the delicate precision of a pocket watch, except the hands always pointed toward the interests of those who already owned the land, the banks, and the ballot boxes.
Vargas grew up as both observer and apprentice in this political ecosystem. São Borja, though geographically peripheral, pulsed with ideological fervour and elite networking. In the smoky salons of the local aristocracy—part gentlemen’s club, part political war room—he absorbed the language of power as a native tongue. It was here, beneath the chandeliers and over the clink of crystal glasses, that he learned that politics was not a calling, but a calculation. His childhood was not burdened by precarity but enlivened by proximity to power; he saw early that authority was not always earned—it was often inherited, traded, or seized.
As a young man, Vargas attempted to follow in his father’s military footsteps, enrolling in the Army where he briefly held the rank of sergeant. But he quickly realised that the strict hierarchies of military life chafed against his temperament. Vargas was not born to salute orders—he was born to write them. He resigned his commission without fanfare and pivoted toward law, enrolling in the Free Faculty of Law in Porto Alegre, the intellectual capital of Rio Grande do Sul. There, he steeped himself in legal codes, Roman law, and the latest European political theories. He was a solid, if unremarkable student, but law school offered more than a degree—it offered a map to the corridors of Brazilian power. In a country where legal expertise doubled as political currency, the toga became as valuable as the sword.
He graduated in 1908 and could have easily slipped into a life of comfortable provincial prestige: a legal practice here, a sinecure there, Sunday afternoons spent discoursing on legal ethics between brandy and cigars. But Vargas was not built for comfort. He was drawn to the machinations of public life, to the gritty, unglamorous theatre of political deal-making. He ran for the state legislature of Rio Grande do Sul and won, beginning a career defined not by ideological clarity but by tactical brilliance. In these early years, he proved himself not as a charismatic speaker—his oratory was famously monotonous—but as a patient, relentless operator.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, who sought to dazzle in the chamber or grandstand in the press, Vargas preferred the shadows. He understood that in Brazil’s early republican system, policy was not debated into existence—it was birthed in whispers between allies, in signed backroom documents, in the exchange of favours disguised as patriotism. He was a master of political jiu-jitsu: never the loudest voice, but always the last to speak when it mattered.
His ascent from state deputy to federal deputy in 1922 marked a shift from regional player to national figure. In Brasília, he served under the presidency of Artur Bernardes, where he was quickly recognised for his astute grasp of fiscal policy. Appointed Minister of Finance in 1926 under Washington Luís, Vargas inherited a nation navigating both global uncertainty and domestic stagnation. He used the post to consolidate connections with the banking sector, industrialists, and agrarian elites. Yet, ever the pragmatist, he kept one eye on the rising tide of dissatisfaction among Brazil’s urban workers and disenfranchised rural poor.
By 1928, he had returned to Rio Grande do Sul as its governor, where he truly came into his own. There, he enacted a series of administrative reforms that not only modernised the state’s fiscal apparatus but also deepened his reputation as a manager who could blend technocratic competence with populist appeal. He used his governorship not as a resting post but as a political springboard, transforming the state’s patronage networks into a launching pad for national ambition. His political machine—the so-called “getulistas”—grew roots across the southern states, laying the groundwork for what would become the greatest power grab in Brazilian republican history.
By the time the 1930 presidential elections approached, Vargas was no longer just a provincial power broker. He was a national contender, ready to challenge the São Paulo–Minas Gerais duopoly that had long treated Brazil like a family inheritance. Backed by the Aliança Liberal—a coalition of dissidents, disillusioned oligarchs, military reformists and regionalists—Vargas ran for president against Júlio Prestes, São Paulo’s candidate. The election, predictably, was marred by accusations of fraud and manipulation. When Prestes was declared the victor, Vargas did not concede. Instead, he sharpened the knives
What followed was less a revolution than a coup dressed in revolutionary drag—part operetta, part strongman theatre. On 3 November 1930, in the smouldering aftermath of João Pessoa’s assassination and amid a nation teetering on economic despair and political fatigue, Getúlio Vargas didn’t win power; he took it. With military backing, governors changing sides like tenors chasing a new key, and a hastily assembled narrative of popular legitimacy, Vargas marched into Brasília without ever winning an election. The capital folded without resistance, as if the Old Republic had finally died of embarrassment.
That regime—the so-called República Velha—had long since exhausted the country’s patience. It functioned like a private club for agrarian elites, particularly those from São Paulo and Minas Gerais, who rotated the presidency like poker players passing the dealer button. “Café com leite”—coffee and milk—wasn’t just a nickname; it was an epitaph for a political system defined by coronelismo, vote-rigging, and backroom deals disguised as governance. Vargas’s arrival signalled something new: the espresso machine had been unplugged, the gentlemen dismissed.
Yet if the Old Republic exited with a shrug, its replacement arrived with full fanfare. The Vargas Era announced itself not with tanks, but with proclamations and pageantry—and just enough disruption to convince Brazil that history was being made. And in some sense, it was. For all his calculation, Vargas intuited a deeper shift: Brazil was no longer a plantation masquerading as a republic. An urban middle class was emerging, industrial workers were stirring, and the machinery of power could no longer run on cigars and lineage alone. He offered a new formula—less consensus, more command.
Still, let’s not confuse political instinct with democratic virtue. Vargas had claimed the presidency as a temporary steward of national salvation, but his early moves were unmistakably authoritarian. He dissolved Congress, sacked elected governors (replacing them with loyal interventores), suspended the 1891 Constitution, and ruled by decree. All of it was draped in rhetoric about reorganisation and national rebirth. Democracy, he promised, would be restored—eventually. Once the country had been properly tamed. Once power was firmly in his hands.
This wasn’t improvisation. Vargas had rehearsed this part for years, first in São Borja’s dusty parlours, then in Porto Alegre’s legal circles, and later amid the political back-alleys of Rio Grande do Sul. He knew that Brazilian politics was never about persuasion—it was about occupying space. Whoever filled the vacuum filled the throne. In 1930, that vacuum practically begged for an emperor.
His opponents, particularly the elites in São Paulo, had written him off as a provincial grumbler. But Vargas, backed by the Aliança Liberal and buoyed by unrest among the junior military (tenentes), understood something they didn’t: that ballots could be ignored, but bayonets could not. When the presidency was handed to Júlio Prestes—the handpicked successor of President Washington Luís—Vargas cried fraud and activated his supporters. João Pessoa’s assassination, though unrelated to politics, was instantly mythologised into a martyrdom. In revolutions, truth is a luxury.
On 3 November, Vargas made his move. No formal inauguration. No legal transfer. Just swift action, and a declaration of a “provisional government”—a euphemism, of course, for what was effectively a civilian dictatorship. Subtle it was not.
What followed was a tangle of tension, compromise, and orchestration. The early 1930s read like a telenovela penned by a caffeinated Machiavelli. The working class demanded reforms. The military itched for relevance. Regional oligarchs seethed at their reduced power. Vargas played them all. Like a seasoned conductor, he let each faction believe it held the melody, while he conducted the entire arrangement from backstage.
The most dramatic act came in 1932, when São Paulo—bruised and marginalised—rose in rebellion. The Constitutionalist Revolution was an armed plea for a new legal order, though its subtext was restoration of old privileges. Vargas, unmoved, deployed federal troops and crushed the uprising. But always the tactician, he reframed victory as generosity: São Paulo’s calls for a constitution would be answered, not because they were right, but because he was magnanimous.
In 1933, he convened a Constituent Assembly to draft a new charter. On the surface, it was a progressive leap: secret ballots, women’s suffrage (for literate women), social protections, labour rights, and economic interventionism. It even curbed the worst excesses of coronelismo. To the untrained eye, it looked like democracy.
But anyone watching closely saw the sleight of hand. The constitution did little to constrain Vargas. He retained sweeping emergency powers, appointed state governors, and kept a tight grip on the military. Elections were held, but under strict choreography. The press was more free than before, but still watched. Dissent was permitted—so long as it posed no real threat. It was democracy with seatbelts. Vargas, naturally, held the keys.
Meanwhile, he built a new economic order in his own image: centralised, dirigiste, paternal. The Ministry of Labour, Industry and Commerce became a powerhouse—not just regulating unions, but absorbing them into the state apparatus. Collective bargaining became ritual. Strikes were discouraged. Union leaders were often handpicked. Vargas recast himself as the ultimate referee in the class struggle—not a neutral party, but a benevolent overlord.
His relationship with workers was the most theatrical of all. He gave them rights, yes—but rights that came prepackaged with supervision. He recognised their demands, but demanded loyalty in return. The entire labour apparatus became a monument to gratitude. Every benefit a gift. Every reform a presidential blessing. Brazil, in this new model, was not a republic—it was a household. And Vargas, predictably, was the patriarch.
By 1937, Vargas no longer needed to borrow the vocabulary of dictatorship — he began writing his own grammar of control. The Estado Novo was not merely a political regime; it was an aesthetic, a style of governance obsessed with unity, order, and the erasure of inconvenient noise. If the early 1930s had been a negotiation between power and possibility, the late '30s were a declaration: Brazil would modernise, industrialise, and submit — preferably in that order.
The pretext, naturally, was danger. It always is. In a country still haunted by the spectres of communism and European fascism, Vargas conjured a threat from the shadows — the infamous Plano Cohen. Allegedly a communist plot to overthrow the state, it was in fact a complete fabrication, a clumsy piece of fiction fed to the public through breathless headlines and staged anxiety. But it did the job. On 10 November 1937, claiming the republic faced imminent collapse, Vargas abolished the newly minted constitution and granted himself near-total power.
No more elections. No more political parties. No more pretending.
The Estado Novo was born not with the thunder of tanks but with the quiet signing of an "Institutional Act." It was a dictatorship that smiled — coldly — for the camera. Modeled in part on Mussolini’s Italy and Salazar’s Portugal, it prized national unity above all else. Dissent was recast as treason, diversity of thought as sabotage. Vargas, the once provisional leader, now sat enthroned as President-Father, cloaking brute force in bureaucratic respectability.
But repression in Brazil never looked quite like its European counterparts. The DIP — Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda — didn’t need to burn books; it simply rewrote the narrative. Films, newspapers, schoolbooks — all channels of communication were streamlined into one voice, and that voice was Vargas’s. He wasn’t just creating policy; he was curating memory. A state without ideology is vulnerable. A state with only one is invincible.
And yet, what makes the Estado Novo so complex — and so unnerving — is that it wasn’t entirely built on terror. It was built, in part, on gratitude. Workers had their rights expanded. Women (literate, middle-class women, to be precise) could vote. A new industrial workforce emerged with pensions, holidays, and a sense of national purpose. Vargas didn't crush the left; he seduced it. He didn’t just centralise power; he distributed favours. Even as he censored the press and jailed opponents, he cultivated an image of benevolence. You couldn’t call it freedom, but you could call it order. And for many Brazilians, that was enough.
The industrial policies of the era were equally paradoxical: modernising yet protectionist, nationalistic yet heavily influenced by foreign capital. Vargas pushed for import substitution, built steel plants, founded public institutions like the National Steel Company (Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional), and laid the foundation for a national bourgeoisie — a class that would owe its existence not to entrepreneurship, but to the state. Under Vargas, capitalism in Brazil didn’t emerge organically. It was state-engineered, designed in ministerial offices, assembled in factories, and distributed like a national brand.
Meanwhile, labour unions were granted a peculiar kind of existence. They were legal, institutional, and entirely docile — or else. Union leaders were vetted by the state like bureaucrats applying for a passport. Collective bargaining became performance art, complete with government-approved scripts and applause cues. Strikes were no longer cries for justice; they were rebranded as acts of sabotage against the “national interest.” The working class had won a seat at the table, yes — but the meal had been planned, cooked, and served by Vargas, who also decided who got dessert.
This was not grassroots democracy. It was top-down harmony, achieved not by consensus but by choreography. Labour didn’t negotiate with capital; both danced to the same state-arranged melody, careful not to miss a step. Vargas cast himself not merely as an arbiter but as a composer, orchestrating the industrial symphony with a firm baton. Social peace was achieved — manufactured, managed, and enforced when necessary. His critics called it corporatism. His supporters called it justice. His enemies called it fascism with samba. In truth, it was all three — a uniquely Brazilian synthesis of authoritarian control, theatrical benevolence, and rhythmic optics of inclusion.
And yet, for all its repressions and contradictions, the Estado Novo managed to hold together a fragmented nation. Brazil had always been a country of regions — of coastal elites and interior neglect, of imported ideologies and tropical improvisation. Vargas did not erase these contradictions; he institutionalised them. Under his regime, the state began to look less like a mosaic and more like a central command: vertical, paternal, and obsessed with unity. Brasília hadn’t been built yet, but the centralisation of Brazil was well underway — political, cultural, symbolic.
The radio, now under the watchful eye of the DIP, no longer broadcast a hundred competing accents but a singular national tone. School textbooks spoke not of provincial pride, but of Brazilian destiny. Regional grievances were not addressed; they were absorbed, renamed as technical issues, filed under “integration.” Vargas’s genius was not in eliminating division — it was in domesticating it, translating difference into policy, and dissent into managed ritual. Brazil, once a nation of scattered voices, now hummed in orchestrated unison.
In the shadow of European war, Vargas played both sides like a seasoned gambler who knew when to fold fascism and when to bluff democracy. He flirted with Axis rhetoric in the late 1930s, admired their order, envied their spectacle, and briefly entertained the notion that Brazil, too, could march to the drumbeat of destiny. But pragmatism, not dogma, was his compass. As World War II intensified, and as the geopolitical winds shifted, Vargas gradually tilted toward the Allies — not out of moral alignment, but out of shrewd necessity. Brazil declared war on the Axis in 1942, sent troops to Italy, and joined the fight for democracy abroad — even as it continued to smother it at home.
It’s one of the Vargas era’s most bitter ironies: Brazilian soldiers died fighting fascism in Europe while their own government mirrored it in Rio. The FEB (Brazilian Expeditionary Force) returned victorious — sunburnt, weary, and clutching the banner of liberty — only to find that their homeland was still marching to the beat of censorship and decree. The contradiction couldn’t hold.
By 1945, the war had changed more than just borders; it had changed the mood. Fascism was now a slur, not a style. And Brazil, under growing pressure from its own military and from foreign allies eager to see democratic “alignment” in Latin America, could no longer maintain the Estado Novo façade. Vargas was pushed out — gently, bureaucratically, and without violence. No trial, no exile, no dramatic purge. Just a polite shove toward the exit, sealed with handshakes and assurances that it was time to “modernise.”
He returned to São Borja not in chains, but in tailored civilian clothes. Not disgraced, but displaced. Not as a defeated tyrant, but as a retired patriarch. The man who had ruled Brazil for fifteen years left office as quietly as he had entered — not with gunfire, but with a file folder and a handshake. A political life ended, or so it seemed, in a bureaucrat’s whisper.
But unlike most dictators, Vargas wasn’t done. Not even close.
In 1950, Vargas pulled off perhaps his greatest and most paradoxical feat: he returned from political exile not on horseback, not at the tip of a bayonet, but through the front door of democracy. The man who had once suspended elections with the stroke of a pen now placed his fate in the hands of the very people he once ruled without consent. And they gave it back to him—overwhelmingly. His campaign was a masterclass in populist theatre: he framed himself as the voice of the forgotten, the guardian of labour, the lone bulwark against foreign capital and domestic betrayal. While the political elite rolled their eyes, the electorate roared. Brazil had not forgotten Getúlio Vargas. In truth, it had been waiting for him.
And behind much of the campaign’s meticulous choreography stood Alzira Vargas, his daughter, political confidante, and—by then—an experienced operator in her own right. Having served as his adviser and informal chief of staff during the Estado Novo years, she understood both the mechanics of power and the subtleties of her father’s image. In 1950, she became his strategist in the shadows: refining speeches, cultivating allies, and reminding her father when to charm and when to strike. She was fluent in the language of populism because she had helped write it; she knew how to translate Vargas’s personal mystique into a national narrative.
But the second Vargas presidency was no mere sequel. The tempo had changed. The country had changed. And Vargas himself—older, wearier, but still shrewd—understood that he could not simply replay the Estado Novo in peacetime drag. The dictatorship had made him feared. Now, he wanted to be loved. Or, more precisely, he wanted to be both. This time, there were no purges, no DIP, no Planos Cohen. Instead, there was Petrobras—born in 1953 as a symbol of economic sovereignty, a national oil company meant to unshackle Brazil from foreign dependency. There were expanded labour protections, minimum wage hikes, a renewed embrace of state-led industrialisation. It was as if Vargas were trying to redeem his authoritarian past through social policy—as if history itself could be rewritten with enough legislation and oil.
To the workers and the poor, he was a hero returned from exile. He gave them language, dignity, and the promise of inclusion. To the business class and the liberal press, he was a threat—a relic of authoritarianism masquerading as a populist messiah. And to the military, he was a question mark: a man who once ruled with their consent but now dared to rule without their control.
Contradictions multiplied like vines in the jungle. Vargas, the nationalist, depended increasingly on foreign loans. Vargas, the protector of labour, ruled with an inner circle tainted by corruption and opportunism. Vargas, the elected president, never quite stopped acting like the provisional dictator he used to be. The illusion of harmony began to unravel. Opposition voices, once cautious, grew bold. The press, led by the acid-tipped pen of Carlos Lacerda, waged daily war against the “new Getúlio.” Lacerda was more than a critic—he was a crusader, determined to topple what he saw as the final monument of Brazilian caudillismo. His attacks were relentless, personal, and effective. He was the conscience of a liberal Brazil that Vargas had long ago ignored.
Then came Rua Tonelero.
On 5 August 1954, an unknown assailant opened fire on Carlos Lacerda outside his apartment building in Rio de Janeiro. Lacerda survived with a wound to the foot. His bodyguard—an Air Force major—was killed. The fallout was volcanic. Finger-pointing began immediately, and the trail of implication led straight to Vargas’s inner circle—most notably to Gregório Fortunato, his personal security chief, nicknamed “The Black Angel.” Whether Vargas ordered the hit remains one of Brazil’s great political mysteries. But in the court of public opinion, guilt needed no conviction. The scandal exploded like a grenade inside the Catete Palace.
The military, already sceptical of Vargas’s intentions, began to whisper of resignation. The press, emboldened, demanded his head. The public, once adoring, now murmured uncertainty. Allies vanished. Friends turned cold. The man who once commanded parades now sat alone in a colonial palace, haunted by portraits, paranoia, and the creeping realisation that history was catching up.
In those final days, Vargas was no longer the invincible statesman. He was a man besieged, wandering the tile-floored halls of the Catete Palace like a ghost rehearsing his own funeral. He scribbled notes. He summoned aides. He issued orders no one followed. His voice echoed in rooms that no longer listened. The presidency had become a mausoleum in waiting. And yet—even then—he remained a master of the moment. He had lost control of the plot, but not the ending.
On the morning of 24 August 1954, as the crisis pressed in, his daughter Alzira entered his room. By then, he knew exactly how his story would close. Sensing her unease, he placed a hand on her shoulder and, with the tenderness of a father and the fatalism of a man resolved, tapped her forehead with his finger: “se você estiver pensando em suicídio, risque isso de sua cabecinha, porque o suicídio é uma covardia e a minha morte tem que representar algo superior a uma covardia.” He was telling her—“If you are thinking about suicide, erase that from your little head, because suicide is cowardice, and my death must represent something greater than cowardice.” Another gentle tap to her temple, a last paternal gesture. Alzira, recognising there was nothing left to say, replied: “Então, meu pai, vá descansar…” and left the room.
The “official” version of this scene—later polished in memoirs—would soften its edges, but the handwritten notes and recollections from those present preserve the rawer truth: this was a man who had decided his death would not be an act of despair but a final political manoeuvre.
Shortly after, Vargas did what no coup, no election, no rebellion had ever managed to do: he removed himself. With a pistol pressed to his chest and a suicide note—the Carta-Testamento—on his desk, he exited with tragic theatricality. “I leave life to enter history,” he wrote, and in doing so turned scandal into sacrifice, defeat into legend, failure into immortality. It was a calculated gesture, the last act of a leader who had ruled by narrative and understood that the curtain call could be more powerful than the play.
And it worked. Overnight, the nation convulsed—not in celebration, but in mourning. Crowds wept in the streets. Newspapers once hostile printed his final words in bold type. His enemies were vilified. His flaws were recast as burdens nobly borne. His legacy, which hours earlier seemed destined for ignominy, became untouchable.
The next day, Rio de Janeiro became a stage for national grief. From the Catete Palace, his coffin—draped in the Brazilian flag—was carried through streets lined with tens of thousands of people. Men removed their hats. Women crossed themselves. Children were lifted onto shoulders to glimpse the man who, hours earlier, had been the most embattled figure in the country, now transformed into its martyred father. The air was thick with flowers, sweat, and the sound of muffled sobs. Trains and trucks brought mourners from the interior; some travelled for days to see his body, even if only for seconds.
In Porto Alegre, where he would be buried in São Borja, the scene was almost biblical: rivers of people following the hearse, banners proclaiming his final words, voices chanting his name in unison. The political tension of the preceding weeks had evaporated into something rawer—an eruption of collective emotion that defied the usual divisions of class, ideology, and geography. Vargas had always been a master of symbolism; now, in death, he had staged the most potent tableau of all: a nation united not by policy, but by grief.
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, the controversial politician, had transformed himself into Vargas, the secular saint—his death not the end of his influence, but its apotheosis.
Perhaps the most enduring lesson of Vargas’s saga is that power is an alchemy of promise and peril. He taught a young republic that social contracts could be written in blood and ink; that the state could be both benefactor and jailer; that a man could mould a nation’s destiny and, in the end, shape the narrative of his own demise. His life was a palimpsest of victories and betrayals, illusions and iron fists—a reminder that in the theatre of politics, the protagonist and antagonist sometimes share the same face.
So whenever Brazil dances samba or debates elections; whenever workers strike or investors hesitate; whenever presidents speak of unity or generals murmur discontent, know this: they all perform on a stage that Vargas built, under lights he rigged, with scripts he partly wrote. His ghost remains overenthusiastic—whispering into the corridors of power, reminding each generation that freedom without vigilance is a masque concealing tyranny; that unity without pluralism is the precursor to dictatorship; that the line between love of country and love of power is thinner than the edge of a blade.
And perhaps, just perhaps, that is the final, unsettling truth he bequeathed to Brazil: that to admire him is to embrace contradiction; to detest him is to ignore lessons hard learned. In the end, Getúlio Vargas did not merely rule Brazil—he became its mirror, reflecting back every hope and horror the nation dared to harbour. And as long as Brazilians dare to dream of progress, they will see his face in the looking glass, beckoning them toward the thin, dangerous line between salvation and subjugation.