The gaucho lawyer and politician who seized Brazil in the Revolution of 1930 and dominated it for a quarter-century, ruling as both an iron-fisted authoritarian who shut the congress, censored the press, and jailed his opponents, and as the great architect of the modern Brazilian state, who gave the country labor laws, industry, and a new sense of itself — beloved by workers as the Father of the Poor, condemned by critics as a dictator who admired aspects of European fascism, and who, cornered at last in 1954, shot himself in the heart and left a letter that turned his death into a final political weapon.
Getúlio Vargas was the dictator who made himself the father of the poor. A short, calm politician from Brazil's southern cattle country, he came to power in a 1930 revolution and held it, in different forms, for a quarter of a century. He shut the congress, censored the newspapers, and jailed his enemies, while also building the labor laws, pensions, and industry that won him the lasting devotion of Brazil's workers. Cornered by scandal and the threat of a military coup in August 1954, he refused to resign. Instead he shot himself in the heart, leaving a suicide letter that blamed his enemies and ended, "I leave life to enter history." The grief that followed saved his movement. The argument over whether he was Brazil's great builder or its strongman has never stopped.