Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

IN a general election of state and city officers in January, Brazilian Communists won the governorship of São Paulo State and a majority of the Rio de Janeiro municipal council. In wealth, population, and industrial advance, São Paulo State bulks in the Brazilian economy with something like the combined weight of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and New England in the United States. And Rio de Janeiro is the national capital. The Communists upped their national vote from less than 10 per cent of the total vote cast, to better than 16 per cent.

Obviously, even though Brazilian domestic administration and foreign policy are still a long way from being controlled by the Communists, such gains raise two questions: What accounts for this sudden Communist success? And what effect will the party’s gain in numbers and “power position” have on Brazilian-American relations and on inter-American relations?

The Communist picture in Brazil began developing initial outlines under the fifteen-year dictatorship of President Getulio Vargas. In 1935, after an attempted military coup against the government, in which a few members of the diminutive Brazilian Communist Party participated, Vargas jailed the party’s leaders and drove it underground. From then on, for almost ten years, he posed in much the same way that Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and other fascist dictators did, as having “saved the Republic” from the overthrow of order and Christian civilization. By this means he won favor with reactionary, clerical, and “big money” elements.

The Communist Party in its underground operations used the decade hardly less effectively, building up its hold on disaffected groups through the appeal of protest and martyrdom. Early in 1945, Vargas was forced by rising public demand to agree to the election of a new President and a Constituent Assembly. He unexpectedly released the Communist leaders from prison and granted the party full liberty of political action.

Three-way election

The campaign got under way with two parties improvised on the remnants of Brazilian pre-Vargas democracy: the Social Democrats, who nominated War Minister Eurico Gaspar Dutra for the presidency, and the National Democratic Union, whose candidate was Air Brigadier Eduardo Gomes.

About as many differences divided the parties as separated John W. Davis Democrats from Coolidge Republicans in the American presidential campaign of 1924. And the Communists, coming up from under ground into a Brazil where every voter below the top wealth groups groaned from the privations of war shortages and runaway currency inflation, won thousands of adherents daily with a campaign of intensive precinct organization.

Within a matter of months, reactionaries in both the conventional parties grew fearful that if a three-way election could not be headed off, the Communists might actually win the presidency. Vargas tried to head it off with rigged demands from his political stooges that the presidential elections be postponed and only a Constituent Assembly be chosen. Vargas then could have guided the making of the new constitution, and had his successor — or himself — elected under it.

But, surprisingly, the most united support for continuing the dictator in office came from the Communists. They could accomplish more toward controlling Brazil’s future by winning a fighting big minority in the Constituent Assembly than by coming out a weak third in the presidential contest.

LATIN AMERICA (continued)

Embarrassments from this Communist patronage had, indeed, quite as much to do with the ousting of Vargas in October, 1945, in a sudden palace revolution, as did the grumblings of the political groups yearning to vote in a new president. The strongarmed military men and Brazilian big-business politicians who arranged the ousting were taking no chances that the only working majority that could be mustered in the Constituent Assembly might be a Communist-Vargas coalition.

Ostensibly, their coup gained its objectives. Presidential elections were held on schedule in December. Dutra, the more static candidate, won the presidency by a narrow margin. The Communists were held down to a tenth of the popular vote and a relatively harmless tenth of the Assembly seats.

But Vargas, though he was triumphantly elected senator both from São Paulo and from his own state of Rio Grande do Sul, nursed grudges. For the better part of the year he struggled for a political combination which would wreck the two conventional parties that ousted him, and at the same time would break his ties with the Communists. He thought he had found it when he began organizing a new Brazilian Labor Party.

Vargas wins votes for the Communists

As the campaign for the January state and municipal elections began to warm up, Vargas gave his Laboristas their official indoctrination. “The old liberal, capitalist democracy,” he declaimed in a speech in November, “is in rapid decline. . . . I was the victim of [its] agents, who seek to maintain our country as a simple colony. . . . This kind of democracy is like an old tree with dry leaves which the people one day will shake in a hurricane of anger. . . . The other way is socialist democracy, the democracy of the workers. For this I will fight on behalf of the people.”

This turned out to be almost exactly the same talk that the Communists were giving on domestic issues. So, although the Laborista movement, with the remnants of the Vargas political machine to aid it, gained converts fast enough, many thousands of converts to the Vargas program moved into the Communist organization and voted its tickets on the theory that “the Party” would be more likely to fill the prescriptions.

Communist-Vargas coalition?

It remains to be seen what effect the Communists will have on the administration of domestic affairs. President Dutra and his top advisers are fanatically anti-Communist. So, ostensibly, is an overwhelming majority in Congress. The top politicians in the administration would be capable of resorting to authoritarian measures to suppress the Communist Party if they thought they could get away with it.

But here developments depend largely on whether Vargas and his laborites “go along” with the Communists in a temporary common front to embarrass the administration. The number of Vargas stooges in Congress might make it difficult for President Dutra to enlist a majority even in a “crusade” against Communism.

And the advantages of a coalition between the Vargas forces and the Communists in a program of better food and job distribution and enforced price reductions, pledged by both Laboristas and Communists, are obvious. The Dutra regime is wide open to attack for having done practically nothing in more than a year to alleviate these headaches.

Down with “Yanqui imperialism"!

Meanwhile the Vargas following and the Communists see eye to eye on policy toward the United States. Brazil is the South American republic with the oldest and strongest traditions of friendship and sympathetic understanding with the United States It is also, for strategic reasons, the ace-inthe-hole of United States hemisphere defense plans. Brazilian foreign policy, since World War I, has been based on close coöperation with Washington.

For these reasons — and probably because hemisphere defense plans today particularly contemplate defense against Soviet Russia — Communist propaganda has spent even more energy in Brazil trying to undermine United States influence and associate it with “imperialism” than it has in other Latin American republics.

Immediately after Germany’s surrender, the Communists launched a boisterous campaign for the return to Brazil of the military bases of the Allies on the “Bulge.” And after the bases were returned in accordance with prior agreement and hemisphere policy, they noisily claimed the credit for forcing “Yanqui imperialism" to disgorge.

Vargas has a parallel grudge against the United States. He persuaded himself, when forced out of office, that the ousting was due to a speech made by United States Ambassador Adolf Berle, Jr., seeking to hold him to his presidential election pledges, and that the speech constituted “imperialist” intervention in Brazilian internal affairs.

This congenial marriage of the Communist foreign policy line and the Vargas grudge consequently bodes no good for Brazilian-American relations or for all-American defense projects based on Brazil as a key defensive area.

Divide and conquer

Another effect to be expected of Communist advance in Brazil is that it will increase the strength of Communism almost everywhere in Latin America. It can hardly fail to stimulate efforts toward party organization, even in republics where they must be carried on underground. In countries like Chile, where the Communists won places in the Cabinet last fall by casting the decisive vote in a presidential election, and Cuba, where they control the labor movement, increased party enrollments and stronger agitation for political power are bound to follow.

In countries enjoying relatively free elections, strategies like those used in Brazil, for easing the Communists into minority victories by dividing the votes of the opposition, are likely to be adopted. And wherever Communist power in domestic politics grows, with it will grow the propaganda aimed at weakening the influence of the United States in hemisphere affairs and thereby weakening the “interAmerican system.”

A factor favoring these developments is that, with one or two exceptions, Latin American governments and political leaders have offered no solution except Communism to the economic misery of the underprivileged. In Argentina, the Perón government has met the challenge, temporarily at least, by trying to substitute fascist totalitarianism for the leftist brand.

Venezuela knows the answer

Only in Venezuela, and to an undetermined extent under the Apristas in Peru, have serious efforts been made to block Communism’s growth by initiating economic reforms through democratic processes. As a result, Venezuela is the only country in South America where Communist strength has manifestly declined in the past half decade. In Mexico it appears to have declined also. But since the first of the year, in a series of municipal disturbances, the government has been facing serious violence from the rightist. Acción Nacional.

Communist capture of Latin America is by no means certain. Latin American capacity to hold the party together with European Communist discipline remains to be proved. So does the capacity of Latin American Communist leaders for the responsibilities of government.

A large fraction, possibly an overwhelming majority, of Communist gains in the neighbor republics represents “economic protest" psychology rather than orthodox Marxism. So it is not impossible that the hordes now flocking to Communist standards below Panama will transfer their support to slick rightist totalitarian agitators.

Certainly in the urban and urban-influenced regions, the Latin American masses have been made aware, by their war experiences, of the economic oppression they endure. They are beginning to want governments which do something about it.