Sensing that he was in for a rough time Lacerda sent his secretary to engage a room at the hotel and proceeded to the palace. There he was met by someone he described as “a sort of Gregório” who took his little black overnight case and showed him to a suite. The first sour note was that the President had already dined. Governor Lacerda dined alone.
Then President Quadros suddenly put in an appearance. He greeted Lacerda warmly and gave him a friendly hug. It was obvious that he had had a few drinks. Lacerda immediately started to tell him of his doubts and suspicions. He asked for an explanation. He said he didn’t want to go back to his days of wild attacks but he owed something to his voters and to the country. He explained that he couldn’t go along with Jânio’s pro-Castro foreign policy. Maybe he’d better resign as governor. The country had a right to a little peace and quiet.
He added that he had personal reasons too. When he took over the governorship he had turned his newspaper over to his son Sérgio. The boy was having a hard time. He didn’t want him to meet failure so young. Jânio gave Lacerda a sharp look and cried out that if it was money he needed for his newspaper he would attend to that.
Lacerda answered that he didn’t want money. His newspaper could take care of itself. He wanted some assurance that Jânio Quadros wasn’t trying to behave like Fidel Castro.
Quadros is a smallish man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. Lacerda, who had always been on good terms with him, tried to kid him: Come now he wasn’t Charles de Gaulle.
“Let’s go to the movies,” said Jânio.
Seeing movies every night had become an obsession with him. The big hall in the palace was rigged up with a motion picture screen. There were tables piled with sausages and cold meats, bowls of popcorn, beer and whiskey bottles. Quadros had the reputation of having a good head for liquor, but by this time he was showing it.
They started with a serious picture but the President shouted that he wanted something funny. He called for Jerry Lewis. He didn’t like Jerry Lewis and switched to a Western. He was a great fan of Westerns.
In the middle of the reel the President went to the phone. He came back and told Lacerda he wanted him to confer with two of his ministers who were having a private talk in a room at the hotel.
When Lacerda reached the hotel all the ministers would talk about was some articles Lacerda had written in the period after Vargas’ suicide, suggesting that elections be postponed. Why didn’t he favor direct action now? Lacerda told them that the situation today was very different. He added that he was planning to resign his governorship since he could not go along with the national administration. He would try to keep his opinions to himself to give them a free hand.
After that, he returned to the palace, under the impression that he’d been invited to spend the night there. At the entrance he was met by the doorman who handed him his little black bag. The doorman intimated he’d better go to the hotel.
Lacerda tells of the ride back to the hotel as one of the worst moments of his life. He was oppressed by the vast loneliness of the unfinished city, the great buildings with nobody in them, the ghost town look. There was a Nazi atmosphere about the crazy scene at the palace, the incoherence, the drinking, the silly movie. From his hotel room he called up one of the ministers he’d been talking to before. The minister came to his room. They argued until four in the morning. Lacerda insisted that this sort of thing couldn’t go on. It was the Stalin way of running a country. The minister told him the President said to go to hell.
Lacerda flew back to Rio the next day. A couple of days later he had a date to lecture to university students in São Paulo. He tried to make a figurative speech as a warning to Jânio. An organized group kept interrupting him, shouting, “Jânio sim, Lacerda não.”
This was for Lacerda a period of terrible indecision. He couldn’t sleep nights. Then on August 24, the anniversary of the downfall of Getúlio Vargas, he made up his mind. That night he spoke to the nation over TV. He told the whole story of the trip to Brasília, his frustration, the efforts to induce him to fall in with Jânio’s plans. “The man we elected doesn’t want to be President, he wants to be dictator.”
Next day Jânio Quadros resigned. With his resignation he gave out a confused statement that hidden interests at home and abroad were sabotaging his program. He may have thought that a wave of popular outbursts would force the congress to ask him to reconsider his resignation. There was no such outburst. A few months later Adhemar de Barros, who is not lacking in humor, announced on television that he didn’t know about the sinister domestic interests that had ruined Quadros’ program, but he could name the foreign interests. They were Haig & Haig, Teacher’s, Johnnie Walker, and so forth.
Quadros’ resignation left João Goulart, Vargas’ political heir, the President of Brazil. All parties, except for the left wing of labor and the Communists, were thrown into dismay. Congress, under the influence of the Democratic Union, immediately started tinkering with the constitution. The President was shorn of his powers. The executive power was placed in the hands of a Prime Minister responsible to the Chamber of Deputies.
Politically the period between Quadros’ resignation in the summer of ’61 and the October elections in the fall of ’62 was the story of a continuous tug of war between the leaders of the Democratic Union, who wanted ministerial government, and the Labor Party men who wanted full presidential powers restored to their leader. National administration was at a stalemate, with the result that no constructive legislation could be passed. Inflation went unchecked. The cost of living soared. In spite of occasional hikes in the minimum wage, the middle classes were pinched and working people’s families went hungry. In the hinterlands the unemployed starved.
The Reactionary Governor of Guanabara
After his crucial television speech Lacerda says he was at last able to sleep soundly in his bed. He awoke to a chorus of praise and vituperation. Jânio Quadros’ resignation was as great a shock to the Brazilian electorate as Vargas’ suicide. Men and women of all levels of society had placed their hopes in his hands. The first reaction was of despair.
The conservative newspapers came around to the view that, shocking as it was, Lacerda’s unmasking of Quadros saved Brazilian democracy. The leftwing press, led by the dashingly edited Ultima Hora with its nationwide circulation, claimed that having brought about Vargas’ death the reactionary governor of Guanabara had now deprived the country of the services of its most dedicated reformer. The man was a monster. Some people have been called kingmakers. Lacerda was the destroyer of presidents.
No man loves a fight more. Breathing deep of the dust of battle Lacerda threw himself into an almost nightly vendetta over television with the supporters of President Goulart. As the campaign for the congressional elections of 1962 neared its climax, he seemed to foreign observers to be engaged in a sort of hand to hand combat over the airwaves with Leonel Brizola, the President’s brotherinlaw.
Brizola was nearing the end of his term as governor of Rio Grande do Sul. In spite of the backing of some of Vargas’ henchmen in the state which had been the center of the old dictator’s political web, his administration had been so unpopular that he was facing a voters’ revolt at home. By following the anti-American line in Guanabara, where there was a compact Communist-inspired vote, he would be sure of election to the Chamber of Deputies. By bearding Lacerda in his own citystate he could hope to win national leadership of the Brazilian Labor Party.