The latest volumes in Hélio Silva’s Vargas Cycle, the ninth and tenth since the publication of Sangue na areia de Copacabana in 1964, present us with the cumulative total of 4,747 pages of loose narrative linking copious excerpts from letters, telegrams, memoirs, transcriptions of interviews, newspaper articles, decrees, and memoranda, all selected by the author, edited, and printed with admirable resolve. 1937: Todos os golpes se pareçem and 1938: Terrorismo em Campo Grande fit the pattern of their predecessors but differ from one another. The first treats the multiplicity of events from late 1935 through the imposition of the Estado Novo by Vargas and the military, providing a general history of the period, while the second, much of which previously appeared in serial form in Tribuna da Imprensa ten years ago, focuses mainly on a single affair: the attempted Integralista putsch of May 1938, which Silva calls the first Brazilian experiment with political terrorism (he should look into Pernambuco’s Barbosa Lima administration in the 1890s, among other places) and an unsuccessful attempt at counter-revolution by opponents of the new order.
The author, who was editor on São Paulo’s Fôlha da Manhã and Fôlha da Tarde during the 1930s and also the secretary to the paulista delegations to the Chamber of Deputies and Senate (he also is a practicing physician and a public functionary) reconstructs the political history of the Vargas period as he saw it. He states his philosophy succinctly: history is fact; it lives in the written document. But Silva is foremost a journalist; as a result, his series amounts to little more than a massive compilation of documents, arbitrarily edited, with neither justification nor analysis. At best he offers a chronology of the public record, a selected reproduction of the Vargas archive, and a catalog of the roles of dozens of participants, eighty-eight of whom are named in alphabetical order in the preface to Volume IX as having assisted the author during his research.
Uncontestably, the documentation is extensive, and some of it revealing. Vargas’ careful reliance on personally gathered political intelligence, particularly during times of stress, is clearly illustrated by the flood of messages between the chief of state and his trusted informers, many of them members of his own family. The organization of the assault on Catete is colorfully described, following the author’s view that it was more than what one Brazilian political journalist has called a “revolution of cowards.” Through page after page parade the figures of the not-so-distant past. But however vivid in personality, they remain congealed behind their public faces, frozen into the author’s narrative, the accuracy and meaning of their actions rendered questionable by the very absence of questioning, the lack of depth, and the weight of unsifted detail.
