This monumental accomplishment is the major and most valuable of the works issued by the Center for Research and Documentation of Contemporary Brazilian History (CPDOC) of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation to commemorate the first centenary of Vargas’s birth in 1883. It is the brainchild of Israel Beloch, the first of its contributors to recognize the need for a ready, authoritative source of information about the men involved in national decision making in Brazil since the revolution of 1930, which ushered in a new generation of political leaders. In all, the Dicionário includes 4,493 entries of which 3,741 are biographic. The 752 thematic articles deal with institutions (chiefly political parties, newspapers, governmental agencies), events (revolts, coups, and revolutions since 1922), concepts (e.g., coronelismo, sindicalismo, integralismo), and constitutions and notorious laws, decrees, and codes important during the Vargas era and since.
The focus of the work is almost exclusively political, with primary emphasis on individuals who exerted significant influence or held elective or appointive office at the national level. It covers most state governors and virtually all federal interventors, as well as all mayors of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and a few mayors of other large cities, but in general those whose public service was limited to one region or state are excluded. There are lengthy articles on each of Brazil’s presidents since 1930. Surprisingly, earlier presidents, as far back as Wenceslau Braz, are also included, because they held another office or continued to exert political influence after 1930. Not surprisingly, the longest entry in the Dicionário is Paulo Brandi’s biography of Getúlio Vargas, which was published separately as Vargas, da vida para a história in 1983. The biographies also cover all vice-presidents, presidential candidates, cabinet members, holders of top military posts, members elected to constituent assemblies, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Senate, civil and military supreme court justices, much of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Brazil, ambassadors to and from world powers as well as Brazil’s ambassadors to Portugal and several of its South American neighbors, a few educators, and leaders of political parties, labor and employer associations, and national student organizations.
Historians will find a number of anomalies in the Dicionário because of its emphasis on political figures. For example, Astrojildo Pereira, a founder of the Communist party of Brazil who never held public office, is included, but Caio Prado Júnior, who has introduced generations of students to a Marxist view of Brazilian history, does not appear. Likewise, there are biographies of Pedro Calmon, once rector of the University of Brazil, and of Gilberto Freyre, a drafter of the 1946 Constitution, but no mention of such authorities on the Brazilian past as José Honório Rodrigues or Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. Specialists on the history of women in Brazil will be distressed to find that a reasonably thorough perusal of the four volumes turns up only half a dozen biographies of politically influential Brazilian women.
A good deal of information on economic, social, and cultural history is scattered through the biographic and thematic entries, but the researcher must look for the appropriate individuals or institutions in order to find it. Despite this limitation, the Dicionário is the authoritative reference work on recent Brazilian history and should be in the library of every institution offering serious study in that field.
