Brazil’s participation in World War II may not have been the deciding factor in the war’s outcome but it was key to the future of that country’s development. The 1930s competition over Brazil between the Axis and the Allies, and the related struggle within the Vargas government of their respective adherents have been studied before; Stanley Hilton, John Wirth, Hélio Silva, Moniz Bandeira, Gerson Moura, and I have written books, chapters, or articles on aspects of Brazilian foreign relations of the era. These studies were done from archival materials in Brazil, the United States, Germany, and Great Britain and are the base from which further work should proceed.
Ricardo Seitenfus’s O Brasil de Getúlio Vargas e a formação dos blocos, 1930-1942 was done as a doctoral thesis at the University of Geneva and still bears the marks of its origin. He covers the period from the Revolution of 1930 to the republic’s entry into the war. The book’s principal contribution is its analysis of the internal politics leading up to the Estado Novo in 1937 and its relating of those politics to foreign affairs. Especially useful is Seitenfus’s discussion of the Italian and German immigrant communities and Axis links with the Integralista movement. What is particularly new is information drawn from Italian and German archives. Using this documentation, Seitenfus is able to add detail to what is mostly a familiar story.
Plínio Salgado, the Integralista chief, had compromised himself in 1937 by accepting money from the Duce’s government to finance his presidential candidacy. Apparently only Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano’s distrust of Salgado kept the Italians from smuggling arms for an Integralista uprising. As it was, their ambassador became involved in the aftermath of the March 1938 Integralista attack on Vargas. During Salgado’s exile in Portugal he had contacts with both German (as Hilton noted) and Italian representatives looking toward his taking power in Brazil once the Axis won the war. Interestingly, one of the Italian objectives was to prevent integralismo from being submissive to “Hitlerism.”
Before the war, relations with Germany centered on trade, including arms sales, and the status of the immigrant communities. What is new here is Seitenfus’s detailed account of the tense personal relations between Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha and German Ambassador Karl Ritter and of how their enmity undermined German policy. The author quotes Count Ciano, who asked his diary if the Germans had a “physical need to exasperate all humanity until it united against them” (p. 194).
Seitenfus takes the reader through the various inter-American conferences, and reviews the growing closeness with the United States. Wisely, he gives his Brazilian readers necessary background information. He generally follows a well-trodden path, although he gives little hint that the way is already blazed. Rather than improve the trail with more documentation or, better yet, interpretation, he limits himself on the American side to the published Foreign Relations of the United States, which are selective documents and, at best, a guide for research in the files themselves. He makes no use of the extensive American military files, nor of books based on those papers, such as Stetson Conn and Bryon Fairchild, The Framework of Hemisphere Defense (Washington, 1960). Indeed, his lack of reliance on existing works weakens his discussion of important questions such as the Volta Redonda steel project, arms supply, Axis airlines, and the northeastern bases.
Seitenfus corroborates the views of earlier authors regarding the importance of Oswaldo Aranha in assuring Brazil’s alliance with the United States, and provides confirmation from Italian records of Salgado’s willingness to deal with the Axis after the January 1942 break in relations. He also gives us helpful information from German reports regarding Brazil’s August 1942 recognition of a state of war.
The book is well written, contains an appendix of 16 interesting documents, and, blessedly, has a name index. What is perhaps most important is that this book joins a growing number of studies by Brazilian scholars of their country’s foreign relations history. The era when this was the province of foreigners is ended.
