BRAZIL: Continental Campaign

From thatch-roofed Amazonian villages to dusty cattle towns on the Argentine border, the rasping blare of loudspeakers drowned out other sounds in Brazil last week. Sao Paulo’s skyscrapers shook to political singing commercials. Sandwichmen stalked the streets on stilts scattering handbills. Placards adorned nearly every lamppost in the land. Office seekers barnstormed the backlands in chartered planes; at least two lost their lives trying to fly in & out of bush-country airfields.

The hemisphere’s biggest republic was winding up its biggest election campaign. Fifty thousand candidates, campaigning on at least 14 party tickets for 18,000 offices, wooed the votes of 11 million electors. In the main fight, the contest for successor to President Eurico Caspar Dutra, no one would predict the winner. With election day a week away, three top presidential candidates were running neck & neck.*The three:

Cristiano Machado, 57, little-known lawyer from the pivotal state of Minas Gerais, nominee of President Dutra’s official Social Democratic Party (P.S.D.).

Brigadeiro Eduardo Gomes, 54, director general of airways and candidate of the loyal opposition Democratic National Union (U.D.N.).

Getulio Vargas, 67, onetime (1930-45) Dictator-President, trying for a comeback on his own Labor Party (P.T.B.) ticket.

No Questions. Since Brazil is too vast and loosely knit for parties to develop rigid principles or programs, no clear-cut campaign issues had emerged. Instead, the Big Three and their parties entered into a welter of double-decking local deals and cross-endorsements that aligned them in some states with lesser parties and local chieftains, and in some states with each other. Amid such entanglements, even the outlawed Communist Party found little difficulty in sneaking names onto the candidates’ lists of one party or another all over Brazil. Politicos were too glad to pick up any added support to ask troublesome questions.

If there were issues to be considered, they were mainly personal. Brazilians knew that if Cristiano* won, they were in for five more years of uninspired but careful constitutional rule. His rivals took a forthright stand on the proposition that, as outs, they could do a better job than the ins. The candidates tacitly ignored foreign affairs; Korea was hardly mentioned. Vargas supporters sometimes charged the present government with serving U.S. interests, and Dutra’s partisans accused Vargas of accepting subsidies from Peron; but none of these charges could be made to stick.

No Promises. Of the three, stiff-backed General Gomes could count on the most solid, unsplit block of votes, the same 2,000,000 he won as Dutra’s runnerup in 1945. But many Brazilians wrote him off as a crusty aristocrat, and the Brigadeiro characteristically refused to cut loose with the slashing spiels that might win him wider backing. “I have built my house,” he snapped. “Now I can’t add any more floors to it.” Dutra’s Candidate Machado was even less disposed to lash out from the stump. But the mild little man from Minas was the administration’s choice, and the government machine has yet to lose a Brazilian election.

The real enigma of the race was foxy, pear-shaped Getulio Vargas. Was he still the champion? Had he lost his magnetic hold over the working masses? White-haired and 67, he still dominated the campaign, both as a man and as an issue. Wherever he went, palpitating partisans turned out to cheer him. The dean of hemispheric demagogues, he campaigned as “father of the poor.” Fun-loving Brazilians, recalling the gay days under Getulio when Rio was the pleasure capital of the Western world, whispered that a vote for Vargas would be a vote to bring back gambling to Brazil.

This week the deafening cacophony of sound trucks will end, in accordance with a Brazilian law that requires all campaigning to cease 48 hours before the polls open. Then Brazilians will cast their ballots. Everybody agreed that the vote would be close.

*A fourth candidate, Socialist Joao Mangabeira, conceded that he had no chance to win but was running, Norman Thomas-fashion, on principle. * Brazilians like to call their politicians by their first names or sobriquets. Machado is always Cristiano, Vargas is Getulio, and General Gomes “the Brigadeiro.”