(4 of 9)
Natal, it turned out, was no place for him either. After a gang of hired toughs wrecked his newspaper office, the police threatened to jail him as a troublemaker. He skipped town, but his avoidance of the Natal jail was only temporary. As editor of a newspaper in the city of Recife, he wrote a front-page manifesto, denouncing Brazil's President Artur Bernardes as a "bloody dictator." Warned that he was about to be arrested for sedition, he fled back to Natal, where the police welcomed him with open handcuffs and locked him up for 72 days.
Flight to Argentina. In 1930 Getulio Vargas ran for President and got a majority of the votes. When the government tried to annul the election, Gauchos of Vargas' home state marched on Rio. Café Filho, fired by Vargas' eloquent talk of reform, joined the Vargas partisans in northeastern Brazil, took part in the successful seizure of Natal. Appointed police chief of his home town, with headquarters right next to the customs house, he soon noted the daily visits of a customs official's attractive daughter, Jandira Fernandes de Oliveira. In September 1931 he and Jandira got married.
Elected a federal Deputy in 1934, Café Filho, who had already turned against Vargas, became his roughest congressional critic. When Vargas set up an outright dictatorship in 1937, Café Filho fled to Argentina. As the price of a promise that he would not be molested if he returned to Brazil, Café Filho had to agree to refrain from all political activities. He got a job with a bus company, and spent the following seven years as a white-collar worker in Rio.
After the army deposed Vargas, in 1945, Café Filho re-entered politics, won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, took up his old role of caustic, lone-wolf critic. He drew more fan mail than any other Deputy. Said Getulio Vargas, planning his own political comeback, "Café Filho is the most effective man in Congress. I wish he were on my side."
Fox & Box. Vargas was determined to run for President in 1950. So was the flamboyant Adhemar de Barros, multimillionaire ex-governor of Sao Paulo. Shortly before the election, the two made a deal. Adhemar agreed to withdraw from the race and back Vargas. Vargas agreed to 1) accept a member of Adhemar's party, the social Progressive Party, as his vice-presidential running mate, and 2) support Adhemar in the 1955 presidential election. For the Vice President slot, Vargas foxily insisted on Café Filho, a nominal P.S.P. member. He reasoned that his old enemy would be less troublesome to him as a boxed-in Vice President than as a freewheeling Deputy.
As Vice President, Café Filho took no part in policymaking. His only task was presiding over the Senate, and that was not enough to keep him busy. He traveled widely in Latin America, Europe and the Near East. When in Rio, he opened his office door three days a week to anybody who wanted to see him—a practice that he still keeps up, though his crowded schedule now allows only one such public audience a week (TIME, Nov. 8). In four years he received more than 40,000 callers.