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Last summer the attempted assassination of an anti-Vargas newspaper editor led to the exposure of what Brazilians came to call "the sea of mud"—the vast disorder and corruption engulfing the Vargas administration. When the military told Vargas to resign, he stubbornly refused. Café Filho, unspotted by the sea of mud, made Vargas a remarkable offer: in order to avert violence, the two of them should resign together and call for completely new elections. Vargas still said no. "Listen to reason, Getulio," said CafeéFilho. "I will be the loser. You will still have your ranch, your money, a chance to make a comeback. I'll be without a job and without a cruzeiro." Vargas gave him the same answer he had given the generals: "Only dead will I leave my post."
The old man meant it. On the morning of Aug. 24, an excited newspaperman rapped on Cafe Filho's door to tell him that he was the new President of Brazil.
Political Threat. Caf Filho had been a champion of the poor all his political life, but when he became President, the conservative parties supported him, the left-of-center parties opposed him. Part of the explanation of this surface paradox lay in Cafe Filho's opposition to Vargas, who was distrusted by the conservatives, followed blindly by the non-Communist left-wing groups. Another reason was that Café Filho is a liberal as to ends, a conservative as to means.
Six weeks after he took over, Café Filho faced a political threat: October's congressional election. He held aloof from the electioneering, even though the success or failure of his administration obviously depended on his getting right-center majorities in both the Senate and the Chamber. He got them. His main political problem now is to keep both of the two main conservative parties on his side. Café Filho (never a member of either party) appears to be unworried about that problem. "My problems are economic," he said recently, "because Brazil's problems are economic."
Monkeys & Skyscrapers. One problem Brazil does not suffer from is any lack of natural resources. Vast stretches of the interior are trackless jungle where jaguars and howler monkeys will long outnumber human inhabitants, but some three-fourths of the nation's total area can ul timately be used as cropland or pasture. According to a recent study by U.S. experts, Brazil is not only capable of feeding her own fast-growing population abundantly, but is potentially one of the world's great exporters of foodstuffs. In hydroelectric potential (21 million kw.) Brazil is nearly as well-endowed as the U.S. A quarter of the world's known iron-ore deposits lie in Brazil, along with sizable reserves of manganese, chrome, nickel, bauxite and phosphates—and geological exploration of the sparsely settled interior has barely begun.