(6 of 9)
The Red Line. Soon after the Labor Party endorsed Kubitschek, the illegal Brazilian Communist Party stopped calling him a lackey of big business and, in a characteristic display of party-line acrobatics, endorsed him for President. Outlawed by Congress in 1947 (Kubitschek was among the Deputies who voted in favor of the ban), the party still has an estimated 60,000 members and many non-Communists fellow-travel its line. Eager for votes, Kubitschek failed to reject the Red endorsement—a piece of opportunism that has already made trouble for him and is likely to make more.
In the presidential campaign, Kubitschek used the same methods that had won him the governorship: go to the voters, hit even the little, out-of-the-way towns that other candidates skip, invite questions, have an answer for everything. He chartered a DC-3, fitted it out as a combination office, bedroom and conference room, covered 100,000 miles in the most strenuous search for votes in the annals of Brazilian politics. His wife Sarah organized women's J-J (Juscelino-Jango) clubs throughout the country, made speeches on TV, kept up her husband's morale with her cheerful, unflagging conviction that he would win. "I was against Juscelino's going into politics," she said. "But when he went ahead anyway, I was right there beside him."
Of the four candidates in the race for the Presidency, two were moralizers and two materialists, General Juarez Távora and Right-Winger Plinio Salgado, both considered deeply religious, vowed to clean up corruption. Juscelino Kubitschek and rich, Falstaffan Adhemar de Barros, both M.D.s, former state governors and practical politicians, vowed to raise living standards. Barros ran well ahead of Kubitschek in the big cities; Kubitschek piled up his plurality in the inland towns and farm villages, where the P.S.D. machine operated most efficiently, and where most of the voters had laid eyes on no other presidential candidate. The final count: Kubitschek, 3,077,411; Távora, 2,610,462; Barros, 2,222,725; Salgado, 714,379.
No sooner were the votes counted than the block-Kubitschek camp, arguing that he would not have won without Communist endorsement, got to work. In the name of antiCommunism, morality and higher democracy, a faction—made up largely of navy and air force officers, intellectuals and conservative politicos—set out to prevent the President-elect's inauguration one way or another—if necessary, by means of a golpe (military coup).