Book, Getúlio 3 (1945-1954) from the return of pop consecrates to suicide[LS]

“I joined the government through a revolution, I left through a barrage”, lamented Getúlio Vargas in a letter sent from his rural exile in São Borja (RS), in November 1945, to his friend and co-religionist João Neves da Fontoura. After fifteen years in the Palácio do Catete, following the 1930 Revolution as head of the provisional and constitutional governments and the dictatorship of the Estado Novo, Getúlio was forced to retire to his home region, on the border between Brazil and Argentina, by the same military personnel who had supported his nationalist project of power. Times were changing, the Second World War was already history and the former dictator, converted into a modest rancher, only had the distractions of horseback riding, mate and cigars. But Getúlio, a political animal with a keen sense of survival, was not completely finished, despite what the Rio de Janeiro newspapers thought, almost all of them aligned with the National Democratic Union (UDN) and the Social Democratic Party (PSD). His daughter Alzira — who had remained in the federal capital in the company of her husband, Ernani do Amaral Peixoto, and her mother, Darcy — became a kind of plenipotentiary ambassador of Getulismo, enabling the former president to peer behind the scenes of General Eurico's government. Gaspar Dutra and maintain control over the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB). With his consecrating election to the Senate and constituent immunities, in 1946 Getúlio was able to return to Rio de Janeiro, in a first movement to prepare his desired return to Catete. But the open hostility of the Udenist opposition and the temptations of a peaceful old age in the Pampa Gaucho made his parliamentary mandate for the PTB a brief interlude from confinement in São Borja, with rare appearances in plenary. Alzira, always in Rio, remained, however, his advisor and privileged informant through detailed letter reports. Despite the defeat of candidates he had supported in the regional elections of 1947 and '48, Getúlio, always encouraged by his daughter, hinted, in statements to the press, that he could run for the first position in the Republic.