[lit-ideas] wonderful dictator

Marlena was "also asking for the name of a wonderful dictator."

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Getulio Vargas is still revered in Brazil. Old people keep photos of him in their homes and maintain he was the only leader in Brazil ever to really care about the working people. He was also a dictator, who initially sided with the fascists before finally siding with the Allies in 1941.

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 completre bio at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getulio_Vargas

extract:

Like Franklin Roosevelt, his first steps focused on economic stimulus. A state interventionist policy utilising tax breaks, lowered duties, and import quotas allowed Vargas to expand the domestic industrial base. Vargas linked his pro-industrial policies to nationalism, advocating heavy tariffs to "perfect our manufacturers to the point where it will become unpatriotic to feed or clothe ourselves with imported goods." In his early years, Vargas also relied on the support of the tenentes, junior military officers, who had long been active against the ruling coffee oligarchy, staging their own failed revolt in 1922. Vargas also quelled a paulista female worker's strike by co-opting much of their platform and requiring their "factory commissions" to use government mediation in the future. Vargas, reflecting the influence of the tenentes, even advocated a program of social welfare and reform similar to the New Deal.

Although "the father of the poor" expanded the electorate, granted women's suffrage, enacted social security reforms, legalized labor unions as a populist, Vargas also whittled down the autonomy of labor and crushed a series of peasant revolts known as the cangaço.

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