Brazil breaks off relations with the Axis

At around 7.30 p.m. on 28 January 1942 the Brazilian Foreign Minister, Osvaldo Aranha, closed the final session of the Third Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American Republics in Rio de Janeiro with a speech. At its end he announced that, on the instructions of President Getúlio Vargas, Brazil was breaking off diplomatic and commercial relations with Germany, Italy and Japan, and that the relevant notes were at that moment being handed to the Axis representatives in Rio and in their capitals. That same evening he also announced an agreement on the border between Peru and Ecuador, a dispute that had weighed on relations in South America for months. The largest country on the continent, a neighbour of almost every South American republic, had thereby come over to the side of the United States, though not yet into the war.

Brazil between Washington and Berlin

Vargas had ruled Brazil since the revolution of 1930, and since the coup of November 1937 as dictator of the authoritarian “New State” (Estado Novo). His regime shared many features of the corporatist dictatorships of Europe, although it had also crushed Brazil’s home-grown fascists of the Integralist movement. During the 1930s Brazil traded more and more with Germany, which bought its cotton and coffee under a compensation (barter) clearing system, and the army’s leaders – the War Minister, General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, and the Chief of Staff, General Pedro Aurélio de Góis Monteiro – admired the Wehrmacht. Large German, Italian and Japanese communities lived in the country. On 11 June 1940, as France was collapsing, Vargas gave a speech aboard the battleship Minas Gerais about the twilight of the old liberalism and the “vigorous nations” marching towards the future. Washington read it as a bow towards Germany.

Vargas, however, was playing both sides to win as much as possible for Brazil. What he wanted most was a large steelworks, which the country lacked. When in the autumn of 1940 the United States agreed to finance one with a $20 million Export-Import Bank loan, the works at Volta Redonda became a symbol of the turn towards Washington. The chief advocate of this course was Aranha, ambassador in Washington in 1934–1937 and a friend of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As early as the Havana Conference of July 1940 Brazil had clearly sided with the United States. In 1941 a subsidiary of Pan American Airways began, on American commission, to enlarge the airfields at Belém, Natal and Recife, on the north-eastern “bulge” of Brazil, the point closest to Africa. On 1 October 1941 the two countries signed an agreement under which the United States was to supply Brazil with some $100 million worth of arms under Lend-Lease.

After Pearl Harbor

Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Congress’s declaration of war on Japan confronted the American republics with a choice. Under the Havana declaration, an attack by a non-American state on one of them was an attack on all. Nine republics of Central America and the Caribbean declared war on Japan, and after 11 December on Germany and Italy as well. Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela broke off diplomatic relations with the Axis. Brazil proclaimed its solidarity with the United States and, according to American accounts, agreed as early as December that US Navy patrol aircraft and small detachments of Marines could be stationed at the north-eastern airfields, but it did not break with the Axis. The foreign ministers were summoned to another meeting of consultation in Rio de Janeiro.

The Rio conference

The meeting opened on 15 January 1942. The United States was represented by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, deputy to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Washington wanted a resolution under which all the republics would jointly break off relations with Germany, Italy and Japan, and their trade and communications with them too. The threat was concrete: Axis embassies and consulates in Latin America were passing information on shipping movements to Berlin, and German and Italian airlines flew across the whole continent.

Argentina and Chile opposed a mandatory break. Argentina was governed by its acting president, Ramón Castillo, who held fast to neutrality, and his foreign minister, Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú, had come with explicit instructions. Chile, where a campaign was under way for the election of 1 February following the death of the president, feared for its long and defenceless Pacific coast. Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia tabled a draft calling for a break in relations and refused to compromise. Vargas assured Welles that Brazil supported the United States “one hundred per cent” and that the decision had already been taken. Aranha, who chaired the meeting, nevertheless tried to keep Argentina at the table. According to Welles’s reports, Vargas and Aranha feared that a split would turn Argentina and Chile into centres of Axis agent activity, and that the Brazilian army, convinced of German influence in the Argentine army, would see this as a threat.

On 21 January Ruiz Guiñazú accepted the text of a joint declaration, but the next day Castillo repudiated it. After a stormy day-long debate on 23 January a compromise formula was adopted: the American republics, “in accordance with the procedure established by their own laws” and in the light of each one’s position, “recommend” the breaking of diplomatic relations with Japan, Germany and Italy, since the first had attacked, and the other two had declared war on, an American state. That evening all twenty-one ministers voted for the resolution. Hull regarded the word “recommend” as a capitulation to Argentina and that same night, in a heated telephone call, reproached Welles for the concession. Welles replied with a telegram to Roosevelt in which he argued that the resolution, for the first time, obliged Argentina and Chile publicly to recommend the break to themselves, and that a split would have been the Axis’s greatest success. According to later accounts, Roosevelt agreed with Welles.

The ministers also adopted several dozen other resolutions: on the severance of commercial and financial relations with the Axis, on combating subversive activity, on excluding Axis nationals and firms from civil aviation, on the production of strategic raw materials, and on the creation of the Inter-American Defense Board. The Final Act was approved on 28 January.

The break

As early as 24 January Aranha authorised Welles to tell Roosevelt on Vargas’s behalf that Brazil would announce the break in relations at the close of the conference. According to the tallies, Peru (24 January) and Uruguay (25 January) broke off relations while the meeting was still in session, followed in the last days of January by Bolivia, Paraguay and Ecuador. When Aranha announced Brazil’s decision, only Argentina and Chile still maintained relations with the Axis. On 29 January Peru and Ecuador signed in Rio a protocol ending their border dispute.

Agreements followed the break. On 3 March 1942 a new Lend-Lease agreement was signed in Washington, raising the value of American deliveries to Brazil to some $200 million, of which Brazil was to pay only 35 per cent. At the same time the Brazilian Finance Minister obtained a $100 million credit for the extraction of strategic raw materials, among them iron ore from Itabira and rubber. The north-eastern airfields, above all Natal, became for the Americans a bridge across the Atlantic to Africa and on to the Middle East.

Place in the war

Germany regarded the break as a hostile act. According to accounts, Ambassador Kurt Prüfer spoke of a “state of latent war”. Brazilian ships sailing to the United States found themselves in waters where, from mid-January, Karl Dönitz’s U-boats were hunting shipping in Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag). The first confirmed victims, Buarque and Olinda, were sunk off the American coast in mid-February 1942. In August U-507 sank five Brazilian coastal vessels off Bahia and Sergipe, with more than 600 dead according to Brazilian figures, many of them passengers. After a wave of demonstrations Brazil declared a state of war with Germany and Italy on 22 August 1942, and on 8 February 1943 it acceded to the Declaration by United Nations. Its navy and air force protected convoys in the South Atlantic, and the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, some 25,000 men, fought in Italy from the summer of 1944. It was the only Latin American army to fight on land in Europe.

Chile broke off relations with the Axis in January 1943, Argentina only in January 1944, declaring war in March 1945; throughout the war Washington treated Argentina with suspicion and denied it the arms deliveries that went to Brazil. The Rio conference, although it ended in compromise, cut the Axis powers off from almost the whole of Latin America: from its diplomats, who also served as informants, from its airlines and from its raw materials. Brazil gained the position of the United States’ principal ally on the continent, and the Vargas regime, which had sent soldiers to fight against the dictatorships, did not itself long outlast the war: in October 1945 it was overthrown by the army.