Sobral Pinto "The Conscience of Brazil": Leading the Attack against Vargas (1930-1945) (review)

This is the first part of a two-volume biography of Heráclito Fontoura Sobral Pinto (1893-1991), the quixotic lawyer and Catholic activist who fought Brazil's dictatorial Vargas regime. Though the Vargas era has attracted considerable historical attention, there are few English-language biographies or autobiographies available to help scholars understand the ways individuals processed the political and social upheavals of the period. To this understanding, John W. F. Dulles has contributed a lively narrative about Sobral Pinto, who by force of religious, political and juridical conviction became one of the regime's most strident foes. This account is based on the previously unavailable correspondence of Sobral Pinto, as well as his regular newspaper columns and the debates he enjoined through the press.

Born in Minas Gerais to a devoutly Catholic family, Sobral Pinto became a federal prosecutor in Rio de Janeiro, during the presidency of Arthur Bernardes. Forced from office by an adultery scandal, Sobral Pinto entered private practice and established a reputation as a steadfast defender of victims of political persecution. As this persecution increased over the course of the Vargas era, so too did the professional demands and economic pressures on Sobral Pinto, who often eschewed compensation for cases he defended as a matter of principle. After the failed communist uprising of 1935, the Catholic conservative defended a number of communists, including Luis Carlos Prestes. He saw this as his Christian duty, as he did his fight against the Vargas regime, which culminated in acrimonious battles with the regime's National Security Tribunal and in intense public debates through his weekly newspaper columns, which drew the ire of federal censors.

Dulles reveals Sobral Pinto to be a complicated and often paradoxical figure. Though he often criticized the political expediency and brutality of the Vargas regime, during his tenure as federal prosecutor, Sobral Pinto was himself accused of torturing detainees, and he kept a hand in the political intrigues of his native Minas Gerais. While Sobral Pinto worked tirelessly to secure the release of communist leader Prestes, he tendentiously branded as a communist and fought for the dismissal of Anísio Teixeira who, as director of education for the Federal District, resisted the introduction of religious education in the city's schools. Though a steadfast defender of a juridical vision of human rights, Sobral Pinto also showed tendencies of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, and the lay Catholic organizations he participated in were consistently anti-feminist. While the author does not explain or reconcile these paradoxes, his vivid narrative style makes them available for scholarly analysis.

This volume should interest scholars of legal history and the history of Catholicism in Latin America. Undergraduate and graduate students of Brazil could also employ it as a companion to such comprehensive studies of the Vargas era as Robert Levine's Father of the Poor: Vargas and His Era, or Thomas Skidmore's The Politics of Brazil, 1930-1964. Sobral Pinto's activism highlights one of the central features of political persecution in authoritarian Brazil: the campaign—enjoined by Catholic activists and embraced by authoritarian regimes—to label progressive social reformers as communists and in so doing, subject them to persecution by the national security state. Paradoxically, Sobral Pinto's actions bring perspective to both sides of this experience since he was at once one of the architects of that category of accusation and one of the chief defenders of its victims. Another substantial question raised by this account concerns Sobral Pinto's ability to sustain such consistent opposition to the Vargas regime and its mechanisms of repression without becoming its victim. Was Sobral Pinto's defiance possible because of his status as a prominent lawyer? Was it because of his role as a Catholic activist at a time when the Church held...