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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 171



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Sobral Pinto, "The Conscience of Brazil": Leading the Attack against Vargas (1930-1945). By John W. F. Dulles. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Plates. Notes. Index. xiv, 377 pp. Cloth, $60.00.

Non-Brazilianists can be forgiven for not recognizing the name of Heráclito Fontoura Sobral Pinto. This celebrated civil-liberties lawyer and prominent Catholic intellectual played a noteworthy, albeit minor, role in Brazilian political history. He was one of the most consistent and effective voices to speak out against Brazil's two twentieth-century dictatorships: the Estado Novo of 1937-45 and the military government of 1964-85. This work is the first of a projected two-volume biography and covers Sobral Pinto's career up to 1945. A second volume on the remainder of his career will complete the coverage.

Sobral Pinto's most famous pre-1945 client was Luiz Carlos Prestes, the long-time leader of the Brazilian Communist Party. Prestes was imprisoned in 1936 after the failed Communist rebellion of 1935 until almost the end of Getúlio Vargas's dictatorship. Sobral Pinto succeeded in maintaining access to Prestes when many other prisoners were forbidden outside contact. In the process, Sobral Pinto cut a courageous figure in his defiance of prison authorities and the secret police.

Sobral Pinto's political background was solidly conservative. His sympathies lay with such figures as Arthur Bernardes, the prominent Mineiro politician who would eventually become president. This created an obvious contradiction between Sobral Pinto's efforts on behalf of civil liberties and his links to traditional political bosses such as Bernardes who readily resorted to repression. Like many of his fellow Catholic intellectuals, his concern for the working man was more a matter of noblesse oblige than any leftist conviction. In 1945, in the wake of his disappointment over the political realignments following Vargas's fall, Sobral Pinto wrote, "[W]hat we must do is not rail against the common people who no longer believe in us" (p. 291). His hope was that new judicial institutions would solve the problem of the threat from below.

Readers familiar with Dulles's previous books on Brazilian history will find no surprises in his approach here. His hallmark is fidelity to his sources (is there a letter or article of Sobral Pinto's that goes uncited?), with minimal attention given to the larger context. For example, the reader learns remarkably little about the legal and constitutional system within which Pinto maneuvered so brilliantly. Nevertheless, this biography will be valuable documentation for students of the Vargas era.

Finally, Sobral Pinto comes across as a very difficult, if courageous man. He was hypersensitive, quarrelsome, pugnacious, verbose, and innocent of self-doubt. On the other hand, aren't these the very qualities we look for in a good defense lawyer?



Thomas E. Skidmore
Brown University

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