Gustavo Barroso

Gustavo Adolfo Luiz Dodt da Cunha Barroso (29 December 1888 – 3 December 1959) was a Brazilian lawyer, historian, writer and politician associated with Brazilian Integralism. He was also known by the pseudonym João do Norte. Being considered a master of Brazilian folklore, he was the first director of the National Historical Museum and one of the leaders of the Brazilian Integralist Action, being one of its most prominent ideologists.

Barroso is considered the most anti-Semitic Brazilian intellectual, whose ideas were close to those of Nazi theorists. A significant portion of the historiography emphasizes that Barroso’s antisemitism was framed not in racial terms, but as a moral concern. There are also scholars who affirm that he manifested traditional Catholic forms of antisemitism. Barroso explicitly rejected racial interpretations. He positioned himself as an anti-racist writer fighting what he viewed as jewish racism.

Barroso was born in Fortaleza, son of Antônio Filinto Barroso and Ana Dodt Barroso, he studied at day schools São José, Partenon Cearense and Liceu do Ceará. He studied at the Faculty of Law of Ceará linked to the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), graduating in 1911 from the Faculty of Law of Rio de Janeiro, currently the National Faculty of Law of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He was half German by birth, his mother coming from Württemberg.

Barroso made his name as a journalist and was for a time involved with the socialist Clube Maximo Gorki. However, his politics became more conservative after he secured his law degree in Rio de Janeiro in 1910.

He soon became an important figure in the Ceará state, serving variously as Secretary of the Interior and Justice, and being elected a Representative in the National Congress. He even formed part of the Brazilian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. He would later rise to hold such positions as president of the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters) and secretary-general of the International Committee of Legal Advisers.

In 1933, Barroso joined the Brazilian Integralist Action, which had fascist characteristics. He soon became the head of the extreme anti-Jewish faction within the Brazilian Integralist Action. Noted for his hard-line antisemitism, he took charge of the Brazilian Integralist Action Militia from 1934 to 1936 before being appointed to the party's Supreme Council. An extensive writer, his polemical works at this time included many anti-semitic books and newspaper articles in Fon-Fon and Século XX magazines.

Political differences caused Barroso to be regarded as dangerous by the more constitutionally minded Integralista party's leader, Plínio Salgado, who suspended him from collaborating for six months with the party's newspaper, A Ofensiva. However Barroso continued to pursue his antisemitic ideals, translating The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Portuguese and even suggesting setting up concentration camps.

Following the formation of the Estado Novo dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1938–1945), Barroso was arrested in 1938 after the Brazilian Integralist Action attempted a violent coup d´etat. However Barroso was never tried due to a lack of evidence of his involvement in the attempted coup. He subsequently left political activism and became largely accepting of Getúlio Vargas later constitutional government (1951–1954), serving as a special ambassador to Uruguay (1952) and Peru (1954). He died in Rio de Janeiro, aged 70.