Brazil Halts Deportation of Jews to Demonstrate Hostility to Nazism

The Vargas Government has suspended deportation orders against 800 to 1,000 Jews, mostly from Germany, illegally resident in Brazil, the New York Times reported today from Rio de Janeiro, in a move aimed at stripping the “unitarian” government of any possible appearance of Nazism or Fascism.

The police are failing to follow up the deportation notices, said Turner Catledge, the Times correspondent, and deportations will be suspended for sixty days while Minister of Justice Francisco Campos drafts a new immigration law giving special status to immigrants of good repute, although probably not encouraging further resettlement of political refugees in Brazil.

The Jews, most of whom had overstayed ninety-day tourist visas, were concededly in the country illegally, the dispatch declared, but the expulsions, the first group scheduled for Monday, were called off when the situation of Jews who would be returned to Germany and other hostile countries was described to the authorities, together with possible repercussions abroad, especially in the United States.

In making the Governments attitude known, Mr. Campos, described as President Vargas’ “one-man brain trust,” stressed that the purpose of the Vargas regime was to do every thing possible to prove to the world, and the United States particularly, that the corporative state established in Brazil was motivated by no Fascist or Nazi spirit and would countenance no such ideologies as are expressed in racial and religious oppressions.