back then; the newspapers campaigned for social improvement. The company was involved in founding the Democratic Party, an opposition group. However, in 1929, Olival Costa, by then sole proprietor of the Folhas, mended his fences with the São Paulo Republicans, and broke his links to opposition groups connected to Getúlio Vargas and his Aliança Liberal. In October 1930, when Vargas led a victorious revolution, newspapers that opposed him were attacked by Aliança Liberal supporters. Folha's premises were destroyed, and Costa sold the company to Octaviano Alves de Lima, a businessman whose main activity was coffee production and trade. Defense of rural landowners and opposition to Vargas Alves de Lima's initial goal, when he took over the newspapers in 1931, was defending the "agricultural interests", meaning rural landowners. But important events elsewhere became the focus for news organizations: the 1932 constitutionalist revolution, when São Paulo tried to recover the power lost to Vargas; the World War II (1939 to 1945), and the Estado Novo (the Vargas dictatorial period that extended from 1937 to 1945). Alves de Lima had no news experience, and so he charged poet Guilherme de Almeida with directing the company, and chose Rubens do Amaral as newsroom head; Amaral led a newsroom staffed by journalists hostile to Vargas. Hermínio Saccheta, a Trotskyite who was briefly a political prisoner under Estado Novo, became an executive news editor as soon as he left jail. The dictatorial administration put political pressure onto news organs, and in São Paulo it took as its main target the daily O Estado de S. Paulo, a major supporter for the 1932 revolution. The newspaper's director, Júlio de Mesquita Filho, was arrested three times and forced into exile, and "Estado" was under intervention by the authorities from 1940 to 1945. With its main rival muzzled, Folha da Manhã took a leading role in voicing opposition to Vargas' dictatorship. This critical stance is one of reasons offered to explain a change in ownership during 1945. According to João Baptista Ramos, brother of João Nabantino Ramos – one of the company's new controlling partners, with Clóvis Queiroga and Alcides Ribeiro Meirelles -, buying the Folhas was a maneuver Getúlio Vargas engineered to get rid of the oppositionist viewpoint Rubens do Amaral, a sworn enemy of "getulismo", gave to the paper's news coverage. Queiroga, on his part, represented Count Francisco Matarazzo Júnior, barred from owning press outlets in Brazil