Military Brazil Research Articles

Beyond Order and Progress: Legitimacy and Nation-Building in Military Brazil

Abstract Between 1964 and 1985, a military dictatorship in Brazil combined an arsenal of political instruments—surveillance, violent repression, and propaganda, among others—to justify its illegal rule. How did the Brazilian military regime attempt to justify its claim to power for more than two decades? What discursive strategies did it use to win popular support, despite the violence it perpetrated? This paper investigates how discourse is used to legitimize power and create meaning in authoritarian regimes. Using ethnographic content analysis of archival materials, I pinpoint and analyze three key discursive frames employed in regime propaganda: “defenders of democracy,” “Great Brazil” and “model citizenship.” I argue that the Brazilian military regime used these frames to justify its authority, forge national values and social norms, and redefine the boundaries of the national community. These findings not only contribute to our understanding of authoritarian power that is wielded and legitimized through discourse, but also speak to the enduring consequences of authoritarianism in sociopolitical subjects.

Planning a Family: Birth Control, Sterilization, and the Welfare of Society in Cold War Brazil

This article explores the history of family planning during the Brazilian military dictatorship by focusing on the activity of The Society of Family Welfare (Sociedade do Bem-Estar Familiar no Brasil, BEMFAM), founded in 1965 and affiliated with the International Planned Parenthood Federation. BEMFAM’s campaigns were met with criticism from various fronts. The Catholic Church condemned the use of contraception methods. The military, which had ruled the country since taking power in 1964, opposed BEMFAM’s efforts to curtail population growth and its international partnerships. Leftist organizations attacked BEMFAM as well, denouncing its initiatives as a form of criminal Western imperialism. The denunciations ultimately led to a parliamentary inquiry into the activities of BEMFAM. Analyzing the dictatorship’s intelligence reports, state records, and BEMFAM’s publications, the article elucidates how population control models, Cold War ideologies, and gendered politics shaped health and reproduction in military Brazil.

White Coats with Blue Collars: Doctors’ Labor Protests and the Struggle for Democracy in Brazil, 1978–1982

AbstractThis article explores the labor struggles of doctors in late 1970s and early 1980s Brazil, the final years of the nation's dictatorship. Health workers' protests for better salaries and working conditions were extensive and reflected a dramatic change in the way medical practitioners in Brazil perceived their professional and political identities. Fusing together histories of medicine and labor, the article shows how physicians not only led strikes and unionized by their tens of thousands but also collaborated with blue-collar sectors in a larger struggle for working rights, access to healthcare, and structural reforms. Dictatorship officials, the article reveals, were significantly concerned by hospital strikes and particularly by the emerging cross-sector alliance. In this sense, the doctors' movement played a significant role in challenging Brazil's military rule and advancing the nation's transition to democracy.

Erratum: The Torah of Che Guevara: Jewish Students and Armed Struggle in Military Brazil by Michael Rom

Erratum: The Torah of Che Guevara: Jewish Students and Armed Struggle in Military Brazil by Michael Rom

Erratum: The Torah of Che Guevara: Jewish Students and Armed Struggle in Military Brazil by Michael Rom

Erratum: The Torah of Che Guevara: Jewish Students and Armed Struggle in Military Brazil by Michael Rom

The Torah of Che Guevara: Jewish Students and Armed Struggle in Military Brazil

Studies of Latin American Jews under Cold War dictatorships have primarily focused on Jewish victims of dictatorial state violence. More recent scholarship, however, has offered individual case studies of Argentine Jewish activists as political actors rather than victims. Building on this newer work, this article examines the participation of Jewish high school and university students in the student movement and armed struggle against the Brazilian military regime (1964–85). Drawing on secret police records, memoirs, and oral history interviews, it explores the experiences of a dozen Jewish activists, tracing their politicization to family ties, Jewish elementary schools and summer camps, and elite public high schools. Blurring the boundaries between the "communalist" and "dispersionist" approaches to Jewish history by demonstrating how social networks established through leftist Jewish institutions had lasting impacts on ostensibly unaffiliated Jewish activists, this article offers the first extended examination of Jewish anti-dictatorship activism in the Latin American sixties.

Diasporic assistance in authoritarian settings: Evidence from military Brazil

The study of diasporas in international politics concentrates on migrants and their descendants in liberal democratic host countries; however, diasporas in non-democratic states experience significantly different political relationships that warrant investigation. Such diasporas are not only numerous but can also be influential. Their participation in international politics and assistance to the homeland require navigating distinct political affiliations. This article explains what enables an authoritarian host country's consent to such diasporic assistance. It proposes that assistance is likely to be tolerated insofar as it does not conflict with the host country's interests, the diaspora member donors have powerful allies within the regime, and they are not identified with the opposition. This theoretical framework is illustrated by analyzing evidence from the Jewish diaspora in authoritarian Brazil (1964–1985). A comprehensive online appendix provides additional background, discusses refuted hypotheses, and details the research process toward making this article transparent and the research replicable.

Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil by Victoria Langland

<i>Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil</i> by Victoria Langland

LANGLAND, Victoria. Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2013. 352p.

LANGLAND, Victoria. Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2013. 352p.

Langland, Victoria. Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2013. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 352 pp.

Langland, Victoria. Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2013. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 352 pp.

Victoria Langland. Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil. Jaime M. Pensado. Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture during the Long Sixties.

Victoria Langland. Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil. Jaime M. Pensado. Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture during the Long Sixties.

Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil

Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil

Speaking of flowers: student movements and the making and remembering of 1968 in military Brazil

Speaking of Flowers is an innovative study of student activism during Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-85) and an examination of the very notion of student activism, which changed dramatically in response to the student protests of 1968. Looking into what made students engage in national political affairs as students, rather than through other means, Victoria Langland traces a gradual, uneven shift in how they constructed, defended, and redefined their right to political participation, from emphasizing class, race, and gender privileges to organizing around other institutional and symbolic forms of political authority. Embodying Cold War political and gendered tensions, Brazil's increasingly violent military government mounted fierce challenges to student political activity just as students were beginning to see themselves as representing an otherwise demobilized civil society. By challenging the students' political legitimacy at a pivotal moment, the dictatorship helped to ignite the student protests that exploded in 1968. In her attentive exploration of the years after 1968, Langland analyses what the demonstrations of that year meant to later generations of Brazilian students, revealing how student activists mobilized collective memories in their subsequent political struggles.

State and Opposition in Military Brazil.

State and Opposition in Military Brazil.

State and Opposition in Military Brazil.

State and Opposition in Military Brazil.

State and Opposition in Military Brazil

State and Opposition in Military Brazil

M. H. M. Alves: State and Opposition in Military Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985, £22.50). Pp. xiv + 352.

M. H. M. Alves: State and Opposition in Military Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985, £22.50). Pp. xiv + 352.

State and Opposition in Military Brazil. By Maria Helena Moreira Alves. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 352. $22.95.)

* Acknowledgments * Foreword * Part I. The Doctrine of National Security and Development * Introduction: Dependency and the National Security State *1. The Doctrine of National Security and Development * Part II. The First Stage of Institutionalization, 1964-1968 *2. The Foundations of the National Security State *3. Building New Control Mechanisms: Institutional Act No. 2 *4. Constitutional Reform and the Institutionalization of the New State *5. Liberalization, Opposition, and State Crisis: Institutional Act No. 5 * Part III. The Second Stage of Institutionalization, 1969-1974 *6. Armed Struggle and the National Security State * Part IV. The Third Stage of Institutionalization, 1974-1983 *7. The Geisel Government: Decompression *8. The Abertura Period * Conclusion: The Opposition and the State in Perspective * Appendix * Abbreviations * Notes * Index

State and Opposition in Military Brazil. By Maria Helena Moreira Alves. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 352. $22.95.)

State and Opposition in Military Brazil. By Maria Helena Moreira Alves. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 352. $22.95.)

State and Opposition in Military Brazil

State and Opposition in Military Brazil