This book offers a balanced assessment of the policies and the economic and social reforms of the Brazilian military regime, while comparing that experience with other South American military regimes. Written by a prominent historian and an experienced economist, it is an ambitious work that explains why the military governments had a profound and long-lasting impact on Brazil.
Klein and Vidal Luna provide a comprehensive analysis of the politics of the Brazilian military interregnum of 1964–85, and the economic and social policies implemented by its several administrations (Chapters 2 through 4, the main body of the content). This analysis clearly shows the continuity of the state-sponsored industrial developmental model first adopted by Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s, which had geared the nation towards a top-down modernization. The state promoted heavy industry, aimed mainly at the internal market and largely without private investors, while retaining agriculture as the primary export sector. The authoritarian state furthered many of the social reforms that Vargas implemented, aiming at preventing revolutionary change from below by implementing controlled changes from above. Through all this, Brazilian military rulers preempted social demands and shaped social welfare institutions that would remain intact following democratization in the post-1985 period.
Against this background, the authors perceptively acknowledge what they define as the “inconsistency of the military repression.” While the regime destroyed the student movement, it promoted the massive expansion of secondary and higher education. Attacking the Universidade de Brasília and downplaying the humanities, it also modernized the university system, created UNICAMP, and expanded hard sciences and engineering. As it was destroying elite public high schools, it expanded literacy throughout the country. Similarly, while it was as repressive as most other military regimes in South America and actively cooperated in the repression of the revolutionary left throughout the region, the Brazilian regime played a ‘reformist’ card. Spaces for political action were controlled but certain areas of activity were left open. By the 1980s, under pressure from an increasingly autonomous labor movement and the Catholic Church, the government's model of authoritarian reform had reopened the road to democracy.
An equally important contribution of the book is its comparison of the Brazilian regime with that of other countries. The Brazilian military administrations of 1964–85 wanted to destroy Communism by demobilizing the left-wing parties and unions no less than did the other South American regimes cooperating in the repressive framework of Operation Condor. In Brazil, this period left a legacy of human-rights violations that would reverberate in the public agenda, leading by the 2010s to the establishment of an official truth commission. In addition, as the authors indicate, Brazil's experience with military rule resulted in “the elimination of the military as a major political actor and the abandonment by the conservative parties of their reliance on military support” (142).
Yet, there were differences between the various military governments of South America, which the book highlights (in Chapter 1 and elsewhere), and this is one of its major contributions. Klein and Vidal Luna's assessment indicates that much like the military governments of Chile and Peru, but less like those of Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay, the Brazilian military administrations combined repressive measures with a reformist agenda and adopted a developmental model in areas such as finance, taxation, welfare, and pension systems that was projected and maintained with changes (for example, in the component of state capitalism) after democratization.
Projecting such an ambitious agenda for a work carries the peril of minor historical mistakes. A partial list of such errors, with my adjustments in brackets: “the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Salvador Allende of Chile in 1970” [1973] (5); the overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz in 1953 [1954] (6); the statement that “the true Dirty War” in Argentina started in 1976 [1974], in “a country where no serious radical forces existed to threaten the establishment” [a misrepresentation of Argentina in the early 1970s] (7–8); a mention of the “Concentración de Partidos por la Democracia” in Chile [“Concertación”] (15); the replacement of president Bordaberry in Uruguay in 1986 [1976] (23); the attribution of the Uruguayan transition to a 1984 plebiscite [instead of the Naval Club Pact, the secret agreement that enabled the transition and was denounced by opposition politician Wilson Ferreira Aldunate] (25).
Overall, this is an excellent book that brings us provocative knowledge about the Brazilian military interregnum of 1964–85, sets it into a broader comparative perspective, and allows us to see what it shared, and did not share, with the other military governments of South America and what made its impact distinctive and long lasting.
