Geography asks three questions:The World is a daily production of Public Radio International (PRI) whose simple name perfectly captures what it provides: an ongoing education about this complicated planet. This week, I was surprised (though I should not have been) to hear a reporter sign off from one of my favorite places: the Brazilian island city of Florianópolis. This was a sweeping, national story, however, set mostly in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
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| Protests in São Paulo, April 2023 Photo: Andre Penner |
The story is about the annual commemoration of the 1964 coup, in which the Brazilian military removed President Goulart from office. This began a two-decade period of military dictatorship in Latin America's largest country. Unlike many other authoritarian regimes that were led by a single, outrageous character, this period was characterized by a series of bureaucratic-authoritarian governments whose individual leaders are rarely mentioned.
The immediate past president of Brazil had been complicit in the tyranny of those decades, however, making this anniversary very relevant to the rise and fall of Jair Bolsonaro and his continued relevance, even in defeat.
This blog has several posts with more information about the 1964 - 1985 period in Brazil and the U.S. support for some of those authoritarian regimes. My 2013 post Creative Resistance introduces the song and I discuss the U.S. role in the 2014 Overcoming Condor post.
Lagniappe
Terry Gilliam's 1985 dystopian comedy Brazil never makes direct reference to the country, but it was released just as democracy returned to the country, and is a satire about bureaucratic-authoritarian (BA) regimes of all kinds, and they ways (known in Brazil as jeito) that ordinary people find to work around them. It is very instructive for those working in more benign BA circumstances, such as universities, state governments, or state universities.
