Política externa brasileira durante o regime militar 1964-1985 by André L. Reis da Silva and Eduardo Svartman (eds.)

Latin America and Caribbean Julio Moreno complements Deborah Levenson-Estrada’s 1994 book-length study of the struggle for trade union rights at Coca-Cola’s bottling plant in Guatemala (Trade unionists against terror, University of North Carolina Press), by using company records in Atlanta to show that the franchisor was limited in its ability to intervene, contrary to standard perceptions of the activities of US corporations in Latin America, though the company’s decentralized business model hardly makes it representative; Jonathan Brown builds on Don Bohning’s 2005 book on US covert operations against Cuba in the early 1960s (The Castro obsession, Potomac Books) by highlighting the proactive role of Cuban exiles; James Jenkins illuminates the part played by North American Indian activists in the already wellstudied Miskitu struggle for autonomy within revolutionary Nicaragua in the 1980s; and Cheasty Anderson adds an important Nicaraguan dimension to the burgeoning literature on Cuban medical internationalism that offers a more realistic and objective view than that provided by some other writers. The geographical scope of the contributions is weighted in favour of the circum-Caribbean, with four chapters dealing, in part or as a whole, with Cuba, three with Guatemala and two with Nicaragua; as in all such collective offerings, the end-product is the sum of individual research interests. Philip Chrimes Política externa brasileira durante o regime militar 1964–1985. Edited by André L. Reis da Silva and Eduardo Svartman. Curitiba: Juruá. 2014. 210pp. Pb.: R$64.70. isbn 978 8 53624 878 3. In 2014, Brazil commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of 31 March 1964, the day General Mourão’s troops marched over Rio de Janeiro and ousted President João Goulart. The academic literature on the military period which followed is extensive, covering both domestic and foreign policy-making under the regime. Why should scholars, then, pay attention to another work on the military regime’s foreign policy? André L. Reis da Silva and Eduardo Svartman’s edited collection is the first book to take a long-range view of the five military governments that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, providing a unique perspective on their attempts to position Brazil on the world stage. Exactly 50 years ago, the rise of authoritarian government in Brazil represented significant economic, political and cultural change in a country that had no experience of real democracy. Merely eleven years had passed between the end of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo regime and the military coup of 1964—not enough time to consolidate democratic institutions. Confidential files and archives from the period have now been opened to the public and a growing body of research on topics such as political repression, dual political systems and democratization in the 1980s is providing more insight into previously understudied aspects of Brazilian international affairs, complemented by the reports of the National Truth Commission and more. Silva and Svartman’s originality lies in the way they focus on both continuity and change in the foreign policies of the five governments studied. The authors use a variety of research methods to study these policies, primarily descriptive historical analysis but also political economy methods and process tracing, relying both on primary sources and official documents. The five chapters cover the period from 1964 to 1985 in chronological order, with one chapter dedicated to the Castello Branco, Costa e Silva, Médici, Geisel and the Figueiredo governments respectively. They each try to answer the same question: ‘how did the military government in office attempt to improve Brazil’s position in the world, taking into account systemic constraints?’; this helps to provide a unifying framework for the book.

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Book reviews In chapter one, André Silva looks at foreign policy-making under the Castello Branco government, identifying three key themes: the internalization of Cold War discourse to strengthen the legitimacy of the new regime; the reinforcement of the hemispherical collective security ideas against the communist threat and the use of developmentalism as the economic path to promote autonomy. Chapter two, by Rodrigo Martins, focuses on the shortest, but most brutal, years of Brazil’s authoritarian experience under Costa e Silva. Martins argues that Brazilian foreign policy began to be governed by the política externa independente [independent foreign policy] strategy, giving it depth and promoting effective multilateralism, despite the ideological barriers at play. Cintia Vieira Souto looks at Médici’s foreign policy, one of the less-studied periods. The main topic of chapter three is the diplomacy of national interest which, as the author argues, was the solution to promoting the politico-economic interests of a conservative but modernizing government. It is at this time that the government launched its ‘Great Power Project’, leading to accusations of Brazilian subimperialism in Latin America. Chapter four covers foreign policy-making under Geisel, and as Tomaz Espósito Neto points out, this is a topic which has already been studied in detail by both Brazilian and international scholars. The pragmatismo responsável [responsible pragmatism] of this period was the most powerful innovation in Brazilian foreign-policy thinking in years, representing a pivot towards the US, East Germany and, at the same time, communist liberation movements in Africa. Brazil carved out an independent path in international affairs, although there is no doubt that developments on the world stage, such as the oil shocks of 1973 and the politics of Cold War deterrence, favoured this shift. Internal and external developments at the end of the 1970s weakened the military and allowed for a ‘slow, gradual and safe’ return to democracy. Svartman ends the book by looking at the Figueiredo government, which paved the way for eventual democratic transition in 1985, and its policies of universalism in foreign affairs. As Svartman concludes, the foreign policy legacy of the military regime is complex and hard to evaluate; on the one hand Brazil, in the course of forty years, became industrialized, more urban and broadened its engagement with foreign states, on the other, its relationship with the United States deteriorated significantly. Nonetheless, the contributors to this edited collection should be congratulated for their valuable addition to the study of the history of Brazilian foreign policy. Fabrício H. Chagas Bastos, University of São Paulo, Brazil

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