XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Reflections on Brazil Apart, 1964-2019

• In Event: Roundtable: Continuity and Change in Modern Brazil

Abstract

Most of this book’s chapters were originally published as essays in the London Review of Books. Each assessed the achievements and legacies of the administrations of, respectively, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula, and Dilma, with the chapter on Bolsonaro examining how he rose to power. In the last chapter, Anderson criticizes Lula’s and Dilma’s Workers’ Party governments for being directly responsible for the “rehabilitation and re-entry onto the political stage of the military” by sending and keeping them in Haiti, where they lead the military component of MINUSTAH, the UN peacekeeping operation, from 2004 to 2017 (p. 208). In Haiti, according to Anderson, the military was re-equipped, “learnt how to run tasks of a civilian administration; and came back to Brazil redeemed as the heroic guardians of an exemplary pacification” (p. 213). He then goes on to argue that the tripod sustaining the Bolsonaro government is business, the judiciary, and the military and that of these three “the military are by far the most significant” (p. 207). Anderson also describes a parabola stretching across 56 years that came close to returning Brazil to the moment of the military coup d’état of 1964, in the form of the “colonization of the Bolsonaro regime by the military” (p. 213). In his contributions to this round table, Anderson will revisit the moment of the publication of this book and reflect on its continued relevance in light of Bolsonaro’s loss of the 2022 election and Lula’s return to the presidency.

Author

• Perry Anderson, UCLA