The Brazilian Dream

About the Book

The Brazilian Dream: Brazil's Quest For Greatness

The Brazilian Dream, written by Thomas G. Sanders and G. Harvey Summ,            

chronicles how the leaders of Brazil, a so?called "middle power," attempted to achieve their dream of greatness for their country in the 1970s and 1980s. It grew out of a series of 45 American Universities Field Staff (AUFS) reports on Brazil written between 1970 and 1991 by co?author Thomas G. Sanders. The reports, both academic and practical in nature, are an unusual and invaluable resource for understanding Brazil in the late twentieth century, and form the main body of this book.

In 1960 President Juscelino Kubitschek of Brazil presided over Brazil's crash move of its capital from Rio de Janeiro to the newly?created and modernistic Brasília. He used the slogan "Fifty Years' Progress in Five" (the length of his presidential term) to realize the country's long?held aspiration to place the capital on its central plateau.

Military leaders who took power in 1964, after a period of uncertainty and chaos of democratic government, attempted to follow through with Kubitschek's dream. They believed that unlike most developing countries, theirs was a leading candidate for greatness. Businessmen and members of the middle class with whom the military shared these and other ideas believed that their country had all the prerequisites??size, population, and geographical location??to make it the great capitalist power of the South Atlantic within 30 or 40 years. They regarded the second half of the twentieth century as the crucial period when Brazil would have to bring about this transformation through high rates of growth.

These military leaders meant to use Brazil's conservative authoritarian tradition, including a widely accepted social class system, a Catholic culture and religion, and a tradition of paternalism, as instruments for developing Brazil into a modern society and a major international power, with broad implications for individual and national well?being. Thinking on a grandiose scale, they envisaged using Brazilian solutions to create a modern and powerful nation, respected internationally for its strength and culture, a potential world actor, a common news topic, and a major force in international relations, with the status of countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union.

Historical Background

In 1500 a Portuguese expedition had discovered Brazil. Portugal, one of the world's leading empires of that era, was interested in conquest, plunder, and trade, had neither the population nor the resources to develop its new colony, and was at the beginning of a long period of decline. Rather than gold or silver, settlers from Portugal found brazilwood, the dyewood which was to give the new colony its name, and which offered only modest prospects to them. Private merchants licensed by the Portuguese crown exported the wood until the supply gave out, and engaged in other small?scale agricultural activities.

Throughout most of its history, the economy depended on the export of a succession of primary products. After dyewood and sugar in the sixteenth century, colonists found gold and diamonds in the late 1600s. Coffee and rubber later were principal export crops. The vagaries of worldwide demand, other European countries' more modern production methods, or exhaustion of the supply of minerals led to frequent boom?and?bust cycles. Industrialization did not take place until well into the twentieth century.

To exploit their colony, the Portuguese crown established a captaincy system under which large plots of land were granted to a small group of friends and proteges of the court. Seeking labor to work the plantations and mines, the colonizers first attempted to use native Indians as slaves, but found that unsuccessful because of disease and Indian unwillingness to work at regular labor. They then imported large number

About the Author

Thomas G. Sanders, a foreign area specialist on Latin America for the American Universities Field Staff (AUFS), received a Ph.D. in religion from Duke University, and lived in Brazil from 1967 to 1991. He is the author of Protestant Concepts of Church and State (1964), and Catholic Innovation in a Changing Latin America. This book, Brazilian Dream, grew out of a series of 45 AUFS reports of his on Brazil between 1970 and 1991. G. Harvey Summ directed the Master's program in Latin American Studies at Georgetown University. A 28-year foreign service officer, beginning in 1944 he served in Brazil, Portugal, and Angola for thirteen years. He was also director of research for Latin America, and directed an area studies course on Brazil, in the Department of State. He is the editor of Brazilian Mosaic: Portraits of a Diverse People and Culture (1995).