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Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil
Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil
Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil
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Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil

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Sarah Sarzynski's cultural history of Cold War–era Brazil examines the influence of revolutionary social movements in Northeastern Brazil during the lead-up to the 1964 coup that would bring the military to power for 21 years. Rural social movements that unfolded in the Northeast beginning in the 1950s inspired Brazilian and international filmmakers, intellectuals, politicians, and journalists to envision a potential social revolution in Brazil. But in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the strength of rural social movements also raised fears about the threat of communism and hemispheric security.

Turning to sources including Cinema Novo films, biographies, chapbook literature, and materials from U.S. and Brazilian government archives, Sarzynski shows how representations of the Northeast depended on persistent stereotypes depicting the region as backward, impoverished, and violent. By late March 1964, Brazilian Armed Forces faced little resistance when overthrowing democratically elected leaders in part because of the widely held belief that the violence and chaos in the "backward" Northeast threatened the modern Brazilian nation. Sarzynski's cultural history recasts conventional narratives of the Cold War in Brazil, showing how local struggles over land reform and rural workers' rights were part of broader ideological debates over capitalism and communism, Third World independence, and modernization on a global scale.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 29, 2018
ISBN9781503605596
Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil

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    Revolution in the Terra do Sol - Sarah Sarzynski

    Stanford University Press

    Stanford, California

    © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

    All rights reserved.

    No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

    Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Sarzynski, Sarah, author.

    Title: Revolution in the terra do sol : the Cold War in Brazil / Sarah Sarzynski.

    Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2017050478| ISBN 9781503603691 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503605596 (electronic)

    Subjects: LCSH: Ligas Camponesas (Brazil)—History. | Brazil—History—Revolution, 1964—Causes. | Brazil—History—Revolution, 1964—Propaganda. | Social movements—Brazil, Northeast—History—20th century. | Peasants—Political activity—Brazil, Northeast—History—20th century. | Rural poor—Political activity—Brazil, Northeast—History—20th century. | Brazil, Northeast—History—20th century. | Cold War.

    Classification: LCC F2583 .S27 2018 | DDC 981.06—dc23

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050478

    Typeset by Newgen in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond

    Cover design: Rob Ehle

    Cover image: (inset) detail from still, Lima Barreto’s O cangaceiro (1953)

    Revolution in the Terra do Sol

    The Cold War in Brazil

    Sarah Sarzynski

    Stanford University Press

    Stanford, California

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction: Tropes of o Nordeste: Contested Visions of the Region During the Cold War

    Part One: O Nordeste in the Cold War

    1. Revolution in Brazil: Historical Context and Key Players

    2. Masculinity, Barbarism, and Honor: Representations of the Cangaceiro

    3. The Coronel and the Rural Poor: Narratives of Class Struggle

    4. Racialized Representations: Slavery, Abolition, and Quilombos

    5. Religion as a Political Tool: Resurrecting Canudos and Revolutionizing Jesus

    Part Two: Recollecting the Ligas Camponesas

    6. Survival and Resistance: Remembering the Ligas Camponesas in the 1980s

    7. Zito de Galiléia: Preserving a Past and Envisioning a Future for the Engenho Galiléia and o Nordeste

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    Acknowledgments

    THIS BOOK IS THE PRODUCT of many conversations and experiences that I have had over the years, and it is my attempt to question the resilient discriminatory practices and beliefs about Northeasterners in Brazil. The research for the book took me to libraries and archives throughout Brazil, including museums in small towns in the sertão, the secret police archives in the industrial district of Recife, film-viewing carousels at the Banco do Brasil in downtown Rio and the well-organized archives in São Paulo. I am immensely grateful to all of the archivists who assisted me in locating documents and films. The book would not have been possible without the funding I received from various institutions, including the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research program, the David Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora, the Department of History at the University of Maryland, the Claremont McKenna Faculty Research Committee and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies. I also want to thank Margo Irvin and the editorial staff at Stanford University Press for their support and transparency, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and critical insights.

    With this support, I have been able to make meaningful friendships in Brazil and learn from Brazilians, debating arguments about Cinema Novo films, racism, and politics. In particular, Adilson Menedes, a tremendous scholar on Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes, helped me navigate São Paulo and feel less Macabéa-ish. Up through assisting me in obtaining copyright permissions, Adilson went out of his way to support my scholarship. I want to recognize the amazing people at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo, FUNARTE in Rio, and the Cinemateca at the Modern Art Museum in Rio for their generosity in assisting me, as well as the filmmakers, family members, and production companies who granted me permission to reproduce images in this book. Brazilian and Brazilianista scholars, including Anatailde Crespo and Cliff Welch, went above and beyond in helping me to locate sources and discussing specific issues in the book. Fabio Rilston-Paim always welcomed me into his home, and we’ve enjoyed many tapiocas and movies together over the years. Ricardo Medeiros introduced me to dance groups in Olinda where I fell in love with the Maracatú. Over the years, Ricardo moved me with his determination, and his generosity let me experience highlights of Northeastern culture such as Recife’s March of the Oppressed. Zito de Galiléia shared his life history with me, and inspired me to recognize the meaning of historical projects even on an isolated, defunct plantation in Northeastern Brazil.

    I am deeply thankful to Barbara Weinstein for her guidance as I developed as a scholar and transformed my initial research questions into this book. Her academic brilliance is equaled only by her warmth and kindness as a human being. Barbara read and listened to so many versions of this book—I can’t express enough gratitude for her engagement with my work over the years. I still feel that I came to the historical profession by happenstance, and without the inspiration, respect, and support that Barbara provided, I don’t think I would be where I am now.

    This book benefited from the numerous discussions and workshops with colleagues and friends who prodded, tore apart, and helped me revise my manuscript. At my current institutional home, Claremont McKenna College, colleagues in the history department painstakingly read my manuscript and offered advice on revisions, especially Lisa Cody, Wendy Lower, Diana Selig, and Tamara Venit-Shelton. Lily Geismer, Heather Ferguson, Jonathan Petropoulos, and Norman Valencia also offered their expert advice as the book went to production. I especially want to recognize Ellen Rentz for her advice about publishing and her support throughout this process. At New York University, I had the privilege of working with Ada Ferrer, Pamela Calla, and Sinclair Thompson, among others at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and appreciated the opportunity to present a chapter at the New York Latin American History Workshop. Teaching at CLACS helped me frame the book as I worked through how to clarify the broader issues and discuss interdisciplinary methodologies. The book also benefited from the expertise of the best writing group imaginable, with Michelle Chase, Tamara Walker, and Marcela Echeverria.

    Before NYU, as a visiting professor at Mount Holyoke College, I became incorporated into the dynamic Latin Americanist community in the Five Colleges, which offered me the opportunity to workshop chapters at the Afro-Luso-Brazilian seminar and to discuss my work in conversations with colleagues Millie Thayer, Sonia Alvarez, Joel Wolfe, Malcolm McNee, Lowell Gudmundson, Roberto Marquez, and Manuela Picq. From the University of Maryland, I’d like to recognize Mary Kay Vaughan, Daryle Williams, Saverio Giovacchini, David Gordon, Shari Orisich, Laura Lenci, Paula Halperin, Linda Noel, Leandro Bernmegui, Giacomo Mazzei, Luc LeBlanc, David Sartorius, and Mary Junqueira, among others. In particular, I want to thank Patricia Acerbi, the bravest person I know, who has been a true friend through good times and bad, and Shervin Malekzadeh, whose friendship and enthusiasm for the project extended from its initial stages to comments on the final draft. I’d also like to express my appreciation to my mentors at the University of Arizona, who helped ignite my interests in Brazilian film and the Ligas Camponesas: Ana Maria Carvalho and, in memoriam, Nivea Pereira Parsons and Bert Barickman.

    My family has been instrumental in supporting me as I have researched, written, and revised this book. My mom spent a month with me in Brazil, being thrown in the air as the bus to Olinda sped over a bump, and drinking cachaça out of a cow-foot flask passed around on the bus of women headed to the passion play spectacle outside of Caruarú. She has always listened to me and calmed my stress levels through all the bumps in the road. My dog, Uncas, was there through many long runs and hikes as I tried to clear my mind and clarify my thoughts during the writing. Mark Lauer read versions and kept me laughing throughout the revision process. He supported me professionally, picking up and moving to California, which allowed us to expand our family. Welcoming our son Niko into the world has been my greatest achievement, and I am sure he will grow up loving Brazil as much I do.

    Introduction

    Tropes of o Nordeste: Contested Visions of the Region During the Cold War

    Que a terra é do homem num é de Deus nem do Diabo

    O sertao vai virá mar e o mar virá sertão

    The land belongs to man, not to God or the Devil.

    The land will turn into the sea, and the sea into land.

    —The repeated verse that concludes Glauber Rocha’s Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, 1964

    GIVEN THE REVOLUTIONARY wave reverberating throughout the Americas following the Cuban Revolution, in 1959, Glauber Rocha could have portrayed Northeastern Brazil as a land erupting in social revolution in his groundbreaking film Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (released in English with the title Black God, White Devil). At the time of the film’s release, in 1964, hundreds of thousands of rural men and women in Northeastern Brazil were demanding land, labor, and citizenship rights through protests, strikes, and land invasions. Insiders and outsiders alike drew direct comparisons between the Northeastern rural social movements and the Cuban Revolution, raising both hopes and fears of an encroaching Brazilian social revolution. But Rocha’s film did not allude to the massive social mobilizations occurring in Northeastern Brazil. Instead, Rocha chose to depict historical struggles involving messianic cults, violent bandits, hired thugs, greedy large landowners, and miserable, ignorant rural people.

    Deus e o diabo criticized historical forms of rural rebellion, such as messianism and cangaceirismo (banditry), as primitive forms of resistance emanating from hunger and alienation. Throughout the film, protagonists Manuel and Rosa escape from the historical legacies plaguing this region of the terra do sol (the land of the sun). In the open-ended finale, the rural couple flees from a battle between a hired gun and the backlands bandits, running across the dry lands of the sertão toward the presumed salvation of the sea. The folk ballad that narrates the film picks up tempo, suggesting the potential for change in the region when rural people become aware of their political rights instead of following false prophets (messianic cults) or partaking in unorganized, violent rebellion (banditry).

    The film is one of the founding films of Cinema Novo, or New Cinema, a radical cultural movement that challenged romanticized Hollywood and European depictions of Third World poverty and sought to transform the passive spectatorship experience of cinema as entertainment into a political consciousness-raising exercise. Deus e o diabo was widely applauded nationally and internationally on its release, and it continues to be celebrated today as one of the most important Brazilian films ever made.¹ In 1964, Brazilian critics applauded Deus e o diabo for being a truly revolutionary film and a huge leap in the development of Brazilian cinema, comparing it to Citizen Kane in terms of its impact on Brazil’s national cinema.² Others compared Glauber Rocha to Euclides da Cunha, author of the canonical book from 1902 Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), for creating a national epic that portrayed the desperation of the homem nordestino (Northeastern man), and described Deus e o diabo as the first Brazilian film to offer an impressive real and authentic vision of Northeastern misery, its causes, and consequences.³ To achieve this reality effect, Rocha filmed the landscape of Northeastern Brazil in high contrast to accentuate the region’s relentless sun and arid topography. He portrayed local inhabitants as nonwhite, small-in-stature victims, whose hunger and passivity preordains their death by messianic cults, backlands bandits, or the harshness of the terra do sol itself.

    While I agree with critics that Deus e o diabo is a cinematic masterpiece, my analytical interest in the film returns to the question of why Rocha made a film in the early 1960s using the historical symbols of the cangaceiros (backlands bandits) and messianic cults. Investigating the film as a historical artifact of the time, I found that the references to cangaceiros and messianic cults were anything but unusual. It seemed that everyone—including commercial filmmakers, leaders of rural social movements, journalists, large landowners, intellectuals, popular poets, and Brazilian and US government officials—communicated about Northeastern political and social struggles in the 1950s and 1960s in a language borrowed from the past or, at least, composed of historical themes, narratives, and symbols associated with the region of Northeastern Brazil. This realization led me to inquire further about why people referred to historical themes when arguing for or against agrarian reform in the era of the Cuban Revolution and the consequences the discourse has held for the region and its people.

    Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonparte, invoked the idea of borrowed language to explain that the French Revolution of 1848 had failed because of its repetition of past revolutionary ideas and symbols, which led to farce instead of a proletarian revolution. Marx implied that a language for the future had to be created for a social revolution to be successful, one that abandoned the past and its superstitions. In Northeastern Brazil, in the 1950s and 1960s, an entirely new language would have been impossible and impractical. Historical symbols and themes such as messianism and backlands banditry are core components that define Northeastern Brazil, forming part of a regional trope that distinguishes the region and its people as the Other in Brazil.

    In Brazilian society, assumptions that Northeasterners are backward, violent, illiterate, and exploited victims who lack agency are readily believed to be true and acted on as if they were true.⁴ Instead of creating a new language, the leaders of the rural social movements found that the best way to challenge existing social structures, such as the latifundio (large landholding system), was to engage with the region’s historical symbols and themes and imbue them with new revolutionary meanings. And yet even when rural social movements and other advocates for agrarian reform attempted to assert new meanings for historical symbols and themes, the images they produced often served to further entrench the assumptions about the region and its people, as in the case of Rocha’s terra do sol. By analyzing the debates over the meanings of historical symbols and themes in Northeastern Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s, I show the political consequences of regionalist stereotypes and their power to legitimize the state’s violent repression of Northeastern rural social movements, provide a rationale for the 1964 coup, and influence how the history of the Cold War has been written.

    Historical Overview: Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s

    After the Second World War, Brazil, like many Latin American countries, transitioned from being a dictatorship (Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo, 1937–45) to having a reasonably democratic government (1945–64), though many Brazilians remained disenfranchised, mainly because of literacy requirements. In 1950, more than half the Brazilian population, an estimated 15,200,000 to 16,700,000 adults, was illiterate and thus ineligible to vote.⁵ Vargas returned to the presidency in 1951, employing a nationalistic language to drive forward the impetus to improve the Brazilian nation through moderate social-reform programs, industrialization, and large-scale development projects in areas such as petroleum and energy. These projects and reforms did not include development projects for the rural Northeast until the late 1950s. Even though populist leaders like Vargas often used anti-imperialist slogans, the government passed laws such as SUMOC 113 (Currency and Credit Board, Instruction 113) to encourage direct foreign investment, which increased US business interests in Brazil.⁶

    The emphasis on economic development and growth based on further industrialization and large-scale development projects accelerated during the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–60), who had been elected on the slogan, Fifty years (of progress) in five. During these years, the Brazilian government built a new capital city, Brasília, the city of the future, to usher in a modern era. As James Holston has argued, architects, urban planners, and the Kubitschek administration designed Brasília as a blueprint for the modern Brazilian nation.⁷ Brasília would lead by example, becoming a model city that would eventually colonize the social order and transform Brazil’s social structures without social upheaval. Those who could not be incorporated into the national vision, such as the nonmodern Northeastern rural population, remained further marginalized in the national project.

    The spread of modernization projects like Brasília in the 1950s inspired social scientists in Brazil and beyond to offer novel ways to define regional difference in Brazil. Through a new language of social indicators and statistics, journalists, scholars, and politicians could now prove that the Northeast was Brazil’s most unequal and underdeveloped region. The new, modern language replaced previously used racist terms, such as savage or barbaric, without diminishing social divisions predicated on racialized notions of superiority and inferiority. Commonly cited demographic indicators rarely put life-expectancy rates above thirty years for nordestinos (people from Northeastern Brazil); mothers were described as offering their infants coffee, farinha (yucca flour), and sugar instead of milk, which resulted in severe malnutrition, and infant mortality rates were reported to reach 700 deaths per 1,000 infants under the age of one.⁸ Illiteracy rates and parasitic infection rates were also extremely high in the rural Northeast, averaging over 70 percent. Journalists, intellectuals, and politicians jumped on the production of such social scientific knowledge to reinforce their political projects aimed at social change and economic development in the region. They produced new catchphrases to define the entrenched poverty of o Nordeste, describing the region as 600,000 square miles of suffering, a land of crab people trapped in a repetitive cycle of scavenging and starvation, where human survival was a miracle.⁹ The synopsis on the book jacket of one of the most important books in English on the Ligas Camponesas (Peasant Leagues), Joseph Page’s The Revolution That Never Was (1972), provided a poignant example of this poverty discourse, explaining to readers that the Northeast is indeed ‘underdeveloped,’ if so mild a word can be used about one of the most extensive and wretched wastelands of poverty in all of the world, where legions of the poor live on so little food that medical science says they should not be living at all.¹⁰

    Northeastern miséria, a combination of misery, wretchedness, and extreme poverty, became a newsworthy political issue in the 1950s and 1960s, in part because of the influence of social science and modernization theory, but also because of prevailing interpretations of the Cuban Revolution and the belief that impoverished peasants could form the social base for a revolution. In the mid-1950s, the rural social movement in Northeastern Brazil that later became known as the Ligas Camponesas began organizing rural workers to fight for radical agrarian reform and to extend labor laws to rural workers and grant citizenship rights to rural people, such as voting enfranchisement. In late November of 1959, the Ligas Camponesas won their first legal victory in the state court, mandating the expropriation of the defunct sugar plantation, the Engenho Galiléia. After this initial victory, the Ligas expanded rapidly throughout Northeastern Brazil, encouraging the growth of other rural social movements led by the Ligas, the Catholic Church, and the Brazilian Communist Party. The mainstream media drew connections between the Ligas and Cuba, revolutionizing the rural social movements and influencing how Brazilians and foreigners interpreted the Northeastern rural movements.

    Rural social movement leaders realized that the most powerful strategy for gaining support for their political projects was to infuse the legends and historical symbols of the Northeast with new revolutionary meanings. The dominant symbols associated with the Northeast had to be reclaimed or transformed into symbols that expressed resistance and demanded justice, transferring the power attached to the landowning elite to the rural laborers. By appropriating regional symbols, social movements could generate popular support for the struggle for land or, metaphorically, for power in the region and the nation. For example, the Ligas challenged the traditional view that the backlands bandit was a sadistic, mixed-race criminal, transforming the cangaceiro into a regional Robin Hood fighting in the style of a guerrilla warrior against the latifúndio system and for rural people’s rights to the land. The Ligas used the symbol of the cangaceiro to encourage rural men to join the fight against the large landowners and for radical agrarian reform.

    The rural social movements contributed to broader debates over the future of the Northeast, the Brazilian nation, and the Western Hemisphere being articulated by a range of political and cultural actors active in the region in the 1950s and 1960s, including Cinema Novo directors. For example, Northeastern state officials supported radical social-reform projects such as the adult literacy programs Paulo Freire discussed in his famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), now the bible of popular literacy programs around the globe. The Brazilian government inaugurated a widely celebrated development institute in 1959, SUDENE (Superintendência de Desenvolvimento do Nordeste, Superintendency for Northeast Development) headed by Celso Furtado, to raise the region’s economic prospects. The first funds from President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress were allocated to the United States Agency for International Development (US AID) for development projects in Northeastern Brazil meant to thwart the threat of communism and promote the American way of life. Regional landowners formed organizations to lobby for economic aid to modernize agricultural production as a strategy to regain their traditional regional power. An array of foreign luminaries, including Roberto Rossellini, Ralph Nader, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the mother of Ernesto Che Guevara, traveled to the Northeast to assess whether Brazil would be the next Cuba.

    Carefully cultivating fears of another Cuba enabled large landowners, Brazilian military officials, the US government, and others I label here as Conservatives to offer Brazil a military solution.¹¹ Citing escalating violence and chaos in the Northeast and alleged communist infiltration in the region, Conservatives argued that the Ligas Camponesas posed a threat to the modern Brazilian nation. On March 31, 1964, the Brazilian Armed Forces overthrew democratically elected leaders, including Brazilian president João Goulart and Pernambucan governor Miguel Arraes, and arrested, tortured, and disappeared Northeastern social-movement activists, beginning a military dictatorship that would rule Brazil for over twenty years. Over those two decades, the military government enacted agrarian reforms that favored policies to increase the mechanization of agricultural production, leading to an even more inequitable distribution of land in Northeastern Brazil. Talk of the Ligas Camponesas and other rural social-movements from the 1950s and 1960s fell silent against the national overture of order and progress.

    The widely accepted interpretation of the Brazilian military dictatorship is that the 1964 coup was mild and that the first military president, General Humberto Castelo Branco (1964–67) was a moderate. This description erroneously suggests that the Brazilian military did not seize power through violent means, even though scholars, reporters, and activists were publishing reports about the human rights violations taking place in Northeastern Brazil after 1964.¹² Most scholarly analyses of the dictatorship concentrate on the linha-dura (hard line) or anos de chumbo (leaden years) that began after 1968 with the leadership of General Artur Costa e Silva (1967–69), who increased censorship and repression through extraconstitutional decrees that limited citizens’ rights and sharply increased incidents of political arrest, torture, disappearance, and exile. This historical narrative developed out of testimonies and studies on student movements and guerrilla movements located in the urban centers of Brazil—namely, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasília. Scholars João Roberto Martins Filho, James Green, and others have questioned the traditional historiographical interpretation, claiming that the authoritarian decrees Castelo Branco enacted were neither mild nor moderate and framing Brazilian authoritarianism as progressing along a continuum instead of starting in 1968.¹³ Revolution in the Terra do Sol furthers these critiques of the traditional interpretations of the coup and military dictatorship by showing how the law of national security was used in the Northeast before the 1964 coup, how state and landowner violence regularly targeted rural men and women throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and how rural social-movement leaders and participants, particularly those affiliated with the Ligas Camponesas, faced violent forms of repression after the coup and during the dictatorship.

    What Was the Ligas Camponesas?

    The Northeastern rural social movement Ligas Camponesas developed on the defunct sugar plantation known as the Engenho Galiléia, outside Vitória de Santo Antão in the state of Pernambuco, in the mid-1950s. After lawyers won the legal battle to have the property expropriated, in 1959, the movement expanded rapidly throughout Northeastern Brazil, primarily in the states of Pernambuco and Paraíba, and largely in the coastal (mata) and transitional (agreste) regions of these states. The Ligas Camponesas was an autonomous Northeastern movement without broader affiliations to political parties or institutions. They fought for radical agrarian reform under the banner by law or by force to continue to push for the expropriation of latifúndios. The Ligas also fought to end coercive rural labor systems, such as the cambão or the day of unpaid labor that large landowners required from their tenant workers.¹⁴ They tried to establish a minimum wage for rural workers and limits on numbers of hours and weeks worked and to extend the Labor Relations Code (Consolidação de Leis Trabalhistas, CLT), to rural workers.

    I refer to the Ligas Camponesas in the plural because that is how they are referred to in Portuguese, as Ligas Camponesas, which is an umbrella term used to describe the collective of community-led and organized ligas (leagues). When rural workers established a liga (league) in their community, the liga was often referred to by its location (e.g., Liga de Galiléia, Liga de Sapé). The name Liga signified that the rural workers were associated with the broader social movement known as the Ligas Camponesas, but each community liga had its own elected leaders, interests, and priorities, which meant that some leagues employed more radical strategies than others in their struggles for land rights, for example, using force instead of legal action by threatening to take over property and displace the landowners and their administrators. Ligas members often had passbooks, paid monthly dues, and participated in political rallies and conferences with other rural workers who supported the Ligas Camponesas. Lawyer Francisco Julião of the Brazilian Socialist Party, the Partido Socialista Brasileiro (PSB), who served as Pernambucan state representative from 1954 to 1962 and as federal representative from 1962 to 1964, is generally considered the leader of the Ligas Camponesas. The social movement also published a newspaper, LIGA, had a hymn, and published materials detailing the political motivations of the movement and its organizational structure.

    Although I am interested in revealing the dialogues among the political and cultural actors in the Northeast, I focus more heavily on the Ligas. The Ligas became the focus of media and public discussions in the early 1960s, and the target of Conservatives’ fears about the spread of communism and social unrest in the Northeast. Because of the movement’s rapid acceleration, its connections to Cuba, and Francisco Julião’s prowess as a public speaker and organizer, the Ligas also attracted a good deal of attention in Brazil and the United States. Conservatives, the new military government that seized control in 1964, and other competing groups on the left blamed the Ligas for instigating the coup. Scholarly publications have also focused more on the Ligas than other rural social movements. Because of this presence, the sources used to write history are available, making it possible to discern how the Ligas engaged with the trope of o Nordeste.

    Initial studies of the rural social movements in Northeastern Brazil addressed why they had emerged and spread so quickly throughout the region. Scholars investigated their participant bases, leaders, tactics, structures, political persuasions, and broader national or global connections.¹⁵ Following the coup and the silencing of the rural social movements, scholars—with an eye to social struggles elsewhere—turned to the pressing question of the time about the revolutionary potential of the peasant versus the rural proletariat.¹⁶ Aspasia Camargo and Florencia Mallon’s studies transcended the stalemate of the peasant-versus-wage-labor debate by reframing the question, arguing that alliances between rural workers, peasants, and other social groups created a revolutionary force.¹⁷ By the 1980s, scholars studying rural social movements returned to the questions about the political organization of the social movements, the political positioning of movement leaders and their strategies, and the major struggles the movements faced. Studies by sociologist Fernando Antônio Azevedo and by political scientist Elide de Rugai Bastos, both titled As Ligas Camponesas, have become the core works to which many scholars turn in order to understand the rural social movements in the 1950s and 1960s.¹⁸ Both studies take questions about why the Ligas emerged as their starting point, using a Marxist theoretical framework to argue that the rural social movements formed as a reaction to the stage of capitalist development and expansion in the countryside in the 1950s.

    Yet even with the greater visibility in the 1960s and as a focus of scholarship, a number of questions about the Ligas Camponesas remain difficult to answer. For instance, it likely will remain impossible to determine the actual size of the Ligas Camponesas. Some estimate that the Ligas had about 80,000 members in the states of Pernambuco and Paraíba.¹⁹ Photographs and film footage from the 1960s show enormous political rallies in support of the Ligas in the Northeast. A special report for O Estado de São Paulo, in 1963, estimated 30,000 to 40,000 registered Ligas members in Pernambuco but argued that this number was misleading, because the region’s misery and the intensity of the leftist activists could easily have led to an explosion of membership numbers. The article went on to insinuate that the 250,000 people who voted for Miguel Arraes for state governor could be considered Ligas sympathizers.²⁰ According to a military publication produced by the Second Army, in the second half of 1963 there were 218 Ligas distributed throughout every Brazilian state, sixty-four in Pernambuco alone.²¹

    This said, I am wary of any estimate of the number of Ligas members, for several reasons, including a lack of trustworthy sources. Rural workers were often affiliated with more than one rural social movement, making it difficult to draw definitive lines between the Ligas, the Rural Syndicates, and the Catholic Church Federations of Rural Workers. In some communities and at some times, the rural social movements collaborated; at other times, they opposed one another. Some leagues had passbooks and records, but many did not, and most of that information has been lost. Because of the violence, disruptions to rural communities, and immediate illegal status of the Ligas and the PCB Rural Syndicate after the 1964 coup, many records were destroyed. Likewise, the historical memory of the Ligas has been erased in many communities, making it difficult to determine which communities may have had leagues. Rather than address a question I believe is not possible to definitively answer, I employ a cultural approach to analyze the participation of the Ligas in political debates and struggles about the future for the region, nation, and the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s. This history is a product of the Cold War, both shaped and being shaped by the broader ideological conflicts between capitalism and communism, the quest for Third World independence, political polarization, and the radicalization of political struggles.

    Incursions into Cold War and Diplomatic History

    The Cold War has long been defined as a confrontation between the superpowers, a lengthy period of time, from 1945 to 1991, when the United States and the Soviet Union battled for alliances in the countries in the so-called Third World, manifesting fear of communism or of capitalism to legitimize the build-up of nuclear weapons. Most studies of the Cold War focus on diplomatic history, examining international policy making and national security strategies at the state level. Latin American Cold War history largely focused on diplomatic history from a US perspective, positioning the United States as the political actor shaping international relations and Latin America as the dependent victim.²² More recent histories of international relations during the Cold War have challenged this perspective by providing perspectives from Latin America and examining conflicting definitions of concepts such as anti-Americanism or modernization theory and how such definitions shaped policies.²³ Among others, Greg Grandin claims that although the Cold War played out differently throughout the Latin American nations, the era can be defined by its radicalization of political strategies and political polarization.²⁴

    Recent works on the Cold War in Latin America detail how Latin American anticommunist leaders did not rely on Washington and instead manipulated US officials and pursued projects of inter-American diplomatic relations outside the sphere of US influence.²⁵ This allows scholars to question the amount of power the United States government and CIA had in dictating Latin American policies during the authoritarian period while also emphasizing the ignorance of the United States in its relations with Latin American nations. Such studies rely on recently declassified US and Latin American government documents, often with the intention of explaining what happened during the Cold War by examining the degree of US involvement, the actual threats of terrorism or armed resistance, and the diplomatic relations between Latin American countries, as in Operation Condor. Scholars have taken an international approach to studying the Cold War in Latin America, comparing the perceptions of events between two or more countries as detailed in official documents. This scholarship tends to focus on key events and hotspots, such as Cuba, Guatemala, Allende’s Chile, and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

    This book builds upon the appeal of Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser’s edited collection In from the Cold to develop a new history of the Latin American Cold War, showing how the local–foreign struggles for power functioned through representations and symbolic systems and shaped ordinary people’s experiences and political activism.²⁶ My interpretation of Joseph’s call for a re-envisioning of Cold War history from the grassroots level distinguishes my work from other Cold War histories in terms of its source base, methodological approach, and focus on a marginal region that temporarily became a major global hotspot. In addition to traditional historical sources such as government documents and periodicals, I interpret a variety of sources from popular culture and oral histories. I take a cultural approach to analyzing my sources, meaning that I use discourse analysis to uncover the significance of the political and cultural debates about Northeastern Brazil during the Cold War. This means that I am less concerned with uncovering the degree of US involvement in Northeastern Brazil and more concerned with revealing what US officials were saying about regional underdevelopment and the threat of communism and how they were saying it.

    Revolution in the Terra do Sol illustrates why the so-called margins are crucial to understanding the Cold War. While writing the book, I often thought of the Cold War as a soundtrack to a film. The Cold War increased and diminished in volume, sometimes narrating the plot, at other times, fading into the background, replaced by local voices and local concerns. Conservatives drew from Cold War discourses that emphasized the fear of foreign agitators, communism, and deviancy in order to criticize the Ligas Camponesas and depict them as criminal elements that threatened the Brazilian nation. The Ligas looked to Cuba as a role model for creating social revolution in Brazil, re-appropriating historical regional figures as native guerilla warriors and precursors in the battle for agrarian reform. To challenge Conservatives, they drew from a Cold War language that designated the traditional landowning elite and the United States as imperialist enemies who sought to further exploit and enslave Northeastern rural workers. Although the global debates over the Cold War themes of capitalism versus communism and the meanings of freedom, modernity, and underdevelopment circulated throughout the rural Northeast, local struggles focused on such problems as acquiring stable access to land; putting an end to extralegal violence and exploitation; and addressing the lack of rural social services, such as education and health care; and labor rights. In these local struggles, Cold War discourse was used as a form of political power to attract attention to local problems and to create allies and support for competing political projects. Since the local and global debates and struggles were in and about Northeastern Brazil, they also had to engage with the trope of o Nordeste, a powerful discourse that Brazilians generally perceived to be real or true in the 1950s and 1960s.

    Regionalism: Northeastern Brazil and the Trope of o Nordeste

    Northeastern Brazil is easily located on a map (see Figure 0.1) as the mass of land in South America that extends easterly into the Atlantic Ocean; or as an American journalist described in 1962, it is the enormous, bloated paunch protruding from the edge of the Amazon basin in the north and then receding.²⁷ Although political borders of the region have changed over time, in the 1950s and 1960s the region included the states of Pernambuco, Paraíba, Alagoas, Sergipe, Rio Grande do Norte, Ceará, Piauí, and Maranhão.²⁸ In the 1950s and 1960s, around twenty million people inhabited the region, which stretched over 400,000 square miles. The region is often divided into three topographical zones: the mata, or fertile cane-growing coastal area; the agreste, or transitional farmland area; and the sertão, or arid backlands. Neither the topographical nor the political borders have been hard-and-fast designations.²⁹

    FIGURE 0.1   Map of the region defined as Northeastern Brazil from 1950 to 1969. The states of Bahia and Sergipe become part of the Northeast in 1969.

    While political borders and topographical features offer one definition of the region, the narratives and traditions of the imagined community of o Nordeste are the threads that strongly bind the region together.³⁰ The idea of o Nordeste is broad enough to apply to the region as it is variously defined

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