An online publication:
The Cold War: by Paulo Roberto de Almeidain: Routledge Resources Online
Edited By: Ruud van Dijk
Published Online30 March 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367199838-1
ABSTRACT
Brazil entered its own Cold War precociously, after a Comintern attempted coup in 1935, which was the starting point of its official anti-communist state doctrine in force until the late 1970s. Having allied itself with Western powers during the Second World War, Brazil underwent an ‘americanisation’ process, most visible during the 1950s, at the height of the international Cold War, when convergence with the US diplomacy at multilateral organisations was expected. But even the military rightist regime of the 1960s and 1970s, openly anti-communist, experienced frictions with the US, mostly in commercial matters, non-proliferation, and development issues. A highly qualified diplomatic corps, together with high-ranking military, kept Brazil far away from super-power confrontations and just as an observer in the non-aligned movement. Cold War spirit was already absent at the end of the military regime (1985), as Brazilian diplomacy struggled to maintain an effective autonomy in foreign policy.
1 – An early cold warrior and an early retreat from the Cold War?
Brazil is a curious case of being a ‘cold warrior’ avant la lettre: as early as the 1930s, due to an attempted coup d’État by foreign Comintern agents in 1935 – aiming to take advantage of a domestic crisis among political forces opposing the constitutional government of Getulio Vargas – the foreign policy elite of the country devised and implemented a defensive, sometimes aggressive, stance towards the Soviet Union, with which there were to be no bilateral diplomatic relations between 1918 and 1961, except for a very brief period after the Second World War. The unacceptable Bolshevik regime was identified at its inception as a powerful enemy of the establishment – an oligarchic political system dominated by the powerful coffee planters – and served as an easy legitimation for the 1937 coup that started a dictatorship for the next eight years, called Estado Novo – the New State – modelled after the European rightist authoritarian regimes.
After the ‘official’ beginning of the Cold War in 1947, state intelligence officers – most of them high-ranking military and senior diplomats – replaced the previous collaboration with Gestapo agents in Brazil with a sympathetic allegiance to similar Western institutions, mostly military and diplomatic representatives of the United States and the United Kingdom. For the duration of first half of the Cold War, up to the 1970s, Brazil maintained a swift collaboration with the main Western partners, mainly US intelligence. The Brazilian elite, both military and diplomatic officers, tried to keep its distance from the Soviet Union. They did so in order to defend Brazil’s autonomy in foreign policy, and to have the country benefit economically from cooperation with the West.
2 – In the beginning was the Comintern
Brazil became a trusted partner of the United States and of other Western powers very early in the interwar period. Having sent a modest military force to France late during the Great War, and performed some naval surveillance by means of a small task force in the South Atlantic, a Brazilian delegation participated in the Paris Peace negotiations, early in 1919, led by a distinguished jurist, Epitacio Pessoa, who was elected president while in Paris (the sole case in the country’s history). Diplomatic relations with Russia were curtailed after the Bolshevik putsch and reestablished only, and only for a brief period, at the request of the Western ‘United Nations’, just after World War II. Modernisation of the srmy was conducted by a French Mission led by General Gamelin during the 1920s.
In the meantime, governments of the ‘Old Republic’ (1889–1930) adopted a staunch anti-communist posture, which became official state policy after the communist coup attempt in 1935. The existence of the Comintern – created by Lenin in 1918 to control the new communist parties arising from ruptures of established socialist parties after the Bolshevik putsch – was the political legitimation for the quick prohibition of the Communist Party of Brazil in 1922, the very year of its foundation. The Soviet Union occupied a unique place in the political imagery of the Brazilian rural and urban elites, as a source of Moscow-directed subversion of their conservative state, to be followed by expropriation and communist slavery and debauchery.
The experience of the 1935 Communist coup attempt in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital at that time, formed a strong inducement for a rightist coup by Getulio Vargas in 1937, abolishing civil liberties and establishing an authoritarian ‘New State’ modelled on the Salazarist regime in Portugal. Early in the 1930s, when President Roosevelt was testing his ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ towards the Southern hemisphere, Brazilian officials became active participants in the International Anticommunist Entente, based in Geneva (also known as Entente Internationale contre la IIIème Internationale).
Following an initial neutral stance at the beginning of the European war that started in 1939, Oswaldo Aranha, the democratic foreign minister of the dictatorship, convened an extraordinary diplomatic conference of the Western hemisphere in Rio de Janeiro, in January 1942, claiming total solidarity with the United States after Pearl Harbor. Next steps were the breaking of diplomatic relations with the three Axis countries, adherence to Lend Lease agreements, an air base for the American forces in the Northeast Brazil (a trampoline to the North Africa counteroffensive), and a decision, in 1943, to send a military expeditionary force integrated with the US Fifth Army, operating in Italy. The conference at Bretton Woods (1944) and Paris Peace conference in 1946 already found Brazil in a strict political alliance with the United States: as early as 1947, a diplomatic conference in Rio de Janeiro closed with the formal signing – by President Truman himself – of an Interamerican Reciprocal Assistance Treaty, the conceptual basis of the Washington treaty of 1949, establishing NATO, including its core principle of collective security. Almost all of the Latin American countries followed the American leadership into this pact, still in force today.
3 – The americanisation of Brazil
The postwar years corresponded to a thorough process of, in the words of Gerald Haines, ‘americanisation of Brazil’, starting with the creation of a Joint Economic Commission (under the Truman administration’s Point IV programme), the foundation of a ‘Escola Superior de Guerra’ (modelled on the National War College), and culminating, in 1953, in the signing of a Military Assistance Treaty, which was maintained until the late 1970s. Already since the inception of the United Nations, however, Brazilian representations in New York and Geneva were strictly instructed by Rio de Janeiro to closely follow American votes in all organs of the new organisation. As president of the second session of the General Assembly, former foreign minister and close friend of Washington, Oswaldo Aranha, worked closely with the Americans. In 1947, this led, among other things, to the approval of the partition plan for Palestine (the same year when strongly anti-communist President Eurico Dutra broke diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union). In early 1950s, at the very heart of the Cold War, a McCarthyist-like persecution sidelined progressive diplomats; they were later reintegrated by judicial revision. Despite the new democratic regime, the official doctrine of anti-communism persisted, as well as the formal prohibition of the Brazilian Communist Party, then under the guidance of the Cominform, the Soviet-led Communist Information Bureau, created in 1947 by Stalin to replace the former Comintern.
At the 1948 Bogota Conference, which transformed the Pan-American Union into the Organization of American States (OAS), Brazilian diplomats pleaded with the United States for a Marshall Plan for Latin America. In spite of Brazil’s anti-communist policies, Washington did not support the idea. In the 1950s, Brazilian diplomacy also pressed President Eisenhower to enlarge assistance programmes and governmental investments in national development programmes. An American request to send Brazilian troops to the Korean theatre of war, even under UN Security Council approval as a peacemaking mission, was respectfully declined by the same former dictator Getulio Vargas, constitutionally elected president in 1950. Since the early Cold War, the three branches of the armed forces maintained very large representations in Washington for equipment acquisition, as well as for education and training at the National Defense University and other special courses; most of the syllabi and manuals adopted at the Escola Superior de Guerra were directly translated from the materials produced by their American colleagues.
During the first three decades after the Second World War, Brazilian diplomacy, national parties, and political elites sustained the canons of the Cold War, defining Brazil as a Christian, Western country, integrated with a succession of ‘geopolitical circles’, encompassing first the Western hemisphere, then the democratic European states, and finally other Western-oriented anti-communist countries. National development policies and state-centred industrialisation became a kind of organising vector for the new nationalists of the late 1950s, with the creation of state companies for steel, oil, energy, and other components of a strong protectionist industrial import substitution process. A new attempt at a US-funded development programme for Latin American countries resulted in the creation of the Interamerican Development Bank in 1960, a practical result of the first truly multilateral Brazilian initiative, the Pan-American Operation of the progressive president Juscelino Kubitschek, also the creator of the new capital, Brasília, in the same year.
Kubitschek was the real founder of the famous Brazilian ‘Independent External Policy’, but it received a new conceptual formulation under his successor, President Janio Quadros, a bizarre populist in diplomacy, to compensate for his austere economic adjustment policies. In 1961, before renouncing his office after only six months of tenure, Quadros ordered the diplomatic recognition of Soviet Union, of other socialist regimes, and newly independent African and Asian countries. His last controversial gesture – especially provocative among the military establishment – was the award of the National Order of Southern Cross to the Argentinian-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. A sensible recommendation by the diplomatic staff limited Brazil’s relationship with the non-aligned movement to a status of observer. The advice anticipated perceptively that the new body would serve much more the cause of international communism than Western and American interests, to which Brazil was strongly attached.
4 – The years of the anti-communist military dictatorship
Vice-president João Goulart became president in 1961, when Quadros renounced; he was not a communist, as accused by the rightist opposition, but opened the operation of state policies and government agencies to leftist leaders and trade unionists affiliated with the Brazilian Communist Party. After its prohibition in 1922, it had been legalised in 1945, but then banned again in 1947. Notwithstanding a broad convergence with American diplomacy at the world level, Brazilian diplomats overtly opposed the US request to suspend Cuba from the OAS in 1962, using the juridical principle that nothing, not one single article, under its Charter, defined what political regime American countries should adhere to. Despite the legitimacy of the argument, Cuba was suspended, but Brazil maintained diplomatic relations with the only Soviet ally in the hemisphere. This recognition induced President John Kennedy to secretly ask Brazil to transmit a letter to Fidel Castro during the very critical days of the Soviet missile crisis in October 1962; however, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev blinked at the crucial moment of the US naval blockade before a special Brazilian envoy could deliver the American proposal. Goulart, suspected by the US government of being too soft towards the communists embedded in trade unions, was overthrown by the military coup of April 1964.
One of the first diplomatic measures of the new military government in 1964 was the severing of any relationship with Cuba, which was already supporting revolutionary movements in various Latin American countries, including urban guerrillas in some big Brazilian cities and among poor peasants in the Northeastern region. As the US favoured the rightist coup, the anti-communist stance of the military regime (1964–85) was reinforced, albeit without interrupting the diplomatic relationships established with many of those socialist countries already recognised between 1961 and 1964. The exception was China, loosely supporting a small peasant guerilla base, very far away from the coast, in the heart of the Amazon region; it was the sole Maoist revolutionary experiment in Brazil, the other being of Cuban inspiration, but it existed in the cities rather than in forests or mountains; at that juncture, many radical student opposition groups engaged in urban guerrilla movements, but were easily dismantled by the repressive apparatus of the regime. For its part, the Brazilian Communist Party, still operating underground, recommended, to its followers, peaceful resistance against the military regime, in alliance with the ‘national Bourgeoisie’ and other democratic forces.
Disentangling Brazil from the Cold War spirit
In 1974, one of the most repressive presidents of the military regime, Ernesto Geisel (1974–79), decided to establish diplomatic relations with Communist China, cutting off a long-standing relationship with Taiwan. Ironically, in this way he exposed himself to the threat of an extreme-rightist revolt from within the military.
Nonetheless, he also approved an ambitious nuclear cooperation agreement with the Federal Republic of Germany, supposedly for energy purposes, thus circumventing the American opposition towards nuclear proliferation in Brazil. Brazil refused to sign the NPT until 1996. Nonetheless, even during the dictatorship of the generals, Brazilian diplomacy always had a preference for multilateral legitimacy; it was against unilateral decisions by the great powers. Before accepting to lead a ‘pacification mission’ in the Dominican Republic, in 1965, the first president of the regime, General Humberto Castelo Branco, required from the OAS the approval of a multilateral resolution creating a ‘Interamerican Peace Force’. The general also refused the ‘invitation’ by President Lyndon Johnson to send troops or give support to American military intervention in the Vietnam war, given the absence of a UN Security Council decision.
Thus, at the height of the Cold War, Brazil’s civil and military regimes always aligned the country within the Western camp, but more in a theoretical fashion than in the practical domain, adopting a cautious diplomatic approach, so as not to be involved in the struggles of the great powers on other continents. Notwithstanding this search for diplomatic autonomy, during the 1960s and 1970s, with the spread of urban and rural guerilla groups in South America, both the military and diplomats intervened against leftist governments or movements in close proximity to Brazil, cooperating in a limited manner with the anti-leftist Condor operation conducted by the extreme right governments in the region. Brazil approved and took part in the Kissinger initiative to undermine Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973. At the same time, though, it refused to join Argentina’s dictators and the Apartheid regime of South Africa to create an explicitly anti-communist South Atlantic Organization Treaty. In 1975, general Geisel recognised the pro-Soviet, Cuban-supported MPLA government in Angola, against the pro-Chinese and American-supported guerilla movements and South African troops.
The end of the Cold War was contemporaneous with the end of the military regime in Brazil, in 1985; the new civil government reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba, and both Communist parties, the pro-Soviet (PCB) and its pro-China variant (PCdoB, founded in 1962), were recognised as legal entities in a democratised country. Overall, Brazil was somewhat marginal in the great struggles during the whole Cold War period, mostly due to the consistent commitment of its professional diplomacy with multilateral decision-making processes and a true respect for international law and the UN Charter. Brazil’s real Cold War – that is, an official state policy of anti-communism directed against Soviet Union – was much more effective during the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937–45), than at the height at the Cold War at the 1950s and 1960s, and perhaps much more in force than during the military dictatorship from the 1960s and 1970s, despite still preserving its anti-communist doctrine.
References and further reading
Betthell, Leslie and IanRoxborough, eds. Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War: Crisis and Containment, 1944–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Chilcote, Ronald H.The Brazilian Communist Party: Conflict and Integration 1922–1972. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Dulles, John W. F.Brazilian Communism, 1935–1945: Repression during World Upheaval. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.
Dulles, John W. F.Anarchists and Communists in Brazil, 1900–1935. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973.
Haines, Gerald K.The Americanization of Brazil: A Study of U.S. Cold War Diplomacy in the Third World, 1945–1954. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
Hershberg, James. The United States, Brazil, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (Parts 1 and 2). Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 2 and no. 3 (2004): 3–20 and 5–67.
Hilton, Stanley E.Brazil and the Soviet Challenge, 1917–1947. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.
Patti, Carlo. Brazil in the Global Nuclear Order, 1945–2018. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021.
Sarzynski, Sarah. Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.
Links to online primary documents
The Wilson Center Digital Archive (under the Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars) and the National Security Archive, of the George Washington University, both have collections of documents on Brazil, pertaining to the Cold War period: https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org and https://nsarchive.gwu.edu.
The series Foreign Relations of the United States has many volumes with material relevant for this entry: is there a particular volume, or document(s), we can list here for users as guidance for possible further research: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments.
Published Online30 March 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367199838-1
ABSTRACT
Brazil entered its own Cold War precociously, after a Comintern attempted coup in 1935, which was the starting point of its official anti-communist state doctrine in force until the late 1970s. Having allied itself with Western powers during the Second World War, Brazil underwent an ‘americanisation’ process, most visible during the 1950s, at the height of the international Cold War, when convergence with the US diplomacy at multilateral organisations was expected. But even the military rightist regime of the 1960s and 1970s, openly anti-communist, experienced frictions with the US, mostly in commercial matters, non-proliferation, and development issues. A highly qualified diplomatic corps, together with high-ranking military, kept Brazil far away from super-power confrontations and just as an observer in the non-aligned movement. Cold War spirit was already absent at the end of the military regime (1985), as Brazilian diplomacy struggled to maintain an effective autonomy in foreign policy.
1 – An early cold warrior and an early retreat from the Cold War?
Brazil is a curious case of being a ‘cold warrior’ avant la lettre: as early as the 1930s, due to an attempted coup d’État by foreign Comintern agents in 1935 – aiming to take advantage of a domestic crisis among political forces opposing the constitutional government of Getulio Vargas – the foreign policy elite of the country devised and implemented a defensive, sometimes aggressive, stance towards the Soviet Union, with which there were to be no bilateral diplomatic relations between 1918 and 1961, except for a very brief period after the Second World War. The unacceptable Bolshevik regime was identified at its inception as a powerful enemy of the establishment – an oligarchic political system dominated by the powerful coffee planters – and served as an easy legitimation for the 1937 coup that started a dictatorship for the next eight years, called Estado Novo – the New State – modelled after the European rightist authoritarian regimes.
After the ‘official’ beginning of the Cold War in 1947, state intelligence officers – most of them high-ranking military and senior diplomats – replaced the previous collaboration with Gestapo agents in Brazil with a sympathetic allegiance to similar Western institutions, mostly military and diplomatic representatives of the United States and the United Kingdom. For the duration of first half of the Cold War, up to the 1970s, Brazil maintained a swift collaboration with the main Western partners, mainly US intelligence. The Brazilian elite, both military and diplomatic officers, tried to keep its distance from the Soviet Union. They did so in order to defend Brazil’s autonomy in foreign policy, and to have the country benefit economically from cooperation with the West.
2 – In the beginning was the Comintern
Brazil became a trusted partner of the United States and of other Western powers very early in the interwar period. Having sent a modest military force to France late during the Great War, and performed some naval surveillance by means of a small task force in the South Atlantic, a Brazilian delegation participated in the Paris Peace negotiations, early in 1919, led by a distinguished jurist, Epitacio Pessoa, who was elected president while in Paris (the sole case in the country’s history). Diplomatic relations with Russia were curtailed after the Bolshevik putsch and reestablished only, and only for a brief period, at the request of the Western ‘United Nations’, just after World War II. Modernisation of the srmy was conducted by a French Mission led by General Gamelin during the 1920s.
In the meantime, governments of the ‘Old Republic’ (1889–1930) adopted a staunch anti-communist posture, which became official state policy after the communist coup attempt in 1935. The existence of the Comintern – created by Lenin in 1918 to control the new communist parties arising from ruptures of established socialist parties after the Bolshevik putsch – was the political legitimation for the quick prohibition of the Communist Party of Brazil in 1922, the very year of its foundation. The Soviet Union occupied a unique place in the political imagery of the Brazilian rural and urban elites, as a source of Moscow-directed subversion of their conservative state, to be followed by expropriation and communist slavery and debauchery.
The experience of the 1935 Communist coup attempt in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital at that time, formed a strong inducement for a rightist coup by Getulio Vargas in 1937, abolishing civil liberties and establishing an authoritarian ‘New State’ modelled on the Salazarist regime in Portugal. Early in the 1930s, when President Roosevelt was testing his ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ towards the Southern hemisphere, Brazilian officials became active participants in the International Anticommunist Entente, based in Geneva (also known as Entente Internationale contre la IIIème Internationale).
Following an initial neutral stance at the beginning of the European war that started in 1939, Oswaldo Aranha, the democratic foreign minister of the dictatorship, convened an extraordinary diplomatic conference of the Western hemisphere in Rio de Janeiro, in January 1942, claiming total solidarity with the United States after Pearl Harbor. Next steps were the breaking of diplomatic relations with the three Axis countries, adherence to Lend Lease agreements, an air base for the American forces in the Northeast Brazil (a trampoline to the North Africa counteroffensive), and a decision, in 1943, to send a military expeditionary force integrated with the US Fifth Army, operating in Italy. The conference at Bretton Woods (1944) and Paris Peace conference in 1946 already found Brazil in a strict political alliance with the United States: as early as 1947, a diplomatic conference in Rio de Janeiro closed with the formal signing – by President Truman himself – of an Interamerican Reciprocal Assistance Treaty, the conceptual basis of the Washington treaty of 1949, establishing NATO, including its core principle of collective security. Almost all of the Latin American countries followed the American leadership into this pact, still in force today.
3 – The americanisation of Brazil
The postwar years corresponded to a thorough process of, in the words of Gerald Haines, ‘americanisation of Brazil’, starting with the creation of a Joint Economic Commission (under the Truman administration’s Point IV programme), the foundation of a ‘Escola Superior de Guerra’ (modelled on the National War College), and culminating, in 1953, in the signing of a Military Assistance Treaty, which was maintained until the late 1970s. Already since the inception of the United Nations, however, Brazilian representations in New York and Geneva were strictly instructed by Rio de Janeiro to closely follow American votes in all organs of the new organisation. As president of the second session of the General Assembly, former foreign minister and close friend of Washington, Oswaldo Aranha, worked closely with the Americans. In 1947, this led, among other things, to the approval of the partition plan for Palestine (the same year when strongly anti-communist President Eurico Dutra broke diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union). In early 1950s, at the very heart of the Cold War, a McCarthyist-like persecution sidelined progressive diplomats; they were later reintegrated by judicial revision. Despite the new democratic regime, the official doctrine of anti-communism persisted, as well as the formal prohibition of the Brazilian Communist Party, then under the guidance of the Cominform, the Soviet-led Communist Information Bureau, created in 1947 by Stalin to replace the former Comintern.
At the 1948 Bogota Conference, which transformed the Pan-American Union into the Organization of American States (OAS), Brazilian diplomats pleaded with the United States for a Marshall Plan for Latin America. In spite of Brazil’s anti-communist policies, Washington did not support the idea. In the 1950s, Brazilian diplomacy also pressed President Eisenhower to enlarge assistance programmes and governmental investments in national development programmes. An American request to send Brazilian troops to the Korean theatre of war, even under UN Security Council approval as a peacemaking mission, was respectfully declined by the same former dictator Getulio Vargas, constitutionally elected president in 1950. Since the early Cold War, the three branches of the armed forces maintained very large representations in Washington for equipment acquisition, as well as for education and training at the National Defense University and other special courses; most of the syllabi and manuals adopted at the Escola Superior de Guerra were directly translated from the materials produced by their American colleagues.
During the first three decades after the Second World War, Brazilian diplomacy, national parties, and political elites sustained the canons of the Cold War, defining Brazil as a Christian, Western country, integrated with a succession of ‘geopolitical circles’, encompassing first the Western hemisphere, then the democratic European states, and finally other Western-oriented anti-communist countries. National development policies and state-centred industrialisation became a kind of organising vector for the new nationalists of the late 1950s, with the creation of state companies for steel, oil, energy, and other components of a strong protectionist industrial import substitution process. A new attempt at a US-funded development programme for Latin American countries resulted in the creation of the Interamerican Development Bank in 1960, a practical result of the first truly multilateral Brazilian initiative, the Pan-American Operation of the progressive president Juscelino Kubitschek, also the creator of the new capital, Brasília, in the same year.
Kubitschek was the real founder of the famous Brazilian ‘Independent External Policy’, but it received a new conceptual formulation under his successor, President Janio Quadros, a bizarre populist in diplomacy, to compensate for his austere economic adjustment policies. In 1961, before renouncing his office after only six months of tenure, Quadros ordered the diplomatic recognition of Soviet Union, of other socialist regimes, and newly independent African and Asian countries. His last controversial gesture – especially provocative among the military establishment – was the award of the National Order of Southern Cross to the Argentinian-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. A sensible recommendation by the diplomatic staff limited Brazil’s relationship with the non-aligned movement to a status of observer. The advice anticipated perceptively that the new body would serve much more the cause of international communism than Western and American interests, to which Brazil was strongly attached.
4 – The years of the anti-communist military dictatorship
Vice-president João Goulart became president in 1961, when Quadros renounced; he was not a communist, as accused by the rightist opposition, but opened the operation of state policies and government agencies to leftist leaders and trade unionists affiliated with the Brazilian Communist Party. After its prohibition in 1922, it had been legalised in 1945, but then banned again in 1947. Notwithstanding a broad convergence with American diplomacy at the world level, Brazilian diplomats overtly opposed the US request to suspend Cuba from the OAS in 1962, using the juridical principle that nothing, not one single article, under its Charter, defined what political regime American countries should adhere to. Despite the legitimacy of the argument, Cuba was suspended, but Brazil maintained diplomatic relations with the only Soviet ally in the hemisphere. This recognition induced President John Kennedy to secretly ask Brazil to transmit a letter to Fidel Castro during the very critical days of the Soviet missile crisis in October 1962; however, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev blinked at the crucial moment of the US naval blockade before a special Brazilian envoy could deliver the American proposal. Goulart, suspected by the US government of being too soft towards the communists embedded in trade unions, was overthrown by the military coup of April 1964.
One of the first diplomatic measures of the new military government in 1964 was the severing of any relationship with Cuba, which was already supporting revolutionary movements in various Latin American countries, including urban guerrillas in some big Brazilian cities and among poor peasants in the Northeastern region. As the US favoured the rightist coup, the anti-communist stance of the military regime (1964–85) was reinforced, albeit without interrupting the diplomatic relationships established with many of those socialist countries already recognised between 1961 and 1964. The exception was China, loosely supporting a small peasant guerilla base, very far away from the coast, in the heart of the Amazon region; it was the sole Maoist revolutionary experiment in Brazil, the other being of Cuban inspiration, but it existed in the cities rather than in forests or mountains; at that juncture, many radical student opposition groups engaged in urban guerrilla movements, but were easily dismantled by the repressive apparatus of the regime. For its part, the Brazilian Communist Party, still operating underground, recommended, to its followers, peaceful resistance against the military regime, in alliance with the ‘national Bourgeoisie’ and other democratic forces.
Disentangling Brazil from the Cold War spirit
In 1974, one of the most repressive presidents of the military regime, Ernesto Geisel (1974–79), decided to establish diplomatic relations with Communist China, cutting off a long-standing relationship with Taiwan. Ironically, in this way he exposed himself to the threat of an extreme-rightist revolt from within the military.
Nonetheless, he also approved an ambitious nuclear cooperation agreement with the Federal Republic of Germany, supposedly for energy purposes, thus circumventing the American opposition towards nuclear proliferation in Brazil. Brazil refused to sign the NPT until 1996. Nonetheless, even during the dictatorship of the generals, Brazilian diplomacy always had a preference for multilateral legitimacy; it was against unilateral decisions by the great powers. Before accepting to lead a ‘pacification mission’ in the Dominican Republic, in 1965, the first president of the regime, General Humberto Castelo Branco, required from the OAS the approval of a multilateral resolution creating a ‘Interamerican Peace Force’. The general also refused the ‘invitation’ by President Lyndon Johnson to send troops or give support to American military intervention in the Vietnam war, given the absence of a UN Security Council decision.
Thus, at the height of the Cold War, Brazil’s civil and military regimes always aligned the country within the Western camp, but more in a theoretical fashion than in the practical domain, adopting a cautious diplomatic approach, so as not to be involved in the struggles of the great powers on other continents. Notwithstanding this search for diplomatic autonomy, during the 1960s and 1970s, with the spread of urban and rural guerilla groups in South America, both the military and diplomats intervened against leftist governments or movements in close proximity to Brazil, cooperating in a limited manner with the anti-leftist Condor operation conducted by the extreme right governments in the region. Brazil approved and took part in the Kissinger initiative to undermine Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973. At the same time, though, it refused to join Argentina’s dictators and the Apartheid regime of South Africa to create an explicitly anti-communist South Atlantic Organization Treaty. In 1975, general Geisel recognised the pro-Soviet, Cuban-supported MPLA government in Angola, against the pro-Chinese and American-supported guerilla movements and South African troops.
The end of the Cold War was contemporaneous with the end of the military regime in Brazil, in 1985; the new civil government reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba, and both Communist parties, the pro-Soviet (PCB) and its pro-China variant (PCdoB, founded in 1962), were recognised as legal entities in a democratised country. Overall, Brazil was somewhat marginal in the great struggles during the whole Cold War period, mostly due to the consistent commitment of its professional diplomacy with multilateral decision-making processes and a true respect for international law and the UN Charter. Brazil’s real Cold War – that is, an official state policy of anti-communism directed against Soviet Union – was much more effective during the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937–45), than at the height at the Cold War at the 1950s and 1960s, and perhaps much more in force than during the military dictatorship from the 1960s and 1970s, despite still preserving its anti-communist doctrine.
References and further reading
Betthell, Leslie and IanRoxborough, eds. Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War: Crisis and Containment, 1944–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Chilcote, Ronald H.The Brazilian Communist Party: Conflict and Integration 1922–1972. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Dulles, John W. F.Brazilian Communism, 1935–1945: Repression during World Upheaval. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.
Dulles, John W. F.Anarchists and Communists in Brazil, 1900–1935. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973.
Haines, Gerald K.The Americanization of Brazil: A Study of U.S. Cold War Diplomacy in the Third World, 1945–1954. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
Hershberg, James. The United States, Brazil, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (Parts 1 and 2). Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 2 and no. 3 (2004): 3–20 and 5–67.
Hilton, Stanley E.Brazil and the Soviet Challenge, 1917–1947. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.
Patti, Carlo. Brazil in the Global Nuclear Order, 1945–2018. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021.
Sarzynski, Sarah. Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.
Links to online primary documents
The Wilson Center Digital Archive (under the Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars) and the National Security Archive, of the George Washington University, both have collections of documents on Brazil, pertaining to the Cold War period: https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org and https://nsarchive.gwu.edu.
The series Foreign Relations of the United States has many volumes with material relevant for this entry: is there a particular volume, or document(s), we can list here for users as guidance for possible further research: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments.
