Beyond the Eagle's Shadow: New Histories of Latin America's Cold War

6: From Ploughshares to Politics: Transformations in Rural Brazil during the Cold War and Its Aftermath

150 · Chapter Six · From Ploughshares to Politics Transformations in Rural Brazil during the Cold War and Its Aftermath 5 Seth Garfield If Brazil’s military government trumpeted national security and economic development as antidotes to fight communism, the countryside was one of its battlegrounds. The coup of 1964, fuelled by elite fears of peasant mobilization under the leftist presidency of João Goulart, unleashed brutal repression against rural labor activists and advocates of agrarian reform . Through the promotion of agribusiness, unionization, and frontier colonization, Brazilian military and civilian authorities further sought to stanch rural unrest and underdevelopment. Over the course of more than two decades, the Brazilian military achieved many of its objectives in the countryside. Capital investment skyrocketed . Rural movements emerged from military rule with an extensive organizational base and strong linkages to the state.1 Yet the Brazilian military government’s agrarian policies also left a bitter legacy of social exclusion and violence. With the transition to democracy in 1985, pent-up popular demands for land reform and expanded rights for rural workers erupted amid the growth of new social movements. Over the following decade, landowners and police murdered more than one thousand rural workers in Brazil, far From Ploughshares to Politics 151 surpassing the killings in the countryside perpetrated by security forces under the military government. This chapter explores the origins and impacts of agrarian policies in Brazil during the Cold War. The Brazilian countryside, historically marked by deep-seated socioeconomic inequalities, oligarchic politics, and the absence of popular incorporation into state structures, had long tested the modernizing impulses of policymakers in the central government. During the postwar era, however, as urbanization, industrial growth, rural mobilization , and the expansion of the electorate transformed Brazilian society, the “agrarian question” gained greater political visibility and urgency. The military regime’s rural project, rather than an offshoot of the struggle between Moscow and Washington or its proxies for supremacy in Latin America’s largest nation, illuminates how Brazilian government policies were entangled in longstanding local conflicts over economic and political power.2 Brazilian actors tailored Cold War mantras—whether revolutionary or counterrevolutionary doctrines, national security ideologies, or developmentalism —to suit domestic political agendas. Indeed, this chapter’s analytical time frame, transcending the transition to democratic rule in Brazil and the demise of the Eastern Bloc, suggests the importance of reconsidering standard periodizations of Cold War histories in assessing legacies of violence, political conflict, and social exclusion in Latin America. This study also examines how subaltern groups in Latin America shaped and were affected by Cold War ideologies of national security and developmentalism. Brazil’s rural poor responded to the transformations around them in myriad ways. Droves voted with their feet: between 1960 and 1980, an estimated 29.4 million people migrated from the countryside to the cities (a population larger than most Latin American countries). A predominantly rural nation in 1960, 70 percent of Brazil’s population lived in urban areas twenty years later.3 Many rural workers, however, stayed put, seizing upon political openings afforded by military-era policies and legislation . Whereas in 1970 an estimated 1.5 million rural workers belonged to 1,322 unions, by the end of military rule 9.5 million workers had organized into 2,732 trade unions.4 Still others held on to their plots, migrated to the frontier in search of land, or joined grass roots organizations demanding land redistribution and democratic governance. Cold War–era policies would leave an indelible mark on the Brazilian countryside. Seth Garfield 152 The Postwar “Agrarian Question” in Brazil, 1946–1964 During the early 1960s, Brazilian government planners feared that rural underdevelopment would hamper domestic growth, divert foreign exchange to food imports, and provoke urban food shortages and social unrest.5 Constituting more than half the Brazilian population in 1963, the rural sector was marked by a 90 percent illiteracy rate (compared to less than 40 percent in urban areas) and accounted for only 28 percent of national income.6 A cadastral survey of 1965 found that 1.5 percent of rural property owners controlled 50 percent of all farmland in Brazil,7 and although controlling 7.5 times more land than the family farms, latifundia did not have more land in crops.8 Of an employable rural population estimated at 25 million in 1963, almost 5 million workers were unemployed or underemployed.9 Moreover, domestic industry for agricultural inputs was meager, and imports...