Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America

3. Antagonism and Anti-Communism in Argentine-Brazilian Relations

c h a p t e r t h r e e Antagonism and Anti-Communism in Argentine-Brazilian Relations Nothing more censurable and strange than that two Heads of State would exchange letters, about foreign policy, above and without the knowledge of the diplomatic channels. —João Neves da Fontoura, former foreign minister of Brazil, 1954 In the case of Brazil-Argentina, the social character of relations is especially important. What we find is a long history, not of Hobbesian conflict, but rather of recurrent rivalry and conflict, often with military overtones, combined with periods of cooperation . . . . Alongside the recurrent fears and suspicions, the post-war period saw a number of previous moves to cooperation . . . . This is in itself something of a puzzle. —Andrew Hurrell, 1998 Argentina and Brazil, the two largest countries in South America in terms of territory , population, and economic might, maintained a strategic rivalry from independence until 1980.1 From territorial disputes and two wars in the nineteenth century to conflicting hydroelectric energy projects and nuclear ambitions in the twentieth, competition dominated the relationship. Meanwhile, leaders frequently proposed regional economic integration schemes and united political fronts, which routinely failed. In the 1980s, however, the two countries coordinated sweeping changes to policies from commerce to nuclear research. They produced 166 bilateral accords that decade, matching the preceding half century’s total and more than tripling the yield of the century before that.2 Rivalry, the central feature of Argentine-Brazilian relations for centuries, had been overcome definitively. The political breakthrough of rapprochement paved the way for strategic alliance 52 Rivalry and Alliance Politics and regional integration: Mercosur, a customs union established in 1991, is now the fifth-largest economic bloc in the world. This transformation, a watershed in the history of Latin American foreign relations, has been gaining attention in international relations scholarship.3 However, most of this research addresses the deepening of cooperation in the 1980s and 1990s rather than uncovering the roots of rapprochement in the late 1970s and the causes of an inflection point from protracted rivalry to more than three decades of cooperation.4 This chapter therefore addresses a fundamental puzzle: Why didn’t Argentina and Brazil cooperate sooner? More specifically, why did presidential summits in 1947, 1961, and 1972 fail to overcome rivalry, while those of 1980 succeeded? A political cartoon in the Uruguayan newspaper El Diario, commenting in 1980 on the second Argentine-Brazilian presidential summit of the year, captures the stark change in the bilateral relationship from rivalry to cooperation. In it, Argentine President Jorge Videla and Brazilian President João Figueiredo calmly share a gourd of yerba mate, a tea indigenous to the borderlands their predecessors had contested since the imperial clashes between Spain and Portugal. The caption, in verse, uses “mate” to indicate both competition and friendship, playing on a second meaning (“checkmate”) to suggest a transition from chess match to teatime: United, for it is their will, Go Argentina and Brazil. They ratify fraternity Meeting on a second date; The two forget their rivalry, And in this actuality, There is “mate,” but not checkmate: “mate” for a friendly tea.5 The cartoon’s tranquil and lighthearted tone is particularly remarkable because the two leaders headed military regimes with a history of repression. Additionally , its place of publication underscores the transformation of regional politics, since small states like Uruguay had long feared Argentine-Brazilian cooperation (which had almost completely annihilated Paraguay in the 1860s War of the Triple Alliance) and often sought gains from maintaining their competition. To explain this moment of transition, we also need to explain why rivalry persisted until that point. By the end of World War II, Argentina and Brazil had perpetuated their rivalry for nearly a century since their last war against one another and for a half century since resolving their final outstanding territorial Antagonism and Anti-Communism in Argentine-Brazilian Relations 53 dispute.6 Unlike some rivalries, Brazil’s and Argentina’s persisted at a low simmer without boiling over into acute crises and wars, offering several lessons about the dynamics of protracted conflict. Rather than outright violence, two central mechanisms reproduced rivalry over the decades: the “hypotheses of conflict” maintained by the two countries’ military high commands and competition for regional influence (particularly in the smaller neighboring states of Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia, though also in dealings...