Desbunde and Its Discontents: Counterculture and Authoritarian Modernization in Brazil, 1968–1974

“For my generation,” writes Alex Polari, “our option was precisely this: either pirar [flip out], trip out on drugs, or join the armed struggle. Heroism vs. alienation, as we who joined the armed struggle saw it; caretice [conformity] vs. liberation, as they saw it.”¹ Born in 1951, Polari was a teen during the cultural effervescence and political struggle of mid-to-late 1960s Brazil but reached adulthood during a period of severe repression—the so-called sufoco (suffocation)—between late 1968 and 1974, when public protest and left-wing cultural expression were suppressed and censored. Polari opted for the “heroic” option of armed struggle, as he recounted in his memoirs published in 1982 during the abertura, a period of political opening leading up to the restoration of formal democracy in 1985. Yet he also expressed a deep affinity for those who “flipped out” and embraced attitudes and practices associated with the counterculture.

For Polari, the divide between the armed movement and the counterculture would impose limitations on both: “Our country had this defect. Politics never claimed counterculture’s message of liberation and formal audacity in relation to life and discourse, nor did the counterculture become rigorously political; it articulated a platform of desire, of healthy, chaotic aspirations for liberty that would join forces with concrete struggles, even though they were limited to the middle class.”² Brazilian youth who identified with the counterculture were committed to an idea of “liberation,” but this was not the revolutionary national liberation of the established left-wing narratives. The counterculture was political insofar as its anti-authoritarian disposition clashed with the stifling social and political climate of the time.³

The binary option described by Polari was, of course, an exaggeration: the overwhelming majority of Brazilian youth who came of age under military rule neither picked up arms against the regime, nor flipped out to pursue an alternative vision of liberation. Most young Brazilians plodded along, hewed to social conventions, tried to take advantage of opportunities offered by an expanding economy, and avoided trouble with authorities. During this time, the military regime invested heavily in higher education, especially in law, economics, science, engineering, medicine, business administration, and other areas oriented toward capitalist production and consumption.⁴ Middle-class kids were far more likely to pursue new opportunities for professional advancement than to join a clandestine guerrilla cell or go to live on a hippie commune. Another former guerrilla, Alfredo Sirkis, refers to a “third segment” who sought a comfortable place within the system.⁵ Yet even this “third segment” was complex and multifaceted. It included people who led lives of relative security, yet sympathized with the armed struggle and even harbored guerrillas. Others might be regarded as “situational hippies”—people who abhorred the regime, chafed at social conventions, and consumed drugs, especially on weekends or during vacations, but also maintained steady employment and constructed middle-class lives. For this segment of urban adolescents and young adults, engaging the counterculture involved grappling with existential questions of how to construct fulfilling lives under authoritarian rule, which often entailed soft resistance to societal conventions, legal strictures, and family expectations. It also entailed forms of lifestyle consumption that were seen as alternative to the growing spending power of the urban middle class in the early 1970s, but were no less forms of consumption in their own right.

Despite the fact that most young Brazilians were neither guerrillas nor hippies, the binary opposition recognized by Polari continues to have deep cultural resonance in Brazil. The theater director José Celso Martinez Correia, for example, recently stated in an interview: “My generation used the body. Some joined the armed struggle and risked bodily harm. Others joined the desbunde.”⁶ The distinctively Brazilian neologism desbunde was invented by guerrillas as an epithet directed at those who left the armed struggle. A comrade who desbundou was considered a traitor to the revolutionary cause. The term later came to designate people who identified with the counterculture in ways that inspired lifestyle choices that were radically at odds with prevailing social conventions. Sirkis...