Brazilian Propaganda: Legitimizing an Authoritarian Regime by Nina Schneider (review)

Schneider’s Brazilian Propaganda investigates the “official propaganda of authoritarian Brazil” through the thesis that Brazil’s military regime could not have maintained power for twenty-one years by force alone. Linking this investigation to her political-historical biography, Schneider asks, “How could my ancestors . . . have prevented the Nazi dictatorship?” One answer is that Nazi’s use of “blunt” and “aggressive” propaganda shaped public obedience to authority. Blunt propaganda—which “directly promotes violence” by “prais[ing] the arbitrary regime”—constructs enemies through stereotyping and “prais[es] . . . organs of repression” (12). Aggressive propaganda pursued the same ends with even greater gusto.

In contrast, “subliminal” propaganda, which Schneider finds to have dominated during Brazil’s military period (1964–1985), “attempt [ed] to win general support for the military regime . . . [by] draw[ing] a veil over violent repression . . . .[and] . . . refusing] to intimidate, threaten, construct enemies, or justify violence.” Schneider argues that subliminal propaganda did not directly create the military regime’s violent actions (11–12), even though the organizations that deployed it were subordinated to the military and headed by military officers. The entities behind subliminal propaganda—the Special Public Relations Consultancy (aerp), 1968–1974) and the Public Relations Consultancy (arp) (1976–1979), delivered subliminal messages primarily through “filmetes” and “radio productions” (22). Their propaganda style contrasted with Globo media’s more explicitly pro-military (“blunt”) delivery and the National Intelligence Service’s (sni) highly aggressive approach.

Schneider discovered a push/pull between propaganda groups; blunt and aggressive propagandists were often backed up by purveyors of subliminal propaganda. The greatest total production of subliminal propaganda came between 1975 and 1977, during General Ernesto Geisel’s government (1974–1979), not during General Emílio Garrastazu Médici’s much more repressive one (28). Schneider reports that opposition was strong against Geisel especially from hardliners. Hence, Geisel needed a softer propaganda voice propagated by an entity that he established and controlled (the arp). The blunt and aggressive propaganda of Globo media and the sni, respectively, could be used against his government.

Schneider’s claim that in Brazil propaganda’s role was to “create the appearance of a democracy and . . . avoid comparisons with a dictatorship” is intriguing (1). She might have extended it to international geopolitics: Is international support easier to obtain if a government does not seem undemocratic? In Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durham, 1997), I show that the Brazilian military government’s increasingly negative image impacted some U.S. Senators’ feelings about continuing U.S. funding for Brazil’s security forces. In a closed 1971 meeting of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (cfr), Sen. Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.), in an attempt to continue funding for Brazil’s police, asserted that the country was a “dictatorship by consent,” a designation that struck a bad chord with Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), who “could not swallow such an oxymoron. cia chief Richard Helms explained that a “dictatorship by consent” referred to the fact that if there were “free elections in Brazil tomorrow, you would . . . [get] the same fellow [General Médici] as President” (Médici had been appointed Brazil’s president two years earlier by the country’s ruling military junta). Fulbright eventually relented; he was “perfectly willing to accept . . . that this is the [political] system that suits [Brazilians’] particular temperament and degree of political maturity . . . . [Indeed he] doubt[ed] that Brazilians’ could do any better than Médici” (Huggins, 161). Schneider would have done well to explore how a country’s propaganda can shape its image internationally.

Schneider clearly delimited the focus of her research—Brazil—and her time period (1968–1977). She consulted a rich number of primary and secondary sources and used multiple data-collection strategies—content analyses of film, of propaganda documents, and of Globo news, as well as interviews. Schneider’s Chapters 2 and 3—“Stars Appearing in the Sky: Unconventional Propaganda Films” and “Beware! More Propaganda”—are often compelling. Her analysis of propaganda “filmetes,” or...