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

BOOK REVIEWS BRAZILIAN PROPAGANDA: LEGITIMIZING AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME. By Nina Schneider. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, p. 213, $74.95. Nina Schneider’s important study brings new data, fresh perspective, and innovative methodology to bear on this critical topic. As Schneider herself points out, authoritarian regimes in Latin America, even where exhaustively studied, have suffered from a want of attention to their propaganda , official and/or informal. This lacuna, in Schneider’s analysis, takes on particular importance for Brazilianists, especially those who study the post-1964 military governments. Brazilian Propaganda argues that the subject provides a window into those governments’ functionality, relationships with non-state actors, and oft-cited internal dynamic of hard- versus soft-line elements. Specifically, Schneider contends that two principal, formal public relations agencies, the Assessoria Especial de Relações Públicas (AERP), and its successor, the Assessoria de Relações Públicas (ARP), were the province of soft-liners who purposefully distanced themselves from all but the most subtle forms of propaganda, as well as from state violence itself. Schneider locates the propagandists of AERP and ARP in a peculiar and sometimes difficult position, somewhere between hard-liners who supported violence and demanded more “aggressive” propaganda; leftwing culture-makers who critiqued the regime via (paradoxically) statesponsored cinema; and private-sector interests who themselves financed and broadcast pro-regime content in the heady days of the “Economic Miracle.” The book provides a wealth of useful information. Schneider compiles essential data on how much propaganda was produced, when, and in what media. Moreover, she divides the story of Brazil’s authoritarian propaganda into three periods: 1962–1968, a period of “anti-Goulart slogans”; 1968–1974, the tenure of the AERP, under president Emı́lio Garrastazú Médici; and 1976–1979, when the ARP held sway. For each period, Schneider details regime anxieties and the roles of different public relations outfits, including lesser-known entities. Drawing on exclusive interviews with former AERP and ARP personnel, she enriches our understanding of the genesis and development of these organizations. Unease generated by the upheavals of 1968, she informs us, facilitated the creation of AERP. This organization focused largely on youth in 1970– 1971, supervised only distantly by Médici, while ARP engaged in more electorally-focused messaging when President Ernesto Geisel began to manage the regime’s public face more directly. Schneider provides her own analytical framework, dividing propaganda into three types: “subliminal” (vaguely positive, eschewing construction of enmity or violence), “blunt” (openly pro-regime), and C  2015 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 85 The Latin Americanist, December 2014 “aggressive.” The first, she argues, emanated from the official government mouthpieces; hardliners agitated for the latter, its support for exclusion and repression epitomized by the “Brazil: Love it or Leave It” campaign and by security forces’ apparent desire to broadcast the message, “whoever does not walk on the right had better leave Brazil” (90). Schneider’s second chapter features fascinating analysis of three government-produced short films, whose characteristics elaborate her framework. In her view, 70% of government-produced films were subliminal, while only 10% could be called “blunt.” The films’ saccharine sublimations, she observes, glossed over not only torture and repression, but also “poverty, inequality, and social and racial friction” (43). In perhaps her most original contribution, Schneider argues that business was responsible for almost the entirety of “blunt” propaganda and that, in Brazil’s advertising age, the burgeoning publicity sector was the “most active propagandist of the so-called [economic] miracle” (81). The book concludes with an admirable attempt at the difficult task of gauging reception, with somewhat surprising results. Schneider reveals, for example , that a meningitis vaccination campaign appears to have prompted eleven million inoculations in a mere three days. The study’s most contentious claim echoes that of Schneider’s subjects , holding that they were committed soft-liners, firmly opposed to the more violent elements of the regime. The book argues that the narrative that AERP and ARP leaders Octávio Costa and José M. de Toledo Camargo present—that they were a long-suffering, outcast voice of reason , generally cleverer than their brutish, hard-line fellows within the regime—is...