Fear and Memory in the Brazilian Army and Society, 1889-1954 (review)

Scholars such as Thomas E. Skidmore and Alfred Stepan have failed, Smallman argues, to acknowledge the Brazilian military's long history of factionalism and thus have failed to understand how factional battles created the elements of authoritarian rule (authoritarianism, repression, and censorship) that accompanied the 1964 military coup. This neglect results in part from the military's own success in hiding, through repression and censorship, the history of factional battles. Furthermore, officers have been quick to explain their actions in ideological terms, when in fact they were acting to squash factional opponents in the military.

The author begins with an introduction that is refreshingly straightforward and free of theoretical assertion. The strongest support for his argument comes from two cases: the Intentona of 1935 and the so-called Democratic Crusade of 1952. The 1935 attempted coup actually began, Smallman reminds us, as a conspiracy hatched by conservative military officers, before it was taken over by communist operatives. Official military accounts of the Intentona ignore the conservative, factional origins of the attempted coup, instead focusing on the threat of communism that political and military leaders have used to justify increased central state and military power. Censorship, the removal of archival evidence, and even repression have meant that historians have also ignored the factional origins of this event.

The Democratic Crusade refers to the triumph of internationalist officers over their nationalist colleagues in the 1952 leadership elections of the Military Club. Smallman does a good (but repetitive) job of explaining the positions of each side: nationalists in favor of state-led development and distrustful of U.S. imperialism versus internationalists seeking an anticommunist alliance with the United States that they hoped would lead to increased U.S. aid for postwar development. At this point, factional disputes did truly gain an ideological tinge, Smallman argues, especially as the internationalists manipulated cold war fears to marginalize their nationalist opponents. Victorious internationalist officers used terror, arrests, and repression against their factional opponents both before and after the Military Club elections. In so doing they "created an apparatus for intelligence-gathering and for torture which would continue to haunt Brazil for decades to come" (p. 168).

This book is a good read, but Smallman overstates his revisionist thesis. Indeed, his presentation of competing ideologies and his narrative history of key events reads very much like the literature he criticizes. At times Smallman rests his assertions on just one or two sources, as when he develops a side argument on the role of race in the army based almost entirely on a two-and-a-half-page essay written by José Murilo de Carvalho (which is cited in a way that suggests this is a monograph). Parts of his narrative are based on a single participant's oral history, which seems odd for a book on factionalism. Finally, by dismissing the positivists and their role in the military, he misses a key opportunity to discuss the importance of ideology in the early years of the republic. This is a shame, for elsewhere in the book he mentions the key role positivism and positivist officers played in factional disputes in the 1940s and 1950s.

Nevertheless, Fear and Memory presents a clearly written and useful narrative history of military factionalism in twentieth-century Brazil that makes a useful contribution to the study of the Brazilian military and its role in national politics.