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

Any researcher who has passed the guards and faced the bureaucracy in a military archive in Brazil has sensed the truth with which Shawn Smallman begins this book: The country's armed forces have attempted to shape an official account of the Brazilian past in which the military played a central, disinterested, and unified role. Far from the first to dissect that corporate version of history, Smallman in fact uses insights from scholars like Nelson Werneck Sodré, Stanley Hilton, and Alain Rouquié effectively to construct a fluidly written and intriguing revisionist take on many of the better-, and some of the lesser-, known events of a long, formative stretch of the evolution of modern Brazil.

The greatest strengths of Smallman's study derive from its focus on the factionalism and informal structures of power that ran through the development of Brazil's armed forces and their relations with civilian groups. This focus allows the author to offer a compelling picture of the activities of the military in national politics and political struggles within the military—as well as the relationship between those two phenomena. He demonstrates, for instance, the emergence and growth of corruption among senior officers in distinct contexts, from the First Republic (1889-1930), when profitable deals with military leaders allowed civilian politicians to hold on to state power, to the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-45), when military control over the press helped cover over such abuses, and on to the formally democratic regime that preceded the military coup d'état of 1964, when quick and threatening action by the army was occasionally necessary to keep scandals from public view. His speculations about the ties between the racial "whitening" of the army and its increasing power during the period of his study remain speculative but are exciting nonetheless. Even more important to our understanding of the military and politics is Smallman's account of the changing nature of factions within the military. Although he shows the ideological positions that helped define factions in the late First Republic, it is his portrayal of the rise of two major blocs at mid-century that is most provocative. The battles between, on the one hand, those who distrusted the imperial intentions of the U.S. in the region and were willing to mobilize much of the population behind a program of state-led economic nationalism, and, on the other, those senior officers who concentrated more on friendly ties to the U.S. and anticommunism abroad and at home, Smallman argues persuasively, were defining features of the political events that culminated in the longest military government in Brazilian history (1964-85).

Not all of the analysis that the author presents is as revisionist as he suggests; indeed, his careful use of works by others in the field makes this clear. Moreover, some of his claims seem more sweeping than the evidence suggests. It may well be, for instance, that the military factions of the mid- twentieth century functioned more like political parties than had their predecessors of the 1920s, in that the later cliques presented more coherent positions on national politics and development. The factions of the late First Republic, however, certainly had ideological and not merely personalist definitions; closer scrutiny of these earlier factions might show the distinction to be a less qualitative one than Smallman posits.

If in these minor ways the book does not quite live up to its every revisionist claim, that is only because its author presents an admirably ambitious interpretation of the military in modern Brazilian politics, one that goes beyond assumptions about the armed forces as a monolithic institution, the inner workings of which exist in separation from the rest of society. Indeed, up through the...