Brazilian Democracy Under Attack: 1964 and 2022

Date: 

Wednesday, October 12, 2022, 12:00pm to 1:30pm


This event is virtual, to register click here. Discussions will occur in English, but simultaneous interpretation will be offered to Portuguese. 

Speakers: James Green, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Professor of Modern Latin American History and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies; Director of the Brazil Initiative, Brown University; Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, Full Professor of Brazilian History, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG); Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto, Adjunct Professor, University of Brasilia (UnB)
Moderated by: Sidney Chalhoub, David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies; Faculty Affiliate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

In 1964, a military coup d’Etat, supported by sectors of civil society, inaugurated two decades of dictatorship in Brazil. In 2022, a right-wing government works to undermine democratic institutions and find justification for another period of authoritarianism. There is much in common in the political rhetoric used to attack democracy in both periods: antidemocratic forces speak of political corruption, an alleged communist threat, the need to defend religious and moral values, etc. But the two historical moments are also in sharp contrast to each other. The purpose of this panel is to explore similarities and differences between 1964 and 2022 while history unfolds and we witness whether Brazilian democracy will be able to avert –this time—a new moment of peril.

James N. Green is the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Latin American History and the author or co-editor of eleven books on Brazil and Latin America. He received his doctorate in Latin American history, with a specialization in Brazil, at UCLA in 1996. He has traveled extensively throughout Latin America and lived more than a decade in Brazil. He served as the Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University from 2005 to 2008 and the Director of the Brazil Initiative from 2012 to 2020. He is a past president of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) and was the BRASA Executive Director from 2015 to 2020. He served as the President of the New England Council on Latin American Studies (NECLAS) in 2008 and 2009. He is currently the Director of the Opening the Archives Project, the National Co-Coordinator of the US Network for Democracy in Brazil, and the President of the Board of Directors of the Washington Brazil Office.

Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta is Full Professor of Brazilian History at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and 1D researcher at CNPq. He has been a visiting professor at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the IHEAL of the University of Paris III (Simón Bolivar Chair) and the Argentine National Universities of Rosario, General Sarmiento and San Martín. His main publications are the books: “On Guard Against the Red Menace: Anti-Communism in Brazil, 1917-1964” (2 ed. Niterói: Edufff, 2020 - edited in English by the Sussex Academic Press, 2020, and in Spanish by the Argentine university press UNGS, 2019) ; “Jango e o golpe de 1964 na caricatura” (RJ: Zahar, 2006); “As universidades e o regime military” (RJ: Zahar, 2014); and “Passados Presentes: o golpe de 1964 e a ditadura military” (RJ: Zahar, 2021). Rodrigo was President of the National Association of History (ANPUH) between 2013-2015.

Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at the University of Brasilia (UnB). She completed her PhD and postdoc in History from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp); Masters in History from UnB; bachelor of Journalism from UniCEUB; and a degree in History from Unip. Since her time as an undergraduate, Ana Flávia´s research seeks to articulate knowledge of the areas of History, Communication, Literature and Education, with an emphasis on: political-cultural performance of black thinkers, black press, abolitionism, as well as the experiences of black freedom and citizenship in pre- and post-abolition Brazil and elsewhere in the African Diaspora.

Sidney Chalhoub taught history at the University of Campinas, Brazil, for thirty years. He moved to Harvard in July 2015. He has published three books on the social history of Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), on working-class culture in the early twentieth century; Visões da liberdade (1990), on the last decades of slavery in the city; and Cidade febril (1996), on tenements and epidemics in the second half of the nineteenth century. He also published Machado de Assis, historiador (2003), about the literature and political ideas of the most important nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist, and co-edited five other books on the social history of Brazil. His most recent monograph is A força da escravidão: ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista (2012), on illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Chalhoub has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (1995, 1999, 2004), a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2007), and a research fellow at Stanford University (2010-11) and in the International Research Center “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History” (Re:work) at Humbold Universität, Berlin (2013). He was a founder of and remains associated with the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura (CECULT), University of Campinas.

Presented in collaboration with The Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School