The Third World Imperative: How Brazil-China Relations Emerge from the Aftershock of Richard Nixon’s Latin American Foreign PolicyAbstract
This article analyzes the emergence of Brazil-China relations in the context of Richard Nixon’s foreign policy toward Latin America. It examines how American perceptions of Brazil as a potential competitor, and the geopolitical economic maneuvers of the Nixon administration influenced Brazil’s foreign policy decisions. The article highlights Brazil’s growing nationalism and its engagement with the Third World, including economic interactions with the Soviet Union and the eventual establishment of relations with mainland China. Ultimately, it argues that U.S. foreign policy played a significant role in shaping Brazil’s understanding of its Third World imperative, paving the way for closer relations with China that continue to this day.
Keywords
Brazil-China relations; United States foreign policy; Brazilian military dictatorship; Brazilian nationalism; Third World; Brazil-United States economic disputes
Introduction
The perennial dispute between China and the United States entered a new phase with the election of Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. For many American scholars, the now inevitable clash between these two countries became an inescapable reality since this Democrat ascended to the highest political position of his country, promoting a shift in the focus of American foreign policy from Europe and the West to Asia. With this change in the American approach to dealing with China’s competition, the Western media began to revive old discourses from the late Cold War, refreshing the idea of a superpower struggle and adding layers of complexity to this line of analysis with the evolving scenario in these first decades of the 21st century. With the formation of the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in 2009, the idea of a bipolar world, with two great powers leading a group of allies in an ideological dispute, has resurfaced even more in Western newspapers and broadcasts. While Europe and the West were seen as America’s natural partners, given all the historical and practical alliances they had, the Global South began to emerge as China’s allies in this scenario, including, of course, Brazil as possibly the regional power in terms of Latin American interests.
In order to provide a historical background to understand this current reality, this article aims to comprehend how Brazilian-Chinese relations came to be as they are today in the concert of nations. To this purpose, the aim of this research is to analyze and discuss, through aspects of contemporary history and international relations, some formative aspects, especially the American observation of this phenomenon, using historical newspapers as the main source of information for this academic effort. Based on a transnational and interdisciplinary approach, this article will discuss the first intentions of rapprochement between Brazil and continental China in the early 1960s, later becoming part of the Independent Foreign Policy (Política Externa Independente, in Portuguese) of the then Brazilian president João Goulart (1961-1964). Building on this, the paper debates the changes promoted by the violent Westernization of the country with the civilian-military coup of 1964. Next, the research expands on the new economic and political approaches that Richard Nixon brought to American foreign policy (Petersen 1973) and the changes it caused in Brazil’s role in the scenario of the dispute between the United States and the East. Finally, the article provides background on and analyzes what led to and contributed to the normalization of relations between Brazil and China in 1974, as well as the strained relations between the South American country and the United States during that time.
This piece also seeks to determine how the internal dispute in the American public discourse about the late Cold War realignment of the United States government combined with Chinese foreign policy to provide ways for the country to escape the economic shock therapy, as suggested by the important research of Isabella M. Weber (2023), considering aspects of the geopolitical economic maneuvers of the Republican administrations of the 1970s, especially the Nixon administration, which provided an ideological path for the neoliberal advances in Brazil until the final rupture of the military nationalist development project in the 1980s.
The methodology used for this research relied primarily on international historical press sources. Through these, it was possible to better understand how the United States shaped its opinions on Brazilian foreign policy, from those of readers of major newspapers to those of policymakers who were influenced by what appeared in the columns of the main media of their country. The main archives and digital repositories consulted for this paper are: Opening the Archives: Documenting U.S.-Brazil Relations, 1960s-80s, from the Brown University Library; and The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, from the United States Foreign Service and Department of State. The main historical newspaper database consulted is that of the New York Times, available through the ProQuest Historical Newspapers repository. In the same newspaper archive, it is possible to access all the material of the American and European news agencies (Associated Press, United Press International and Reuters), which are also employed in this study.
The Paranoias, Illusions, and Reality of João Goulart’s National Reform and Sovereignty Project for 1960s Brazil
With the fall of Getúlio Vargas’ Estado Novo in 1945, Brazil entered a period of relative democratic normalcy. In 1946, a new constitution replaced the old autocratic legislative document, and after the first transitional government, the country freely elected Vargas to return to power. The country’s constitution, which was recognized as liberal by most newspapers in the United States, also allowed the legalization of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), in a desperate act by Vargas’s opponents to reduce the old president’s influence in Brazil’s labor movements by adding this competition. The Brazilian liberals at that time were more preoccupied with being a counterpoint to Varguism than with liberal values, something that is inescapable if we observe the political proximity they developed with the Brazilian far-right movements, the Integralists, which survived the Estado Novo and preserved their ideology through the years of Vargas’ autocratic rule (Gonçalves and Caldeira Neto 2022).
These far-right ideologues, led by Plínio Salgado, had limited popular support, but they gained the provision of important institutional figures in Brazil, especially in the military (Gonçalves and Caldeira Neto 2022). General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, the leader of the revolution that overthrew Vargas in 1945 and the country’s president until the 1950 elections, once was an integralist. General Olimpio Mourão Filho, a key organizer of the civil-military coup that overthrew Goulart years later, was also an integralist. Although the Integralists were officially on the fringes of Brazilian politics, their ideological influence grew through the self-determined liberals in the National Democratic Union (UDN) party, the political affiliation that rose to become the main opposition of the two parties that inherited Vargas’s political movement, the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PTB) and the Social Democratic Party (PSD) (Gonçalves and Caldeira Neto 2022). The great political figure of the UDN was Carlos Lacerda, a man who called himself the anti-Vargas. Although popular in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital at the time, Lacerda was never able to truly compete with Vargas in the country’s major elections.
Unable to reach the presidency, Lacerda began to redirect the UDN’s policies to promote the sabotage of the Brazilian federal government when Vargas returned to power after winning the elections of the 1950s. When this conflict ended with Vargas’ suicide in 1954, the old leader successfully stopped UDN’s rise to power, although the country entered several institutional crises with increasing coup attempts over the years until a coup was finally successful in 1964. In the short period that the UDN had access to the federal government in Brazil, with the victory of Jânio Quadros in 1960, it ended with a resignation that was planned as a coup attempt, which failed and returned power to the PTB.
At the root of this political conflict were the socio-economic struggles between the country’s old elites, accustomed to a semi-feudal economic model, and the newfound movement for the reform and development of Brazilian capitalism, initiated by Vargas and later inherited by figures like Juscelino Kubitschek and Goulart. This semi-feudal model was the legacy of the fundamentals of the bourgeois revolution in Brazil, as described by Florestan Fernandes. He critiqued how this European sociological concept manifested differently in Brazil due to its prolonged colonial status and specific characteristics. The sociologist describes this model in his major work, The Bourgeois Revolution in Brazil: An Essay on Sociological Interpretation (literal translation from the original Portuguese), especially in its first two parts. Finally, Fernandes concludes the essay by expanding on how this unique model of a “bourgeois revolution” – which he himself thoroughly questioned as to whether it was bourgeois or revolutionary – dealt with the monopolization aspects of the late-stage transnational capitalist system that permeated the late Cold War period. The enduring backdrop of this sociological, historical, and economic essay is the everlasting conflict mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. Fernandes described this conflict as characteristic of the time when he finished the first version of his book in 1974 (Fernandes 2020). To complement and critique this theoretical landscape, it is important to contrast how this conflict of capitalist models continued to clash in the years following Fernandes’s work, especially examined through the work of Francisco de Oliveira (2013).
The last government of this democratic period of Brazilian history, in the 1950s and 60s, was the Goulart government, which was later removed from power with the help of foreign influence from the United States (Fico 2008). This government, not only the last, was the one that came closer to realigning the political forces in a more permanent way, paving the way for some necessary social, electoral, and economic restructurings, known as the Base Reforms (Bandeira 2010). Goulart was quite popular, even though he came to the presidency only because of Quadros’ resignation, since he was the vice-president at the time. Jango, as Goulart was popularly known, was able to reconcile in a historic political movement the Varguism with the Communists, which had grown considerably in the trade unions and labor politics since they’d returned to the legality of the political system in 1945 (Reis 2014). This pragmatic alliance between the PTB and important figures of the PCB was not the backbone of Goulart’s government, being only one of the pillars of a much larger coalition, the one with the smallest representation in that cabinet.
Nevertheless, the communists were important as forces that moved the masses to defend Goulart’s plan for reforming Brazil’s economic land use, political legislation, and even urban planning. This group of reforms were, indisputably, capitalist reforms needed to break the monopolies that were freezing the ability of the Brazilian economy to develop further and try to carve a new path and position in the concert of nations. The government aimed to reform the use of land, to include a large part of the population in the electoral process – allowing the illiterate to have access to the ballot – and to create a new system of education, health and welfare that would allow the workers and the middle class to achieve some of the civilizational gains that have already been achieved in some important parts of the Western world. The problem is that Jango’s plan directly interferes with the freedom of foreign companies to operate unreservedly in Brazilian markets, including American companies. Given Brazil’s size and capabilities, it was obvious that it could become not just an American satellite, but a real competitor.
At the same time, the Goulart government would continue to develop its independent approach to foreign policy. This was nothing new, considering the Brazilian governments since the fall of the Estado Novo, but it came at a time when the United States had launched the Alliance for Progress foreign plan, which was strictly aimed at preventing the advance of “communist influence” in Latin America (Rabe 1999). Among the far-right factions of the UDN, the paranoia of Brazil turning red had already been rampant for some time, and American diplomats from the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson began to be heavily influenced by this ideology of integralism and far-right thought. Documents declassified and available in the presidential libraries of Kennedy and Johnson confirm that these two American presidents were already determined to overthrow the Goulart government, even accepting the military way to do it – although Kennedy preferred a civilian alternative. When we analyze these documents, it is clear that the influence of far-right speeches and ideology comes through, especially because of the rhetoric and action plans of Lincoln Gordon, who was the American ambassador in Brazil at the time1.
This paranoia was fueled by aspects of the Goulart government’s rapprochement with Mao Zedong’s government in mainland China. Although Brazil didn’t have diplomatic relations with Beijing at that time and only recognized the Nationalist China as the actual government of the country (Taipei), the Brazilian vice president at the time led a mission in august of 1961, authorized by the Brazilian Congress and the Quadros government, to reinforce the non-alignment policy that was in place. The Chinese mainland government at that time was not on good terms with the Soviet Union and was promoting a different approach to international politics from the one recognized by the West as communist. Jango had been planning this rapprochement with Beijing since he was Kubitschek’s vice president, years before, not through Quadros’ direct planning – although the conservative president also wanted to strengthen ties with the Chinese mainland government. During his official state visit to Beijing, the Brazilian vice president was received by chairman Mao, president Liu Shaoqi, and premier Zhou Enlai. This resulted in a series of famous photographs – however, no records remain of where the photographs were taken. During his visit, Goulart delivered a diplomatic speech at the National People’s Congress, praising the relationship between China and Brazil and paving the way for closer cooperation (Costa 2019).
By an unpredictable and unrelated chain of events, Goulart happened to be in China on the day of Quadros’ resignation, feeding the paranoia that the right was being deprived of power by some international interference from China. This crisis, which almost interrupted Goulart’s rights and duties to become president in 1961, kept alive this illusion of Chinese interference in Brazilian affairs for the next few years, to be remembered as the making of the civil-military coup d’état that took Jango from the presidency and began Brazil’s military dictatorship.
The coup started on March 31, 1964, evolved on April 1, and did not officially take control of the government until April 2. The very next day, one of the first autocratic and violent acts of this new-found military dictatorship was against nine Chinese citizens in Rio de Janeiro, who represented economic missions in accordance with the deals promoted by Goulart. They were imprisoned, robbed of their belongings, and are still awaiting justice due to the abuses committed by this group of Brazilian military men, who were convinced that this assembly of Chinese men were spies and agents of the Communist Party of China (CPC) (Guedes and Melo 2014).
The First Period of the Brazilian Military Years: The Primacy of the Paranoia of the Cold War in International Relations
The first period of the Brazilian military dictatorship was marked by an overwhelming repression in any form of potential counterrevolutionary forces that could impede the advancement of the agenda of this new-found autocratic government. This included, right at the top, a major repression of the PCB, along with the total stripping of political mandates and rights of any politician, regardless of administrative level, associated with the PCB, PTB, PSD, and any communist, socialist, or even nationalist approach to Brazilian politics, culture, or identity. The communists were the most violently treated in these first institutional purges, although politically the backlash against the Varguists was more intense. The first general to rule Brazil during this newfound military rule was Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco (1964-1967), the closest to the American allies and influences on this subversive movement. Part of the new political aspects of this rupture in constitutional order was the halting and reorientation of every major political and foreign policy decision that protected state control of the Brazilian economy, unleashing an indiscriminate liberalism throughout the country.
Castelo Branco, once known as a “moderate” and “legalist” general, could not contain the political aspirations of the more right-wing military groups that participated in the 1964 coup. Any civilian allies were successfully and quickly silenced by the military, but Castelo Branco saw his power and influence quickly diminish as Artur da Costa e Silva (1967-1969) rose politically as the new leader of that “revolution”. Costa e Silva was as much an anti-communist as any military man left in the Brazilian Armed Forces – since anyone who wasn’t was purged by the First Institutional Act of 1964 –, but he was less capitulated to the idea of international subordination of Brazil, even to the United States. This military man came from a long tradition of Florianism, a military way of thinking that the Brazilian Armed Forces were the founders and therefore the guardians of the Brazilian Republic, called to be the moderators whenever the institutions were in conflict. This concept was born from the interpretation that the Armed Forces could have inherited the old moderating powers of the Brazilian Emperor when they overthrew the monarchy to establish a republic (Penna 1997).
Costa e Silva, more in line with this classical interpretation of the role of the Brazilian Armed Forces, began to reconstruct some aspects of a Brazilian nationalist policy in domestic and foreign affairs, albeit slowly and still very much in line with the American agenda.
This only grew with time, entering the third general to govern Brazil during the military dictatorship, Emílio Garrastazu Médici. He governed through the peak of repression in Brazil and through the so-called “economic miracle” of the country, mostly because of the state control and planning aspects of development in a very similar way it was promoted by the old PTB and PSD governments, but now without the need of a popular and democratic coalition or to include the workers in this dialogue. The Brazilian “economic miracle” was indeed a boom of growth for the country, but it never brought the social reforms that would allow this growth to ever reach the poorest and the lowest Brazilian middle class (Cordeiro 2015)2.
Brazil began to rise again as a potential competitor to the United States, and with less reprisals for the old elites of the country against this project, because of the characteristics of the military regime and the constant fed fear of “communist subversion” planted in Brazilian society by the dictatorial government (Cordeiro 2015). The United States media, recognizing the autocracies and violations of civil and human rights in Brazil since the very beginning of the Brazilian military dictatorship, mostly because of the work of some distinct correspondents, also began to recognize the role of competitor that the newfound developing country to the south provided to the United States primacy. Brazil began to appear in the business and political pages of the New York Times and American and European news agencies as a possible “new Japan” or the potential “leader of the Third World”. With this incredible growth and expansion, the Brazilian dictatorship also began its plans to claim its vast interior and develop the Amazon region (Souza 2015). During this period, the military government’s concerns about Chinese interests in Brazil resurfaced for the first time since the initial persecution of Chinese diplomats in Brazil by Castelo Branco. This resurgence was even noticed by the American media covering the dictatorship’s expansion through the rainforests of northern Brazil (Novitski 1970a).
Presenting comparative data on the GDP per capita of Brazil and the United States, as well as the characteristics of the modernizing Brazilian economy during the “miracle” years and its subsequent decline. To illustrate this, data on two major powerhouses of Brazilian economic development were selected: car manufacturing and other industrial developments. The data also shows the percentage that these industries represented of the country’s GDP. Sources: World Development Indicators (WDI), Maddison Project Database (2020), the National Association of Vehicle Manufacturers (ANFAVEA), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), and (Baer 2008).
The first signs of American attention on Brazil beginning to recover ideals of sovereignty and development in the United States newspapers appear from the interpretation of correspondents and special stringers who covered the economic expansion of the country in 1970. The head of the New York Times office in Brazil at the time, Joseph Novitski, wrote an article analyzing that it was the first time since the 1964 coup that the Brazilian government spoke, at least in rhetoric, of an economic development with the distribution of the country’s newly acquired wealth among all regions of the nation, including the historically forgotten and impoverished ones (Novitski 1970c). Highlighting Médici’s discourse on this newly recovered issue of inequality for the country’s administration, the dictator was referred to in this international news coverage with much of the same language that had been identified as a characteristic of the old national development politics. The general reaffirmed the success of his economic management to foreign observers in order to ensure that this would be part of the collective memory of his government. Because of this initiative of the general president, the special envoy of the New York Times from Caracas, H. J. Maidenberg – sent to chronicle the latest developments of Latin American economic endeavors – emphasized Brazil as an example of the traditional military response to a wave of discontent that seemed to be looming on the subcontinent.
The Brazilian model was described as the standard for the region: violent repression of any popular demand for development, better working conditions, or civil rights. In addition to Brazil, Maidenberg included Stroessner’s Paraguay as another example (Maidenberg 1970). But the American envoy also brought to light an excerpt from an interview with a military official from the Peruvian dictatorship that could sum up this newfound Latin American military nationalism that Médici wanted to implement in Brazil:
“When one is pursued by a heard of maddened bulls, one has three options. One is to kneel, close the eyes and pray. The second is to fight the bulls, which is as good as the first option. And the third is to lead the stampeding heard into terrain that is more advantageous to the pursued”. (Maidenberg 1970).
Médici’s plans may have been similar to those described by this Peruvian official, although somewhat more moderate, not necessarily in terms of conservatism, but rather in terms of Brazil’s economic dimensions, which in his view made it necessary to maintain the repressive models installed by Costa e Silva. Moreover, as the Brazilian military developed the conscience that their coup of 1964 had suppressed all of the country’s civil and political elites – the people who could lead those profound reform projects that were becoming more and more necessary throughout the subcontinent – they began to imagine that they were the only ones left to manage these processes, in effect, the last ones standing with the bull, as the Peruvian metaphor appointed. The problem is that, in the Brazilian case, it wasn’t necessarily true that the second option, the one of “fighting with the bull”, was in fact suicidal. In Brazil, the repressive forces of the state had complete control over the country without any struggle to maintain that power (Reis 2014). Given this, there was no reason not to consider this option from this perspective. Within the Peruvian metaphor, Médici seemed to want to keep both the second and third options open at the same time, in his plan to turn the image of Brazil’s future into its present. Moreover, it’s clear that Brazil’s economic characteristics were completely different from those of countries like Peru, which relieved Brazil of the need to take more drastic measures to change the country’s course to its new national plan.
From an international point of view, Médici offered a double message: he told the world that he wanted Brazil to be a protagonist, and at the same time he guaranteed the West – especially the United States – that he wouldn’t transform his country into something radical or socialist. His representatives went so far as to offer this guarantee of moderation directly to American correspondents, defending their project for the new Brazil (Maidenberg 1970).
Médici’s new Brazil began to receive attention in the American media, not only for its economic aspects, but also for the possible consequences that could arise if the country became an imperial force in Latin America.
For the United States, beyond the perceptions of Maidenberg and Novitski, these movements also demanded special attention because of the ripples they created in the shaping of its foreign policy in the region.
Nixon’s Outreach to China, the Democrats’ Response, and Brazil as a Conflict Protagonist and American Rhetorical Tool
Foreign policy was one of the areas where Nixon proposed major changes, starting with distancing the United States from the oppressive military regimes of South America, at least for the cameras. Nixon proposed changes to the old Alliance for Progress approach that allowed him to avoid appearing responsible for the human rights abuses that were constantly appearing in the pages of the New York Times about the Brazilian military dictatorship and those of its neighboring countries. At the same time, the Republican ended the aid programs to these Latin American countries and replaced them with a series of loan initiatives from American and European banks, guaranteed by the American treasury and with interest rates and tariffs fixed by the value of the dollar (Petersen 1973). It was the prelude to Nixon’s plan to shock these economies into dependence on the United States, the beginning of the neoliberal practices that Ronald Reagan would perfect and promote years later.
Regarding China, Nixon attempted a convergence that assumed that the normalization of relations between the two countries would allow the United States to wage the same kind of economic warfare in the giant Asian country in a similar, though different, manner as it had been applied in South America. While the Republican president maintains considerable popular support for his new semi-isolationist foreign policy in terms of cultural and political values, focusing only on economic issues, the Democrats, still in political shambles since Hubert Humphrey’s defeat in 1968, reach for another approach to counterpoint the White House in this recently important foreign policy issue. The liberal media of the United States, highly intertwined with the Democratic Party, became a forum for discussion of these issues, with the New York Times rising to an important position thanks to the famous Foreign Affairs column signed by a member of the family that owned the publication, Cyrus Leo Sulzberger II (Azevedo Muñoz 2024).
Focused on poking holes in Nixon’s agenda and providing some talking points for Democratic politicians, Sulzberger began to pay close attention to the Brazilian case as a way of questioning the efficacy of the White House’s new strategy of lending huge amounts of money to a potential competitor country that also had a record of human rights violations documented in the pages of the American media. Sulzberger chose a group of countries to criticize, while defending that American foreign policy should focus on American values and interests, and not extend business opportunities to countries that posed a threat to his nation. It was a way for this Democratic exponent to recover aspects of the old Kennedy/Johnson policy without actually having to defend such an unpopular approach that began to be recognized as the cause of Latin America’s dwelling in militarism3.
Ideologically we are groping our way back to a policy of unbiased realism, seeking to accept with equal impartiality friendship with China, Russia, Yugoslavia, and other Communist lands plus the heirs in Spain, Greece, and Brazil of what used to be called fascism in a simpler Manichean age. (Sulzberger 1971).
The knowledge of the competition with the United States also started to land in the Médici government, especially when the Republican administration in the White House started to have domestic problems caused by the increase of cheaper industrial or manufactured goods in the American markets. It wasn’t the first time that the American government had to deal with competition that hurt certain markets in their country, but it was probably the first time that it came from what was undoubtedly a “Third World” country4. Brazil had caused problems for American markets before, but only with agricultural products, such as disputes over access to the U.S. citrus market or over prices and sales regulations for Brazilian coffee5. But an industrious Brazil sounded a different kind of alarm and renewed the ambitions of the country’s governing elites, even if they were still encapsulated in military power (Azevedo Muñoz 2024).
This new possibility of achieving a different position in the concert of nations brought the thinkers of the Superior War College in Rio de Janeiro closer and closer to an idea that could somehow have been ripped from the Vargas playbook. This institution of an academic military elite began to talk about Brazilian exceptionalism and development plans that focused on sovereignty. At that time, the Superior War College’s members included the highest-ranking military officers, especially those aligned with the generals who focused more on international policy than internal struggles. Various Brazilian diplomats and civilian government officials – whom the regime’s opposition usually described as technocrats – also studied and sometimes taught at the college6.
Médici, although still firmly anti-communist and aligned with Western values, also began to resent Nixon’s protectionism against Brazilian goods and expansion of markets, especially after the Republican changed the rules of imports in the midst of the current expenditure of treaties already signed and worked through international efforts to hinder Brazilian ability to access and influence Latin American markets, especially in Chile and Argentina. At the same time, Nixon still offered a hand and a smile to the Brazilian general for political reasons, since it was interesting for the White House that the Brazilian military men kept their power, even though they started economic destabilization efforts against the Brazilian military government (Azevedo Muñoz 2024).
In the months leading up to a very important state visit by Médici to the United States – to become the first Brazilian military president to be received by Nixon in the White House – the Associated Press denounced that sixteen people had been convicted by the Brazilian dictatorship, although they claimed that they had only confessed to the crimes they were accused because they had been tortured to do so. The report mentioned that the charges against these people were essentially “subversion,” and that they were tried in a military court, which was common practice for the Brazilian military government. This short nine-line article (“Brazil jails 16 as subversive.” 1971) did not provide any information about who these people were.
The fact that this kind of news still lingered in the American media was a problem for the Brazilian dictatorship. Médici’s government almost wanted to use the influence of the international media to promote its new vision for the country, even beyond the economic aspects of the “miracle”.
In this scenario, Novitski’s international reporting reflected Brazil’s initial actions to expand its economic influence over its neighbors (Azevedo Muñoz 2024). The message that began to resonate in the United States from militarized Brazil was: if we cannot sell to the United States – which invested in our development – we will sell to anyone who will buy. In addition, the expansion through Latin American markets was a very effective way for Brazil to achieve greater political influence in the subcontinent, possibly reaching the position of Latin American leader that it wanted. The granting of credit lines to its neighbors to the north and in the Andean region was also a clear way of trying to expand its control over these zones. The American suspicion of Brazil’s growth for the possibility of competition in the internal markets gained a new layer, that of the southern country becoming a full rival for international protagonism in the Western Hemisphere.
The complete estrangement of Brazil’s relations with the United States was yet to come, but that moment seemed to be right around the corner for much of Brazil’s enlightened society, and Médici knew that he had to show the civilian sector of the regime, which was very active in Brazil’s key economic policies, that his nationalist plans for the country were not anti-American, considering that these elites were terribly Americanophile. Reports of guerrilla chiefs killed in the country were a relief for these elites, but they were beginning not to be enough to guarantee that they would still feel comfortable with some of the measures championed by the military power, especially when these initiatives could be seen as anti-liberal7.
In October 1971, the New York Times announced Médici’s visit to the United States, scheduled for December (“Brazil’s President Plans Visit to U.S.” 1971). For the paper’s correspondents, who were largely Democratic in ideology, the interpretations about the reason for this visit tended to focus on a weakness in Nixon’s Latin American policy that created the need to invite one of the subcontinent’s most important leaders to patch things up. The image painted by the New York Times article is one of Nixon anxiously waiting to know if the Brazilian general would consider accepting the courtesy of visiting the White House, since the military man had his doubts about the relations between the two countries, especially considering the recent conflicts, both economic and diplomatic, that happened in the same year. If in Brazil the consensus was that this meeting was much needed by Médici as an opportunity to strengthen his ties with Nixon, in the United States the media defended that the meeting was mainly in the interest of the American president (Azevedo Muñoz 2024).
Shortly before this summit between the two leaders was confirmed, Brazil would return to the current diplomatic news pages of the press as the “only” supporter of the American position in a recent query in the field of education, science and culture of the United Nations (UNESCO). That issue was the official recognition of the Beijing government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole Chinese legal representative in the institution, following a wave of recognitions that the Chinese mainland has been conquering around the globe, actively harming some American interests. Nixon’s success in having Brazil on his side in this episode was a major concession by the Médici government, since it meant going against a motion that had been approved with the support of 25 other important countries, led by the Mexican diplomatic corps (Hess 1971).
Although Nixon’s tactics were successful in stifling Brazil’s economic rise, he still had to strengthen American diplomacy in other areas to prevent that these circumstances, which were already driving Brazil further and further away from the United States, could provoke the country to an irreparable detachment from the American zone of influence and to become an adversary in all respects. The American media, covering this aspect of Nixon’s foreign policy, once again used Brazil as an example of an adversary of American interests regarding the creation of a new international bloc aimed at fighting economic imperialism issues. Taz Szulc, the famous international correspondent of the New York Times, wrote:
A group of 21 Latin-American countries, led by Brazil, has proposed in the General Assembly that the industrialized countries accept the concept that political security cannot be achieved without economic stability.
The move this week in the Assembly’s Political Committee expected to be followed on Tuesday by a roughly similar initiative by the so-called nonaligned nations of Asia and Africa, was the latest expression of protest by the developing countries against what they see as dangerously arbitrary economic decisions by the United States, Japan, the European Common Market, and the Soviet Union. (Szulc 1971a).
The foreign interests most affected by this Brazilian initiative to create a new international bloc were clearly American. At first, the American media did not seem to believe that this Brazilian change of heart was caused by anti-Americanism or a preference for Eastern values. However, the message was clear and directed at Nixon and his policies, especially the economic ones that the Republican was promoting. Médici took on a bipolar aspect in this plan, wearing the masks of an important ally and of the main leader of the opposition to American protagonism.
A few days later, according to Szulc’s analysis in the New York Times, the United States public began to be informed that – thanks to the Brazilian initiative – the greater part of the then so-called Third World countries were developing some special regulations that they wanted to impose in international trade relations, at least among themselves (Szulc 1971b). Such objectives were a serious threat to Nixon’s foreign economic policy.
Exactly ten days after this last report in the American media, Szulc would write again about the gaining of terrain of this idea in the United Nations. In his article, the journalist described the supporting countries as a “Third World bloc” and explained that they’d come together mainly through the diplomatic will of countries like Brazil (but not only), which directed their complaint specifically against Nixon’s protectionist economic policies. The basis of this initiative was the G-77, until then largely ignored by the United States. The article points out that this group had a “full range of ideologies” and focused more on economic foreign policy than on political affiliations. Nevertheless, for the American correspondent, one of the highlights of the G-77 proposal was that it had the support of Beijing, which showed an interest in joining this bloc through its participation in the United Nations. Szulc recalled that thanks to this bloc, Beijing had its first opportunity for diplomatic contact with Latin American countries (except Cuba and Allende’s Chile), including a direct dialogue with Médici’s Brazil (Szulc 1971b).
Brazilian Sugar Sold to Communists
Although Médici’s state visit to the White House served the purposes of both the leader of the Brazilian dictatorship and the president of the United States, Nixon had one last wrench to throw in the gears of Brazil’s diplomatic expansion into Latin America. Offhandedly, the Republican used a phrase that would go down in history as a major controversy for Brazil’s neighboring nations: “We know that as Brazil goes so will go the rest of that Latin-American continent”. Working perfectly, the White House guaranteed that Novitski would have to cover the major reaction from other Latin American countries that showed disgust for the characterization of nations under the influence of Brazil (Novitski 1971).
It is possible that Nixon did not plan this as it happened. Although, it seems unlikely that the Republican would just give a random compliment to Médici in that controlled environment of tense relations. American foreign policy at the time was aware of the problems that could arise for American interests from a unification of Latin America under a local leadership that could represent all these nations globally. This union could put a stop to the expansion of the economic diplomacy used by the White House to control these nations by means of investments and foreign debt, for example, especially when these countries were led by the general president who opposed Nixon’s protectionism, of a state in open industrial expansion and in search of a more notable role in the concert of nations. Considering all these factors, it’s not reasonable to think that the American leader used this phrase only to refer to Médici itself, but more precisely as a way to address his foreign policy directly. Médici, which had to immediately apologize and change its discourse towards its neighboring countries, understood then the reason behind Nixon’s compliment.
Brazil has declined the role of leader in Latin America that was in effect extended to her by President Nixon early this month.
President Emílio G. Médici of Brazil affirmed last night that his nation, the largest in Latin America, was seeking its own progress and not domination over its Latin neighbors. (Novitski 1971)
Within a few days, Brazil was diplomatically attacked by Venezuela, Peru, Argentina and Uruguay, proving the positive results of Nixon’s formulation for the American interests.
The Brazilian dictator could not have foreseen that Nixon would deal such a diplomatic blow to his country’s aspirations during a state visit. Now that the Brazilian military dictatorship had to end 1971 apologizing to the nations it wanted to sell industrial goods to, it also had to deal with the fact that left-wing movements from all over the subcontinent were identifying Brazil as the United States’ watchdog in the region for Washington’s economic interests. The Brazilian regime did not mind and actively publicized being a police state against subversion, but Brazilian diplomacy was in the process of developing an image of a strong and independent country that could lead the nations of the Third World, an effort that could be seriously hampered by this kind of anti-Brazilian sentiment in the economic sphere. No Latin American or African country would want to be led by Nixon’s puppet when they identified Nixon as the main cause of their economic problems.
In a quick response, Brazil made a bold move. The New York Times reported an economic agreement between Brazil and the Soviet Union that could lead to the largest purchase of sugar the world market had ever seen. It is obvious that this agreement was not made in one day as a direct result of Nixon’s betrayal of Médici, but it is clear that the Brazilian government used it as a way to fight back internationally against Washington, especially since in Brazil this kind of major foreign export of raw materials was (and still is) controlled by the state. The news article announcing this huge movement of goods between South America and the other side of the Iron Curtain also detailed that the Soviets were paying above-market prices for the Brazilian goods (Maidenberg 1972a).
It was inevitable that such a report would attract the attention of Nixon’s cabinet. The alarm came from the recognition that Brazil was capable of producing a quantity of raw materials that the United States didn’t know about, since the Americans thought the country was selling almost all its sugar to American markets. Finally, a point made specifically by Maidenberg, once this deal was done, was that the Soviet Union would be the recipient of about 10% of Brazil’s annual exports (Maidenberg 1972a).
In addition, the New York Times report offered a broader analysis in terms of national prestige and power. As it were, the American media described a scene in which Médici allowed Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev to send a message to the United States, one that the Soviet Union was capable of paying and buying more than the American economy could afford. This argument gained momentum when it became clear that the Soviets might not even need that much sugar from Brazil, since they were the larger producers in the world and had a long-term contract with Cuba that guaranteed even larger amounts of the commodity.
However, some political observers tend to think that the purchase reflects Moscow’s desire to enter the vacuum in Latin America created by Washington’s “low profile policy” in the region.
The Chinese Communists are also busily trying to cultivate friends in Latin America (…).
Thus far Brazil’s military Government has shown no interest in trade with mainland China and does not have diplomatic relations with Peking. But the Brazilians are studying various huge assistance and trade pacts offered by Moscow, particularly in the field of hydroelectric power. (Maidenberg 1972a).
The mere possibility of a normalized relation between Brazil and China was not a problem for a Nixon – who himself was working to establish normal relations with Beijing. In economic terms, however, a link between the two nations was seen as a risk, especially since Médici’s Brazil could serve as a lever for China to gain access to some industrial and infrastructural technologies that the United States imagined the country didn’t possess (Weber 2023). At the end of his article, Maidenberg finally hit on the cornerstone of the issue:
Should the Russians, not to mention the Communist Chinese, decide to use the same approach in Latin America and elsewhere, it could eliminate a powerful weapon from Washington’s economic arsenal, some political scientist here observed. (Maidenberg 1972a).
Two months later, the first major economic trade agreement between the Brazilian government and Beijing appeared in the New York Times:
Communist China has plunged openly into the Latin-American commodities market by buying 100,000 metric tons of Brazilian sugar for immediate delivery at prices higher than world prices.
(…)
Minister of Industry and Commerce Marcus Vinícius Pratini de Moraes confirmed the sale late Thursday and said that it “opens a whole new market for Brazil”. (Maidenberg 1972b).
Two years later, after General Ernesto Geisel took power in the Brazilian military dictatorship, Brazil would officially normalize all diplomatic relations with the Chinese government in Beijing. At that time, the “economic miracle” of the Brazilian regime was already in decline, and the country was desperate to generate surpluses capable of tackling the large amount of foreign debt it had acquired through Nixon’s foreign policy. To achieve this minimal goal of not short-circuiting the country’s entire economy, Geisel chose to focus on commodity and agricultural development as a way for Brazil to weather this storm. Nixon’s shock had achieved its goals, and the “economic miracle,” along with the “new Brazil” planned by the military, sank into a huge economic crisis that would last until the mid-1990s (Azevedo Muñoz 2024).
Conclusions
In Weber’s major work on how the Chinese economy escaped shock therapy, there’s a subchapter about the incursions of Chinese economists, from Zhao Ziyang’s government, who wanted to understand the major economic developments of Latin America in the second half of the 20th century, absorbing some lessons on how to deal with the pricing crises of that period. The Brazilian “economic miracle” emerged as the greatest example of a country that achieved major development goals during the Médici government, especially under the leadership of its powerful finance minister, Antônio Delfim Netto. The Chinese team wanted to understand how Brazil managed to grow throughout the foreign investment, even with the increasing problems of inflation, and came to the conclusion that inflation was not the problem that caused the demise of the Brazilian “miracle”.
The main problem in the path of development of the Brazilian capitalism under the nationalist project of the mid-military years was not a question of failed economic planning or inflation, but a direct consequence of a White House foreign policy designed to hinder the ability of Latin American economies to develop. What was different from the Brazilian and Chinese economic models of those times was the origin of the foreign money invested in the Latin American country – they were loans, not investments – something that Nixon and the Republican-led White House knew how to use to their advantage. Even considering the international crises that marked the beginning of the end of the Brazilian dictatorship’s plan for economic expansion – such as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargo and its aftermath since 1973 – it’s impossible to separate Nixon’s policies from the origins of the Brazilian economic crisis. The oil question is a perfect example of how the problem of the Latin American country wasn’t the geopolitics of a lack of petroleum, since all the necessary deals were guaranteed to maintain the supply line needed to fuel its “miracle,” as this article demonstrates. The main issue was the dollar chokehold that Nixon ensured through his loan policies and control of interest rates on American currency, as Mauricio Metri (2023) explained in his concept of monetary diplomacy.
Not unrelated, this was also the time that showed the Brazilian military dictatorship the Third World imperative that was applied to the country, holding its abilities to expand its international position through direct actions from the United States, its closest ally. Much because of this new understanding of the Brazilian regime, what followed this economic decline in Brazil was the renewal of relations with African nations fighting the European colonial powers, especially the old Portuguese colonies, and the fundamental economic alliance with China, inaugurated in 1974 and expanding ever since. The implementation of the characteristics of this seminal neoliberal ideal in Nixon’s government, before Reagan could summarize and weaponize it a few years later, was also the beginning of an important part of the intellectual, economic and diplomatic ideologies that grew in Brazil in the late 20th century, the same that brought the country closer to the aspirations of the Global South in the current geopolitical scenario.
References
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Loureiro, F. "Insoluble dispute: the U.S.-Brazilian soluble coffee trade and Brazil's third worldism." Diplomatic History 45, no. 1 (2020): 132-161. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhaa072
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- Novitski, J. "Brazil is challenging a last frontier." The New York Times, July 7, 1970a.
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- Novitski, J. "Brazil's new government sets goals for its development plan." The New York Times, January 11, 1970c.
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Data Availability Statement:
All the data and sources used in this article are accessible through various providers, some of which are free and others that require a subscription. Azevedo Muñoz’s doctoral thesis is currently unavailable for public consultation due to a publication embargo. However, the full thesis will soon be published by the Autonomous University of Madrid and may be requested. All of the academic books and articles referenced are available online, either for consultation or purchase. The referenced media articles are also available in free versions offered by the authors or through the ProQuest Historical Newspapers archive, which is accessible via partnered university access. All other dissertations mentioned in the article are also available online.
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1
The unclassified transcript of a famous conversation concluding that the White House approved a military coup in Brazil is available thanks to the efforts of American historians James G. Hershberg and Marc J. Selverstone of George Washington University. The conversation included Kennedy, Gordon, and then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB465/docs/Document%209%20brazil-jfk%20tapes-100763-revised.pdf.
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2
Another important source of information on the limits of the Médici’s “miracle” for those most in need in Brazil is (“O presidente Emílio Garrastazu Médici e os problemas do Nordeste.” 2017).
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3
Later, in 1977, a report in Rolling Stone magazine, produced by the famous journalist Carl Bernstein – one of those responsible for telling the world about the Watergate scandal – revealed that a number of American reporters were aiding the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in foreign spying missions for the United States, including Sulzberger (1977).
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4
By the end of the Second World War, United States’ economic hegemony had risen. The first non-Western country to emerge as a potential economic rival to the United States was certainly the Soviet Union, which could not be classified as a Third World country according to the principles of this conceptualization. Before the time period of this research, the United States also faced competition from rebuilt Japan during its “miracle” years. However, Japan could not be identified as a Third World country either, and the United States swiftly overcame its competition as North Americans were among the major investors in Japan’s rapidly booming economy (Beckley et al. 2018).
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5
As early as the Vargas years, Brazil’s potential competition with the United States in the agricultural and basic product markets almost posed a threat to American interests in Western and domestic markets (Blyde et al. 2010). Another notable example is the coffee pricing and distribution conflicts that occurred during the same timespan covered by this article (Loureiro 2022). Nevertheless, these conflicts did not provoke the same reaction in the United States as the prospect of Brazil becoming an industrial powerhouse and competitor within what the United States considered its zone of influence in Latin America, as the paper demonstrates.
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6
Regarding these aspects of the Superior War College, the sources consulted were primarily analyses and reports from historic newspapers, combined with the discourse used by dictatorship officials, both military and civilian, in various scenarios concerning Brazilian foreign policy. Some of the sources are Novitski (1970b; 1972) and Yglesias (1969).
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7
Examples of these reports in the international media include The New York Times (“Brazilian police slay terrorist.” 1969) and Friendly Jr. (1970).
All the data and sources used in this article are accessible through various providers, some of which are free and others that require a subscription. Azevedo Muñoz’s doctoral thesis is currently unavailable for public consultation due to a publication embargo. However, the full thesis will soon be published by the Autonomous University of Madrid and may be requested. All of the academic books and articles referenced are available online, either for consultation or purchase. The referenced media articles are also available in free versions offered by the authors or through the ProQuest Historical Newspapers archive, which is accessible via partnered university access. All other dissertations mentioned in the article are also available online.
