Brazil has experienced two important moments of anticommunist mobilization. The first took place in the 1930s and culminated in the creation of the Estado Novo. The second, in the early 1960s, prompted the coup of 1964. Scholars have examined these events and the principal movements behind them but have not compared them in detail. Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta explores the history of Brazilian anticommunism in these two periods, analyzing the motives, ideas, and actions of groups and individuals, as well as the rhetorical and iconographic representations of communism they produced, to reveal both continuity and change over time.
Not long after the Bolshevik Revolution, criticisms of communism appeared infrequently in the local press. The political flux that accompanied the revolution of 1930, however, sparked considerable fear that this leftist tendency might spread through Brazil. The Catholic Church, the military, and business circles became the main exponents of such concerns. These...
