These books are products of the important work on Brazil being done in France. Alain Rouquié, in this collection of edited papers from a 1979 round table, explains that the title, Les partis militaires, reflects the notion that the Brazilian army has functioned as a partisan political group. One of the directing ideas of the book’s five essays is that there has been a permanent tension in the army between politically organized officers and the institution itself. While the army has maintained a high degree of institutional cohesion, many of the crises that led it to intervene in national politics were mirrored in the officer corps’ political divisions.
The first of two essays by Antonio Carlos Peixoto in Rouquié’s collection summarizes various interpretations of the military’s political role, giving emphasis to the work of Alfred Stepan and Edmundo Campos Coelho. Manuel Domingos Neto’s essay on foreign influence before 1930 argues that the transformation of the army’s structure and methods of operation produced by German and French training implied a redefinition of the army’s role. If there was a military party, it was composed of the reformist officers who transformed the army. Moreover, army reform changed the relationship between the institution and the oligarchy because it substituted merit for favoritism as the criterion for promotion. After the Revolution of 1930, officers who clustered around A Defesa Nacional began “a vast program of transformation of the Brazilian reality” (p. 62). Most important, the army was no longer a dependency of the oligarchy.
Covering the 1945-64 period, Antonio Carlos Peixoto’s second essay examines the Military Club as an intermediary between the armed forces and the politicians. The club exhibited the military’s various currents of opinion, while club elections served to measure their influence. It was an era of constant tension between the constitutional roles of the military apparatus and the ideological allegiances of many officers. Peixoto highlights the cleavage between nationalist and antinationalist factions, which disagreed over the model to use in industrializing Brazil. In 1964, the antinationalists won out, espousing traditional Brazilian liberalism, which fostered mobilization of the elites, suppression of popular participation, and close economic and military relations with the United States.
Finally, Eliezer Rizzo de Oliveira analyzes the decompression (distensão) of the Ernesto Geisel years (1974-79), which sought to adapt the armed forces to the country’s new stage of development.
In Le Brésil des militaires, Philippe Faucher focuses on the period after 1964. He sees Brazil as a dependency of the world capitalist system, and his analysis of the political economy of growth traces the complicated process whereby development was purchased by opening large sectors of the economy to foreign investment. There was a correlation between the denationalization of the economy and the increasingly repressive political system of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Faucher brings his examination up to the beginning of João Figueiredo’s presidency. His skillful interweaving of politics, economics, and power struggles within the army is an important contribution. Because of the difference in focus, the book is a useful companion to Peter Evans’s Dependent Development (Princeton, 1979).
