Less than three months after Marshal Humberto Castelo Branco became the first president of Brazil’s military dictatorship, he pledged that the government would tend to the educational and social needs of the country’s “children.” Twenty years later, General João Baptista Figueiredo, the final military president, professed his desire to have the public see him as a “father loved by all.” In both cases, military rulers continued the legacy of a state paternalism in which the president of Brazil was a father-figure to all Brazilians. Situated in a Cold War context, the military government relied on this rhetoric and vision of its own rule to reward those who supported the military’s nation-building projects even while it legitimized and defended its use of repression, censorship, and torture. Yet the military’s discursive efforts did not go unchallenged, and various social groups, including students, white-collar professionals, workers, and opposition politicians increasingly used their own gendered definitions of citizenship and the national family to challenge military rule, ultimately shaping the process of democratization in Brazil in the 1980s. This paper focuses on this often-overlooked component of how the Brazilian military regime relied on this vision of the nation as a family of parents/military leaders and children/citizens. Drawing from scholarship on state paternalism under populist regimes as well as recent literature that examines how societies constructed and defined the idea of “children,” this paper argues that the statist paternalism of populist leaders like Getúlio Vargas and Juan Perón in the 1930s and 1940s did not disappear with these individual leaders. Rather, under military dictatorships, state paternalism (and social responses to the government’s assumed authority) took on new gendered and politicized meanings and guises for the state and citizens alike.
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