Fascism in Brazil

A small April 2011 demonstration convened a motley collection of neo-Nazis, skinheads, and supporters of Integralism, Brazil's 90-year-old fascist tradition. Brazil in 2011 seemed destined for an increasingly inclusive, stable, prosperous liberal democracy, where such extreme Right groups could only carp from the sidelines that such inclusivity constituted an attack on conservative “freedoms” to exclude. There was, one neofascist demonstrator announced, only one federal legislator “who stands against libertines and communists”: Jair Bolsonaro, then relatively marginal (p. 121). “We support . . . Bolsonaro,” the demonstrator said, “because he represents the Brazilian family” (p. 122). This episode, succinctly retold in Fascism in Brazil, epitomizes the book's signal contribution—an engaging and accessible chronicling of Integralism from its 1932 founding up to its present iterations.The book fittingly approximates a cri de coeur from a Brazil experiencing throes of polarization and right-wing radicalism that will be familiar to readers from elsewhere. The preface, written before the January 2023 attack on Brazil's capitol, presciently notes that “democracy is in danger in Brazil,” and the volume demonstrates the ways in which such danger emerged, in part, from the long history of Integralism (p. viii). In one sense, Leandro Pereira Gonçalves and Odilon Caldeira Neto have made a critical intervention in the history of the contemporary Right beyond Brazil, the global, unstable blend of neoliberalism and authoritarian populism that has developed across decades and that Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte, Vladimir Putin, and others currently incarnate. Importantly, the book addresses the dearth of English texts on Brazilian fascism. With its publication, we can hope that Brazil's fascists will no longer seem a historical curiosity, exotic but inconsequential, to many who have hitherto not had access to this story.Fascism in Brazil is an excellent primer and will revolutionize teaching while aiding scholars of the Right in other regions who wish to understand this Brazilian phenomenon. The uninitiated will find a straightforward account of Integralism's founding, rise, fall, and resurrections, however fractured and seemingly ineffective (with emphasis on “seemingly”). The book expertly defines Integralism, explaining its ideologies, alliances, and development as a subculture and a way of life. The authors offer careful yet digestible descriptions of transitions between the formative years of Brazilian Integralist Action (AIB) and its storied founder Plínio Salgado, the mass movement in the 1930s, and later iterations, from exile after 1937 to resurrection as the Popular Representation Party in 1945 and fracturing after Salgado's death in 1975. Throughout, resonances with other Far Right groups will be unavoidable, particularly insofar as the book contains pithy narrations of Integralist attempts to adopt and exploit identity politics and culture wars. For example, interwar Integralists' wooing of Afro-Brazilian adherents while obscuring or euphemizing the country's slavocratic past will strike a chord with those witnessing the white supremacist anxieties that have inspired “postracial” subjectivities and prohibitions against studying slavery, racism, and other historical realities.Specialists, too, will reap considerable rewards from this volume. Beyond its brilliant review of the history of Integralism, readers will appreciate new and colorful anecdotes and illustrations—like those of Integralist weddings, Integralist toothpaste, Integralist candy wrappers, and even a 1930s Integralist version of Santa Claus, a spectacle of appropriation presented as “Vovô Índio” (Grandpa Indian). More helpful still, the book provides a granular recapitulation of how Integralism survived the past 50 years—or rather, the book shows us which Integralisms survived and reinvented themselves in those decades. This is a wonderful achievement, especially in an English-language publication. The authors bring us up to the present day, demonstrating how the seeming ineffectiveness of sundry contemporary Integralisms belies the ascendancy of their ideas. That ascendancy occurred amid a constellation of right-wing movements that range from neo-Nazism to monarchism.We thus witness the disarray that followed Salgado's demise, followed by the rise of several arguably more extremist versions of the Sigma (Integralism's symbol) that have struggled to fill the founder's void. The book rightly categorizes Integralism after Brazil's dictatorship (1964–85) as a unique political stance, explicitly antidemocratic at a time when liberal democracy was an unquestionable watchword of Brazil's political class. Given this context, it is less surprising that AIB's heirs made alliances with Brazilian skinheads (carecas) and monarchists who seek the Bragança family's restoration to a throne defunct since 1889. Latter-day Integralist extremism even included one leader's green-shirted (and thus quasi-official) presence at a 1988 rally to honor Adolf Hitler.This book delivers on its titular promise and directly articulates the arc between Integralism and Bolsonarism. It is not just that Integralists have continued to fight their time-honored culture wars (against women, sexual minorities, and others) in ways consonant with today's broader Right. It is that Bolsonaro's presidency signaled that Brazilian extreme rightists' moment had finally arrived, highlighting and granting new significance to what Gonçalves and Caldeira Neto rightly identify as “commonalities” between the Bolsonaro government and historical fascism: “conservatism, anticommunism, the use of conspiracy theories, and a worldview” employing Manichaean distinctions between good and evil (p. 129). Drawing on this history, then, the authors concluded, well before the spectacular blossoming of pro-coup camps and demonstrations in late 2022, that Integralism and like-minded movements are “still alive and might be even more relevant now” (p. 135)

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