23.01.2025

Lecture 29.01.25: Anticommunism and Conspiracy Theories: Civic-Military Coup in Brazil

TRT Guest Lecture by PhD Student from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais at the University of Tübingen

We are pleased to announce a special guest lecture by Ana Carolina Zimmermann, a PhD student from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, where she is supervised by Prof. Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta. She will put on the agenda the topic: “Anticommunism and Conspiracy Theories in the Anniversaries of the 1964 Civic-Military Coup in Brazil: the Past and the Present”. The presentation will take place on Wednesday, January 29th at 6 PM, in room 226 of the Brechtbau (Wilhelmstraße 50).

Ana Carolina is currently visiting the University of Tübingen, sponsored by the Brasilien- und Lateinamerika-Zentrum as part of the Tübingen Research Takeoff (TRT) program. The host institution within the University is the ERC-Project PACT (Populism, and Conspiracy Theories), under the supervision of Dr. Katerina Hatzikidi. This conference discusses relevant methodological debates on issues such as the history of the present tense, comparative history and the use of historical narratives around dictatorships in the Southern Cone of Latin America within contemporary political movements.

About the lecture: The aim of this presentation is to investigate the presence of anticommunist conspiracy theories during the anniversaries of the 1964 civic-military coup in Brazil, focusing on two distinct periods: the military dictatorship (1964-1985) and the presidency of Jair Messias Bolsonaro (2019-2022). The objective is to identify the political and commemorative uses of these conspiracy theories by both regimes, analyzing their historical conections and reflecting on the strategies authoritarian powers have used to legitimize themselves in the past and present. This analysis is grounded in theoretical discussions on the Cultural History of the Political, employing the concepts of political culture and imaginary. It examines how certain far-right political groups in Brazil, particularly those associated with authoritarianism, have invested in commemorating the coup. The 31st of March, the anniversary of the civic-military coup, also denominated as the “Democratic Revolution of ‘64” by its supporters, has historically been a platform for promoting discourse and symbolic acts that glorify the military’s role and their permanence in power. These discursive, symbolic, and ritualistic practices helped create a political imaginary that framed the coup as a “Revolution” initiated by the military, a narrative that was repeatedly invoked during the dictatorship's anniversaries and later assimilated by the negationist discourse on the subject, which had found institutional support during the Bolsonaro presidency. This political imaginary, developed by the dictaroship and its supporters, and sustained by militaristic and authoritarian far-right movements after redemocratization, effectively incorporated anticommunist conspiracy theories from the 1960s. These theories, which emphasized a supposed “red conspiracy” and the infiltration of a “foreign enemy,” were used to legitimize both the coup and the dictatorship. They offered distorted explanations for the political and social conditions leading up to the 1964 coup, presenting it as a necessary “Revolution” that saved Brazil and its democracy from the dangers of subversion and communism, while overlooking the unconstitutional and violent nature of the takeover.