Edoardo Altamura

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

Abstract: Between 1959 and 1964, the democratic government of Brazil did not receive any support from the World Bank, not a single project was funded and not a dime entered the country. The Bank insisted that the lack of project funding was due to the country’s inability to keep inflation at bay, to devise credible projects and to stabilise the exchange rate. In 1964, the democratic government of President Joao Goulart was replaced by a right-wing military government that would stay in power for 20 years. Despite the supposed neutrality of the World Bank, the attitude towards the new regime was markedly different. The President of the World Bank and several officials started paying regular visits to the country and established a friendly and collaborative relationship with the economic team of the regime. Money entered the country at a fast pace and by 1970 Brazil was the biggest receiver of capital from the World Bank. This paper relies on a wide set of recently disclosed material from the archives of the World Bank and large multinational commercial banks to illustrate the changing relationship between the World Bank and Brazil in the years preceding the military coup and after the military takeover. The article will question the supposed economic neutrality of the World Bank by showing that the Bank saw the military regime through its own ideological lens superimposing its own narratives on the country and ignoring conflicting evidence. Although the Bank did nothing to hide its ideological preferences, it never clearly supported the regime either. Nonetheless, it required a set of economic measures in order to unlock its credits that could only be implemented by an authoritarian regime.

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: In the course of the 1970s labour came to be violently attacked by the military dictatorships that took power across the region. Workers were arrested, tortured, and often killed in countries like Argentina, Brazil or Chile. This attack was part of a larger plan to restructure Latin American societies and eliminate the threat of unionised workers. Once military dictatorship lost power and the region transitioned to more or less imperfect democracies, the situation did not improve. In need of financial support to avoid a complete economic meltdown, Latin American countries, partly under the influence of international creditors such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and Western commercial banks, adopted a series of economic policies to open their economies and redefine the role of the State after half a century of protectionism. Gradually, Latin American economies had to reduce barriers to entry, privatize state-owned enterprises and deregulate internal markets inaugurating a neo-liberal phase that would have a serious impact on the social fabric of most Latin American countries. The paper will rely on a wide range of recently-disclosed sources from North America and Latin America, including trade unions from Argentina and Brazil, to investigate how labour was systematically attacked in the course of the 1970s and, secondly, how democratisation did not coincide with an improvement in workers’ condition but, on the contrary, with a continued deterioration of their condition resulting in a gradual but steady dissatisfaction with democratic institutions in subsequent decades.