How Brazil’s last military junta set scientific progress back by targeting top scientists and systematically destroying the country’s research ecosystem
The last few weeks have seen Donald Trump lambast and bully American elite universities – guilty, according to a highly tendentious narrative spun by the administration, of being hotbeds of sedition, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. The attack should be worrying to anyone who holds academic freedom and the independence of its institutions at heart. But there’s an additional self-defeating element to it. After all – besides being viewed by the administration, often phantasmagorically, as incubators of extreme wokeness and pervasive anti-Semitism – institutions such as Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and UPenn are also, in reality, central to the kind of global supremacy, technological or otherwise, that Trump and his hawks are desperate to maintain.
As Brazilian journalist Sérgio Barbo writes in a long investigative piece that appeared on platform A Pública a year ago but seems highly relevant today, it is not the first time a cabal of right-wingers, in attempting to stifle dissent and subordinate free academic activity to the interests of capitalist enterprise, saw off the branch the country is sitting on.
As he explains in O Que a Ciência Brasileira Perdeu com a Repressão Durante a Ditadura (What Brazilian Science Lost As a Result of State Repression During the Dictatorship), the military junta that ruled Brazil from 1964 and 1985 systematically targeted high-profile scientists and research institutions to fight off the perceived threat of communism. They simultaneously tried to clumsily redirect scientific research towards the interests of businesses and entrepreneurs. Brazil has been living with the unintended consequences of these policies for decades since.
The article spends a good chunk dwelling on the best-known episode in the story in which ten senior researchers from the Oswald Cruz Institute for scientific research in Rio de Janeiro were forcibly retired in 1970 – what later came to be known as “O massacre de Manguinhos” (The Massacre of Manguinhos) thanks to a 1978 memoir by one of scientists impacted, Herman Lent (1911-2004). The article relates also how the department of parasitology at University of São Paulo –dubbed as “red” because of the high proportion of left-wingers amongst its staff as well as its social mission to fight off widespread diseases such as malaria – incurred a similar fate not long after.
However, the investigation makes clear how these two episodes – which were carried out under the AI-5, a special law which gave the executive additional powers – were just the endpoint of a much longer campaign of systematic state repression that indeed begun the very moment the military deposed left-wing president João Goulart (1919-1976). The article states that between 1968 and 1973, the time period during which AI-5 was active, at least 168 professors, researchers and intellectuals had their jobs terminated and subjected to a regime in which they couldn’t be contracted by any institution of higher education receiving public funding, and were consequently forced into exile. In fact the purges and harassment started as soon as 1964, when a government decree established special commissions to look for dissidents and subversives were installed in universities and research institutions.
It was all part of a strategy, also affecting trade unions and farmers’ organisations, to cement regime control across the country. The article notes that between 800 and 1,000 researchers were the victims of repression during military rule. Of the 434 reported dead or disappeared by the dictatorship, 47 were connected in some way with the University of São Paulo).
As the article makes clear, this wasn’t an obscurantist crusade against science per se. It was rather a campaign against the culture and spirit of the academy, against particular scientists, and an attempt to yoke Brazilian science to particular economic interests and to a narrow notion of how economic growth is achieved. Anything deemed economically useless (or potentially politically seditious) was abandoned. The result, however, wasn’t an economic boom, but rather a lag in fundamental scientific research in key sectors such as medicine and electronics that continues to haunt Brazil to this very day.
It’s difficult to know what the fate of higher education will be under Trump. But if Barbo’s investigation offers any indication at all, we are heading down not only a dangerous but also a self-defeating path.
Original article (“O Que a Ciência Brasileira Perdeu com a Repressão Durante a Ditadura” by Sérgio Barbo) was written in Brazilian Portuguese and published in Agência Pública on 7 April 2024. It’s available here.
Agência Pública is the first non-profit for investigative journalism in Brazil. Founded in 2011 by women reporters, it marries in-depth, independent journalism with a preoccupation for social justice.
Summary by BS.
