Brazil and Chile: dialogues and reciprocal influences in the right-wing thinking of two nations (1959-2023)

Abstract

Much has been written about the close collaboration between the Brazilian and Chilean dictatorships since 1972, but also about the role that Fiducia magazine played in Chile in the sixties, a magazine strongly influenced by the Brazilian professor Plinio Correa de Oliveira. However, in the following article we suggest a holistic approach which includes both periods and searches political and ideological constants within a process that spans 1960 to the end of 1980, when there is an influence in the opposite direction and the Chilean neoliberal ideas start to find some echo in Brazil. From this, we argue as a thesis that a long relationship of reciprocal influence among the Chilean and Brazilian right-wing sectors has been forged, which ranged from the Catholic conservatism to the neoliberalism, but kept a clear anticommunist and order-and-stability-protecting speech. For that purpose, not only academic literature, but also the primary sources (such as magazines and speeches) will be consulted. As to the government of Bolsonaro, since it came to an end recently, we will use the press as the main source. In our methodology we will be based on the paradigm of the “Interamerican Cold War” proposed by Tanya Harmer, and we will carry out a comparative history exercise to understand the feedback and ideological evolution of the Right of both countries.