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Kenneth Maxwell is the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Inter-American Studies and Director of Latin America Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations, and a monthly columnist for Notícia e Opinião (Brazil).
Talk about blaming the victim. Three days after 9/11 the eminent economist Celso Furtado suggested in one of Brazil's most influential newspapers that there were two explanations for the attack. One possibility, Furtado implied, was that this savage assault on America was the work of foreign terrorists, as the Americans suspected. But a more plausible explanation, he asserted, was that this disaster was a provocation carried out by the American far right to justify a takeover. He compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 and the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany.
Nine days before he was scheduled to meet with President George W. Bush at the White House, on October 30 the president of Brazil, the eminent sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso—pal of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair; charter member of the "progressive governance" group of world leaders; doctor honoris causa of the Universities of Notre Dame and Rutgers; former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—declared before the French National Assembly in Paris that "barbarism is not only the cowardliness of terrorism but also the intolerance or the imposition of unilateral policies on a global scale."
The populist Venezuelan president, Comandante Hugo Chávez, former paratrooper and failed coup leader, had said much the same thing in Caracas, whereupon the American ambassador was recalled to Washington in protest. Some thought the U.S. should have expressed similar disapproval of Cardoso, since no one in the U.S. administration or intelligence community doubted that he was targeting the United States in his remarks; nor did his appreciative audience in the French Assembly miss the point, much less his old mentor, Alain Touraine, of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), long an outspoken opponent of U.S. "hegemony." In fact, Touraine was relieved to discover that his prize pupil was still "a man of the left."
Then on November 11 the prominent Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff told O Globo of Rio de Janeiro that he was sorry only one airplane had crashed into the Pentagon; he would have liked to have seen twenty-five.
None of these declarations was out of tune with Brazilian public opinion. In a Datafolha poll of September 23, 2001, 79 percent of the population said they were unequivocally opposed to any military attack by the U.S. against countries that hosted those responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center; 78 percent were opposed to any participation by the Brazilian military in support of the U.S. armed response to terrorism. The richer segments of the population were more opposed (83 percent) than were the poorer sections (78 percent). So much for Hemispheric solidarity. And remember that this is not Saudi Arabia—mullahs do not set the cultural tone here.
The Brazilian reaction, which was almost the reverse image of popular reaction in much of Europe, shocked oldtime friends of Brazil in the United States as well as many Americans and Europeans in Brazil. John Fitzpatrick, a Scottish journalist based in São Paulo since 1995, observed that "obviously one cannot force people to feel genuine sorrow, but the muted response in Brazil has been puzzling and, to a non-American like me who lives here, disappointing and distressing." Some U.S. experts on Latin America, on the other hand, were surprised at the surprise. Had not Latin America good reason to distrust the U.S.? Was not this the comeuppance for years of quasi-imperialist policy and the cozy relations with military regimes and repressive security forces?
Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy, attributes this disconnect between U.S. and popular reactions in Latin America to what he calls "historical anti-Americanism." But it is less obvious why this should be the case in Brazil. Unlike Mexico, the U.S. did not gobble up vast stretches of Brazil's territory in the nineteenth century. Nor is Brazil like Chile, where, as the writer Ariel Dorfman reminded us, September 11 is etched in Chilean memory as the date in 1973 that Salvador Allende was overthrown by a U.S.-backed military coup. To be sure, the United States was not unhappy to see the military coup in Brazil in 1964, but the Brazilian military intervention of that year was much more a Brazilian affair than an American invention, and the military regime during the 1970s got very angry with Jimmy Carter and his human-rights policy. Brazil's diplomatic elites have long been preoccupied by U.S. predominance, and have long wished to see Brazil play the role of a counterbalance to the colossus of the north; but Brazil and the United States have never gone to war, and they have at times—as in World War II—actually fought together against common enemies. Nor has Brazil ever had the sort of overtly anti-American regime that once ruled in Argentina, much less that which still rules in Cuba. So the depth of the divergence after September 11 in popular opinion is not so easily explained.
Fitzpatrick thinks the Brazilian response reflected "the ignorance of the less educated population, and the smugness of the better educated." But it was the brilliant Harvard-educated Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta who from his chair at Notre Dame best caught the profound cultural dissimilarities underlying the stark difference between the Brazilian and the U.S. response. Da Matta argues that the most notable counterpoint with Brazil was the immediate solidarity between authorities and the victims and the dead, in sharp contrast to Brazil, where the formalism of the government's traditional response to tragedies or accidents means that, as a rule, no Brazilian governor, mayor, or president, as a rule leaves his palace to visit the sites affected.
Both populations recognized the same symbols and their importance—the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—but they saw them with differentiated perspectives, rooted in different political cultures. For Brazilian commentators the event was seen as an apocalyptic "end," not a beginning. Brazilians saw a mortal blow to American arrogance and self-confidence, whereas Americans saw the attack as a historical and moral test of their democracy and institutions. This "civic, administrative, social, and moral solidarity around President Bush," he wrote, "is alien to us Brazilians."
Finally da Matta highlighted the role assumed by national flags in these moments of crisis. In a society "in which civility, love, and pride in national accomplishments" are embedded in the memory of an authoritarian past and perceived as tasteless manifestations of the political right, the "flag unfortunately represents for many of our elite a silly nationalism that must be eradicated by international symbols." Americans on the other hand see their national flag as the noblest expression of their collectivity. In a time of crisis, Americans "bind up their wounds, plan a return to their routines, and, above all, temporarily set aside their radical individualism and feel a part of a whole through their flag."
Published in Brazil's O Estado de São Paulo on September 20, da Matta's column "The Brazilian View of the American Tragedy" helped set the record straight, though his voice unfortunately seems to be very much still a voice in the wilderness. The Jornal do Brasil asked its readers in November if they believed a greater convergence between the U.S. and Brazil in questions of culture and education would be beneficial to their country. Sixty-three percent thought not.