The Economist and Human Rights Violations in Brazil During the Military Dictatorship

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse British media coverage of the Brazilian dictatorship. Specifically, we examine coverage by the weekly news magazine The Economist in the period from the promulgation of Institutional Act 5 in December 1968, to 1975, the second year of the Geisel administration. We compare its coverage with that of The Times and The Guardian in order to reach an understanding of its portrayal of Brazil in terms of two themes in particular: economic performance (notably the ‘Brazilian miracle’), and political repression. We relate the latter theme to the international condemnations of torture, and the disappearance of political prisoners. Furthermore, given that The Economist mainly covers issues from an economic perspective, we examine shifts in the frequency and content of articles about Brazil, and conclude that The Economist’s portrayal of Brazil in the period under review deviated from that of much of the rest of the British Press.

A dictatorship in the battle for human rights: the 1977 UN High Commissioner proposal and the Brazilian resistance

“…In the late 1960s, complaints against Brazil attracted the attention of international organizations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) (Bernardi 2018) and the UN Commission on Human Rights (Amnesty International 1972; Roriz 2021). Headlines in Western media decried torture in Brazil (Sales and Martins 2018). In the US, activists pushed the Congress, which, in turn, pressured the White House into adopting a more peremptory position (Green 2009), though with scarce results.…”