Fiction and Massive Public Works during the Brazilian Military Regime (1964–1985)

Abstract

In 1971, Caetano Veloso, then self-exiled in London due to his politically controversial music, was allowed to travel to Brazil for his parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary. Upon arrival at the international airport in Rio de Janeiro, Caetano was taken to an apartment on Presidente Vargas Avenue by a group of plainclothes military agents. Their goal? Make him write a song in praise of the Transamazon Highway, a massive public works project inaugurated by the military dictatorship in 1970 (Veloso 291).¹ The government was not only creating actual public works, but also narratives about those public works, and to craft those narratives it sought the talents of one of Brazil’s greatest singers. Caetano, who had publicly opposed the regime, was now being pressured to praise one of its major projects. He refused. Caetano’s refusal to legitimize the Transamazon Highway illustrates one possible response to the central question of this chapter: how did artists engage and contest the dictatorship’s representation of Brazil’s public works projects? Exploring this question is critical to a better understanding of both the role of Brazilian cultural texts in the construction of social meaning and the complex historical legacy of the Brazilian military government’s massive public works projects.