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Rafael R. Ioris , Transforming Brazil: A History of National Development in the Postwar Era (New York and London : Routledge , 2014), pp. x + 266, $140.00; £ 85.00, hb.
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In Transforming Brazil, Rafael Ioris focuses on the 1950s, a period that has long captured the imagination of scholars working on Brazil's postwar history. There was the political drama of Getúlio Vargas's return to the presidency, his suicide in August 1954 and the closely contested 1955 election won by Juscelino Kubitschek, who promised to make the country progress 50 years in his five-year term. The political tension only grew in the late 1950s and early 1960s, ultimately leading to the 1964 military coup, and Ioris wants his book to help illuminate the causes of that extreme polarisation. He argues that at the heart of the conflict were different conceptions of development. That Brazil needed to develop was consensus across the political spectrum, but there was less agreement on how exactly and for whom. To shed light on the competing visions for development, Ioris devotes two chapters to the broader context of the debate and four chapters to specific actors with distinct expectations for Brazil's development push.
The first chapter provides background on the historical origins of the 'developmentalist experiment of the 1950s' (p. 221) and offers an overview of the main initiatives. Chapter 2 discusses the connections between the domestic development discourse and Brazil's foreign policy to argue that many political actors viewed the two as inherently linked in the context of the Cold War. The third chapter focuses on the Kubitschek government's main development agency, the Council for Development, and its core development policy, the Targets Plan, aimed...