The The idea of development, Alliance for progress and Sudene

theoretical conflicts and political strategies

Abstract

The national developmentism can be understood as strategy, as a project for social economic and political change, and as a fundamental part of the brazillian experience for modernization. Constituted and resignified throughout its long and extense trajectory, it assumes a mature face in the 1950s, suffering an important mutation with the authoritarian spin of 1964, with its alignment to the western block of the Cold War, lead by the USA, distancing itself from the original CEPAL propositions and from the implicit challenges to the theory of underdevelopment. This drastic change was a result of internal strains, aggravated by the actions of north-american external policies, which became constitutive elements of the decision paralysis of the 1964 coup. Stands out the international pressure, the financing of think tanks, media and the election of adversary groups to Goulart’s government in 1962 and, little studied, the underground action of the Alliance for Progress program (1961). Under the image of the fight for overcoming underdevelopmentin Latin America, the ALPRO, in Brazil, guided itself to ignore the federal government, repassing a good portion of this program’s resources to state governments (selection without public visibility and contrary to the guidelines of the project), ignoring the centralized coordination necessary to the planning policies. Also moved away from Sudene, institution that acted in the closest region to the key-image of ALPRO (high social vunerability), which acted through the rigorous diagnostic and planning techniques. In this context, ALPRO’s action reveals two occult political objectives: generating instability and neutralizing the developmentist arrangement.