1. Brazil and Latin America*

I

It has been the conventional wisdom of the past several decades – since the publication of John Leddy Phelan’s influential 1968 essay, ‘Pan-Latinism, French intervention in Mexico (1861–7) and the genesis of the idea of Latin America’¹ – that ‘Latin America’ was originally a French concept, ‘l’Amérique latine’, used by French intellectuals to justify French imperialism in Mexico under Napoleon III. There existed, the French argued, a linguistic and cultural affinity, a unity of ‘Latin’ peoples for whom France was the natural leader and inspiration (and their defender against Anglo-Saxon, mainly US, influence and, ultimately, domination). The idea of a ‘race latine’, different from the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’, was first conceptualised in Lettres sur l’Amérique du Nord (2 vols., Paris, 1836) by Michel Chevalier (1806–77). After a lengthy stay in the United States (1833–5), following in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, Chevalier had visited Mexico and Cuba. He later became a prominent member of the Collège de France, the Council of State and the Senate – and a close adviser to Napoleon III. Chevalier was the principal apologist for French intervention in Mexico in 1861 in, for example, the articles he wrote for the Revue de deux mondes (1862) and in Le Mexique ancien et moderne (1863).² However, the first use of the expression ‘l’Amérique latine’ known to Phelan was by L.M. Tisserand in an article ‘Situation de la latinité’, published in the Revue des races latines (January 1861).

In fact, a number of Spanish American writers and intellectuals, many of them resident in Paris, had used the expression ‘América latina’ several years earlier. For its very first use there are three principal candidates: José Maria Torres Caicedo, a Colombian journalist, poet and critic (1830–89), Francisco Bilbao, a Chilean socialist intellectual (1823–65) and Justo Arosemena, a Panamanian/Colombian jurist, politician, sociologist and diplomat (1817–96).

In 1856 Torres Caicedo wrote a long poem entitled ‘Las dos Américas’, which appeared in El Correo de Ultramar, a Spanish language newspaper published in Paris, in February 1857. Along with several references to ‘América del Sur’ and ‘América Española’, and ending with a passionate call for the unity of the ‘Pueblos del Sur’ against ‘América en el Norte’, it included the lines:

Torres Caicedo went on to publish Bases para la formación de una Liga latino-americana (Paris, 1861) and Unión latinoamericana (Paris, 1865). It was in Paris in 1866, in an homenaje to the Argentine liberator José de San Martín, to whom all ‘latinoamericanos’ owed a profound debt, Caicedo declared: ‘Para mí, colombiano, que amo con entusiasmo mi noble pátria, existe una pátria mas grande – la América latina’.³ In a speech on 22 June 1856 in Paris Bilbao offered his reflections on ‘la raza latinoamericana’ and ‘la unidad latinoamericana’. The speech was later published as a 32-page pamphlet entitled Iniciativa de la América. Idea de un Congresso Federal de las repúblicas (Paris, 1856).⁴ A Liberal representative for the state of Panama in the Colombian Senate at the time, Arosemena referred to ‘América latina’ and ‘el interés latinoamericano’ in a speech in Bogotá on 20 July 1856 and in articles published in El Neogranadino on 15 and 29 July 1856 (‘la cuestión americana i su importancia’) and later in Estudios sobre la idea de una liga americana (1864).⁵ A number of Spanish liberal intellectuals, for example, Emilio Castelar (1832–99) and Francisco Pi y Margall (1824–1901), also began to refer to ‘América latina’ at this time.⁶ Carlos Calvo, an Argentine historian, diplomat and international lawyer (1824–1906), was probably the first to use the expression in scholarly works: Colección completa de los tratados, convenciones, capitulaciones, armisticios y otros atos diplomáticos de todos los estados de la América Latina (20 vols., Paris, 1862– 64) and Anales históricos de la revolución de la América Latina desde el año 1808 (3 vols., Paris, 1864–7).

Argentina represents an interesting case in the history of the emergence of the idea of a common Spanish American or Latin American identity in the middle decades of the 19th century. The post-independence generation of writers, political thinkers and liberal intellectuals, the so-called Generation of ’37, of whom Esteban Echeverría (1805–51), Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810– 84) and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88) were the most prominent, regarded Argentina, and especially Buenos Aires, as the embodiment of European civilisation in a predominantly barbarous Spanish American environment. They were influenced primarily by English, French and North American ideas and believed that Argentina had the potential to become South America’s United States. For Alberdi the United States was ‘the model of the universe’, for Sarmiento ‘the highest point of civilization thus far attained’. They had little interest in the rest of Spanish America, except when offering themselves as guides and mentors, and rarely used the term ‘América Latina’. Only the early ‘nationalists’, such as Alberdi (after he distanced himself from Mitre and Sarmiento), Carlos Guido y Spano (for whom Argentina was one ‘American state’ among many ‘sister republics’), José Hernández, and Olegario V. Andrade (author of the poem ‘Atlántida: canto al porvenir de la raza latina en América’ in the late 1870s), demonstrated what Nicolas Shumway described as ‘unabashed – and for Argentina unusual – identification with the other countries of Spanish America’.⁷

The point to be emphasised here is that none of the Spanish American intellectuals and writers who first used the expression ‘América Latina’ (with the exception of Calvo), nor their French and Spanish counterparts, thought that it included Brazil. ‘América Latina’ was simply another name for América Española or Hispanoamérica. For their part, Brazilian writers and intellectuals, while conscious that Brazil shared with Spanish America a common Iberian and Catholic background, were also aware of what separated Brazil from Spanish America: geography, history (Portugal’s long struggle to maintain its independence from Spain and the different colonial experiences of Portuguese America and Spanish America), above all language and culture and, not least, political institutions. Unlike Spanish America, Brazil had secured its independence relatively peacefully and had remained united under a monarchy. Brazil was politically stable and ‘civilised’, in contrast to what Brazilians regarded as the violent, extremely unstable and ‘barbarous’ Spanish American republics. Brazilian romanticism was different from that of Spanish America, in its literature, whether the poetry of Antônio Gonçalves Dias or the novels of José de Alencar, as well as in its art and music.⁸ Insofar as Brazilian writers and intellectuals thought about the world beyond Brazil it was not to Spanish America they looked – they certainly did not see themselves as part of ‘América Latina’ – but to Europe, especially France and to a lesser extent Portugal, or in rare cases to America as a whole, including the United States. For example, it was the common Indian heritage of the Americas that captured the imagination of Antônio Carlos Gomes in his opera Il Guarany (1870), Joaquim Manuel de Souza Andrade, or Sousândrade (1833–1902) in his dramatic poem about a legendary Colombian Indian, ‘O guesa errante’, written in New York in the 1870s, and Machado de Assis in Americanas (1875), his third published volume of poems.

Republican intellectuals were particularly attracted to the idea of America. The Republican Manifesto of 1870 famously concluded with the declaration: ‘We are part of America and we wish to be Americans … in democratic solidarity with the continent to which we belong [Somos da América e queremos ser Americanos ... em solidariedade democrática com o continente que fazemos parte]’. For Republicans, Brazil was ‘um país isolado’ separated from both the Spanish American republics and the United States by geography, history, language and culture, but also by slavery and, above all, by its monarchical form of government. Republicans felt that Brazil should become less politically – and culturally – isolated from Spanish America but, more importantly, from the United States.

II

During the early part of the 19th century US politicians, in particular President Thomas Jefferson and Senator Henry Clay, had elaborated on the idea of the ‘Western Hemisphere’; the idea that America and Europe, the New World and the Old, were different and that there existed a special relationship between the peoples and governments of the Americas, a shared American geography and history and shared American ideas of republicanism, liberty and democracy (sic).⁹ In his many conversations with his friend the Abbé Correa da Serra, in 1816 minister of the United Kingdom of Portugal and Brazil, Jefferson included Brazil, not yet independent and not to become a republic until 1889, as a key element in his ‘American system’.¹⁰ In December 1823, in what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe declared that the United States would not tolerate any extension of the European political system or any intervention by any European power ‘in any portion of this hemisphere’. George Canning, the British foreign secretary, expressed some concern about ‘the avowed pretension of the United States to put themselves at the head of a confederacy of all the Americas and to sway that confederation against Europe (Great Britain included)’.¹¹ John Quincy Adams, however, Monroe’s Secretary of State and successor as president, while equally opposed to European influence in the Americas, had no interest in any ‘American system’ which included former Spanish and Portuguese colonies. They were not only Iberian and, worse, Catholic, but inherently unstable and degenerate, not least, he thought, because of their tropical climate. ‘As to an American system,’ Adams wrote, ‘we have it; we constitute the whole of it’. He had ‘little expectation of any beneficial result to this country [the United States] from any future connection with them [the newly independent Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries], political or commercial’.¹² For the next 60 years no US president showed much interest in the Western Hemisphere idea or indeed in any part of the hemisphere south of Panama.

Despite the fragmentation of Spanish America into ten republics at the time of independence from Spain (by mid-century there were 16) not only did Spanish American intellectuals and writers, notably Andrés Bello (1781–1865),¹³ sustain the idea of a common Spanish American consciousness and identity that was stronger than local and regional ‘nationalisms’, but Spanish American politicians, notably Simón Bolívar himself (most famously in the Jamaica Letter of 1815), had a vision of a confederation of Spanish American republics, forming a ‘single nation’. In December 1824 Bolívar invited representatives of all the peoples and governments of America, except the United States, Haiti and Brazil, to a Congress in Panama ‘to arrange our American affairs’. Thus, not only the United States, which Bolívar felt should be kept at arm’s length, but also Brazil was not initially invited to Panama.¹⁴ Brazil’s language, history and culture were regarded as entirely foreign. Its economy and society were based on the slave trade and slavery had been repudiated, if not yet entirely abolished, in most of the Spanish American republics. Moreover, Brazil remained part of the Europe Bolívar despised and feared, not least because it had maintained a monarchical system of government. Worse still, it called itself an empire, and had imperialist ambitions in the Río de la Plata (the Banda Oriental of the Río Uruguay, which had been invaded by the Portuguese in 1816, now formed part of the Brazilian empire) and possibly further afield. In Bolívar’s view, Brazil constituted a threat to the sovereignty and independence of the Spanish American republics.

The Panama Congress, June–July 1826, was a failure. Not all Spanish American states sent delegates, and only Gran Colombia ratified the treaty of perpetual alliance. But the idea of a Bolivarian American confederation persisted, especially in view of the territorial expansion of the United States in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. The annexation of Texas in 1845, the Mexican War (1846–8), the Californian gold rush, US interest in an inter-oceanic route across the isthmus of Panama, the constant threats to occupy and annex Cuba and, especially, William Walker’s invasion of Nicaragua in 1855, all confirmed the belief that the United States could only fulfill its ‘Manifest Destiny’ at the expense of ‘América latina’. In the 1860s, as a result of France’s intervention in Mexico in 1861 and Spain’s annexation of Santo Domingo (1861–5) and its wars with Peru (1864–6) and Chile (1865–6), France and Spain joined the United States as enemies of ‘América latina’. The American conferences held in Lima (1847–8), Santiago de Chile (1856), Lima (1864– 5) and Caracas (1883: the centenary of Bolívar’s birth), however, have to be counted as failures.¹⁵

Neither the United States nor Brazil were invited to participate in these American conferences. ‘[Both] are tacitly considered as not belonging to the American community’, wrote the Brazilian chargé d’affaires in Santiago in May 1862, ‘and consequently excluded from it or, at most, only tolerated’.¹⁶ For their part the Brazilian governments of the Segundo Reinado (1840–89) did not identify with any of the various projects of its neighbours for inter-American unity. Brazil with its immense Atlantic coastline was firmly part of the Atlantic world, and its principal economic and political links were with Great Britain (see Essay 2). Unlike the Spanish American republics Brazil did not feel threatened by the United States, and much less France and Spain.

Bilateral relations between Brazil and its Spanish American neighbours, in what was referred to by Brazilian diplomats as ‘América Espanhola’, ‘América Meridional’ or simply ‘América do Sul’, were extremely limited, except in the Río de la Plata where Brazil fought three wars: the first, in 1825–8, against the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata for control of the Banda Oriental (resulting in the independence of Uruguay); the second, in 1851–2, against the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, in alliance with the Argentine province of Entre Rios and Uruguay; and the third, in 1864–70, against the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López, in alliance with Argentina and Uruguay, known as the Paraguayan War (see Essay 3). Paulino Soares de Souza, Minister of Foreign Relations from 1849 to 1853, the first since the abdication of Emperor D. Pedro in 1831 to hold the post for more than a few months, initiated bilateral negotiations with a number of Pacific republics mainly with the aim of confirming existing frontiers based on the principle of uti possidetis, that is to say, the boundaries in South America generally recognised by Spain and Portugal under the Treaty of Madrid (1750). Brazil’s position was that since it was already so vast it had no wish to expand at the expense of its neighbours; it wanted them simply to accept the status quo. Duarte da Ponte Ribeiro was sent on a mission to Chile, Peru and Bolivia and Miguel Maria Lisboa to Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Treaties were signed with Peru in 1851 and Colombia in 1853, and later with Venezuela (1859) and Bolivia (1867).¹⁷ After the War of the Pacific (1879–83), in which Chile fought and defeated Bolivia and Peru, there was an informal understanding, though not an informal alliance as is sometimes suggested, between Chile and Brazil, which had remained neutral in the war, not least because both saw Argentina as their principal rival. Brazil would dominate the Atlantic coast of South America, including the Río de la Plata and Chile the Pacific coast. Brazil’s relations with Mexico were virtually non-existent.¹⁸

When, on the other hand, politicians in the United States during the 1880s rediscovered the concept of the Western Hemisphere and invited the 17 Spanish American republics and the Brazilian empire to join the United States at a conference in Washington with the aim of creating an informal alliance of the ‘nations of America’, Brazil readily accepted. The opening ceremony of the first International Conference of American States was held on 2 October 1889. On 15 November, three days before the first working session, Brazil proclaimed itself a republic. Marechal Deodoro da Fonseca, the head of the Provisional Government, appointed a prominent Republican, Quintino Bocaiúva, as Minister of Foreign Relations. Bocaiúva immediately replaced the head of the Brazilian delegation to the Washington conference with another prominent Republican, Salvador de Mendonça. Both Bocaiúva and Mendonça, had been signatories of the Republican Manifesto of 1870, with its concluding declaration, ‘We are part of America and we wish to be Americans’. At Washington Brazil symbolically separated itself from Europe, the Old World, and finally joined America, the New World.¹⁹

III

The final decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of the United States as a regional power. Secretary of State Richard Olney’s famous remark during the Venezuelan crisis of 1895 (‘The United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition’), US intervention in Cuba’s war of independence from Spain in 1898, the annexation of Puerto Rico and the establishment of a US protectorate in Cuba, US involvement in Panama’s separation from Colombia in 1903 and President Theodore Roosevelt’s annual message to Congress in December 1904 all attested to the growing assertion of US hegemony in the region. ‘Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society’, Roosevelt declared, ‘may in Latin America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized power … In the Western Hemisphere, the United States may be forced, however reluctantly, to the exercise of an international police power’. There followed US intervention in the Dominican Republic (1905) and Mexico (1914–5) and US occupation of Nicaragua (1912–33), Haiti (1915–34) and the Dominican Republic (1916–24). At the same time, following the International Conference of American States in Washington (1889–90), the United States promoted a series of what became known as Pan-American Conferences: Mexico (1901–2), Rio de Janeiro (1906), Buenos Aires (1910), Santiago de Chile (1923), Havana (1928), Montevideo (1933) and Lima (1938) before the Second World War. The aim was to promote US trade and investment throughout the region, to create more orderly and predictable political structures in the countries to the South, and peacefully to assert US leadership in the Western Hemisphere, while at the same time deterring any lingering European imperialist ambitions there.

The governments of Spanish America generally reacted to this new US interest in the Hemisphere with suspicion and mistrust. They strongly condemned, in particular, the War with Spain and the US take-over of Cuba, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine and successive US interventions in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. They feared, with good reason, that Pan-Americanism was simply a weapon with which to assert US economic and political hegemony for the further exploitation of the region, and used the Pan-American conferences to express their opposition to the United States.

Brazilian governments, on the other hand, were not generally critical of US policy in the region, sought to develop closer relations with the United States and gave their full support to the United States at all the Pan-American Conferences.²⁰ For Brazilians there were two giants, though unequal giants no doubt, in the Western Hemisphere: the United States and Brazil. Both were continental in size; both had huge natural resources and economic potential; both were stable ‘democracies’ (sic); and both were different from América Espanhola/América Latina. Brazil also recognised the great changes – geopolitical, economic and cultural – that were taking place in the world on the eve of the 20th century. US global hegemony would inevitably replace that of Britain and Europe more generally. The United States was regarded not only as offering the best defence against a resurgent European imperialism (which for Brazil remained a greater threat than US imperialism) but as providing order, peace and stability in Latin America, that is to say, in Spanish America. In a long interview he gave to the correspondent of La Nación of Buenos Aires in Rio de Janeiro in July 1906 the barão do Rio Branco, who became Foreign Minister in December 1902 (and remained in post until his death in February 1912), argued that the threat from the United States was ‘a fiction’, and that the principal nations of South America, which were well-governed and paid their debts (and which were distant from the United States) – Argentina and Chile as well as Brazil – had nothing to fear. On the contrary, the United States provided much needed order, peace and stability in the rest of Spanish America, which was necessary and in the national interest of Brazil. But countries which could not govern themselves, could not pay their debts, could not avoid continuous revolutions and civil wars (as, for example, in Central America), ‘have no reason to exist and must give place to another nation stronger, better organized, more progressive, more virile’.²¹ Teddy Roosevelt could not have put it better!

While extending Brazil’s diplomatic representation (for example, to Colombia and Ecuador in 1904, Cuba and the Central America republics in 1906) the governments of the First Republic (1889–1930) showed no greater interest in ‘os povos da língua espanhola’, ‘as nações latinoamericanas’, than the governments of the empire, except in two respects: firstly, their (generally successful) efforts to resolve the frontier disputes with their immediate neighbours in South America, notably Argentina (over Palmas or Misiones) in 1895 and Bolivia (over Acre) in 1903, but also Colombia, Peru and Uruguay,²² and secondly the (somewhat less successful) efforts of Rio Branco to develop closer relations with two South American neighbours, Argentina and Chile.

In January 1905 Rio Branco was described by the US minister David Thompson as having ‘no little ill-feeling’ for the other countries in South America, except possibly Chile, and as having remarked privately that ‘no Spanish speaking country is good, and no person of Spanish blood can be believed’.²³ At the same time, Brazil had to ‘conquer the affection and confidence’ of its neighbours because there would always be ‘great prejudice and distrust’ against Brazil in Spanish America.²⁴ Like Chile, Argentina had begun to make significant economic and political progress, and Argentine president Julio Roca and Brazilian president Campos Sales had exchanged official visits in 1899 and 1900. In 1903 Rio Branco had begun to elaborate the idea of a Pacto ABC (Argentina, Brazil and Chile, ‘the three great nations of South America’). The signs were good until José Figueroa Alcorta became president of Argentina in January 1906 and appointed Estanislau Zeballos as Foreign Minister for third time. Zeballos had always been hostile to Brazil, and to Rio Branco personally. He distrusted Brazil for its size and population (three times that of Argentina), while at the same time showing contempt for its racial mix and its economic and cultural backwardness. He never accepted the loss of Palmas and he was suspicious of Brazilian influence in Paraguay and Uruguay. Zeballos kept alive the old Argentine dream of reuniting the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata and he became alarmed when Brazil, conscious of its military weakness with respect to Argentina, increased its naval expenditure and began to modernise its navy in 1906–7. Ultimately Zeballos failed to separate Chile from Brazil and relations with Argentina improved with his resignation in June 1908. Only with the election of Roque Sáenz Peña in September 1910, however, was Rio Branco able successfully to revive the idea of the Pacto ABC. The Mexican Revolution offered a first opportunity for joint action. At a meeting in Niagara Falls, Canada (May–June 1914) the ABC powers acted as mediators in the conflict between the government of General Huerta and the United States following the US occupation of Vera Cruz. Hostilities ceased, Huerta resigned and, a year later, the United States withdrew its troops. In May 1915 Argentina, Chile and Brazil signed a treaty in Buenos Aires. It was ratified by the Brazilian and Chilean Congresses, but was rejected in 1916 by the newly elected Argentine president Hipólito Yrigogen.

In 1904 Rio Branco had nominated Joaquim Nabuco, the leader of the movement for the abolition of slavery in Brazil in the 1880s and minister in London since 1899, as Brazil’s first ambassador to the United States. (He served in Washington from 1905 until his death in 1910.) Nabuco had long believed that, far from being a threat to the independence of ‘our continent’, the Monroe Doctrine was the best guarantee that there would be no European recolonisation of America. He was particularly concerned about the future of Amazonia. ‘In the end what is Monroism?’, he had asked in the postcript to his book Balmaceda (1895), ‘Monroism would appear to be the promise made to the whole of America by the American Union (sic) that Europe would not acquire any more territory in the New World’.²⁵ There were two pathways [caminhos] that Brazil could follow, Nabuco wrote to Rio Branco in December 1905, ‘the American or the other, which I don’t know whether to call Latin-american, independent or solitary [solitário]. For my part, I am frankly Monroist’.²⁶ In a long letter to José Carlos Rodrigues, the owner and editor of the Jornal do Commercio, Nabuco wrote: ‘For us the choice is between Monroism and European recolonisation ... the only protection for America is sea-power which only the United States has. Monroism is thus the affirmation of national independence and integrity by the only system that can guarantee them.’²⁷

Disagreement over Monroism ended Nabuco’s friendship with the historian, diplomat and fellow pernambucano (born in the state of Pernambuco] Manuel de Oliveira Lima. In his book Nos Estados Unidos: Impressões políticas e sociais (1899), written while serving in the Brazilian legation in Washington, Oliveira Lima had expressed his profound admiration for the United States, his belief in the superiority of Anglo-Saxon over Iberian civilisation and culture, and even a positive attitude towards the Monroe Doctine which protected Latin America against European imperialism. But a few years later in articles for O Diário de Pernambuco and O Estado de São Paulo, published in 1907 as Panamericanismo (Bolívar-Monroe-Roosevelt), he described the foreign policy of the United States as ‘aggressively imperialistic’ and the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine as a serious threat to the sovereignty of the Latin American nations. He accused Nabuco of ‘excessive americanism’ and promoting an ‘entente ultra-cordial’ between Brazil and the United States.²⁸

In the interest of Pan-American unity, Nabuco sought to improve relations between the Brazillian, United States and Spanish American republics, but he resented the fact that in the International Bureau of American States the Spanish American members were treated as equals of the United States and Brazil: ‘the vote of Nicaragua cancels out that of the United States; the island of Haiti (sic) counts for more than Brazil, the votes of two republiquetas cancelling out our vote; Brazil counts for less than any two Central American republics’. Moreover, whereas América inglesa [the United Sates] had one vote and América portuguesa [Brazil], which by a miracle of history [um milagre histórico] had remained united, one vote; América espanhola, because of its historic failure [fracasso histórico] and fragmentation [fragmentação], had 18 votes. The Spanish speaking countries had a natural tendency [uma tendência natural] to unite against the United States and Brazil, ‘the principal republics of the hemisphere [os principais repúblicas do hemisfério]’.²⁹

Nabuco regarded US ascendency in Spanish America (particularly Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean) as ‘natural’ and US interventionism in the region as generally beneficial. He was a fierce defender of ever closer relations between Brazil and the United States to the exclusion of all others. ‘Between Europe and America’, Nabuco wrote to his friend Alexandre Barbosa Lima, in July 1907, ‘for better or for worse, no nation in Latin America has a choice ... In America … we [Brazilians] cannot hesitate between the United States and Spanish America’.³⁰ Rio Branco’s ‘South American triple alliance’, indeed ‘any South American alliance’, was, for Nabuco, ‘absurd’, ‘fatal’, and would have ‘disastrous consequences’ for the close relationship between ‘the principal republics of the Hemisphere’, the United States and Brazil, which was the ‘alpha and the omega of our foreign policy … He [Rio Branco] has confidence in Germany, France, Italy, Chile, Argentina, and I don’t know who else’, Nabuco wrote. ‘I believe in the United States’.³¹

***

In the First World War Brazil alone among the leading countries of the region followed the United States in declaring war on Germany in 1917. (Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, for example, remained neutral throughout.) At the Versailles conference Brazil alone, with the support of the United States, was elected a non-permanent member of the Executive Council of the League of Nations for three years. And when in March 1920 the US Senate voted to withdraw the United States from the League Brazil began to consider itself as having an implicit mandate to represent the Americas on the Council.³² Brazil was re-elected to the Council annually from 1922 to 1925, but its authority to speak for Latin America was increasingly challenged, especially by Argentina and Uruguay. The Spanish American republics wanted the non-permanent ‘American seat’ to rotate, and there was no support for Brazil’s bid to become a permanent member of the Council. In 1926 the European powers accepted Germany as a permanent member of the Executive Council, but refused to accept Brazil. When Brazil decided therefore to withdraw from the League of Nations – a decision Austen Chamberlain, the British Foreign Secretary, described as ‘Brazil’s suicide in international affairs’ – Spanish American support for Brazil was conspicuously absent. Indeed, Afrânio de Melo Franco, Brazil’s representative in Geneva, accused the other American states, led by Argentina, of ‘ill-concealed hostility to Brazil’.³³ (Chamberlain later confessed that had there been unanimous Latin American support a permanent seat for Brazil on the Council would have demanded serious consideration, indeed it would have been difficult to refuse.)³⁴ After the event, the Brazilian Foreign Minister, Jose Félix Pacheco, took the view that perhaps it had all been ‘providential’: Brazil could stop worrying about ‘América Latina’ and, like the United States, define itself by its own characteristics as ‘América Portuguesa’, different from ‘América Inglesa’ and ‘América Hispânic sub-dividida’.³⁵

After its withdrawal from the League in 1926, Brazil focussed even more on its relations with the United States, which had by now replaced Britain as Brazil’s principal commercial partner (that is to say, the principal supplier of manufactured and capital goods – the United States had always been the major importer of coffee, Brazil’s main export) and which was challenging Britain as Brazil’s principal source of capital. At the disastrous sixth Pan-American conference in Havana (January–February 1928), the low point in Inter-American relations, the issue of US imperialism in Central America and the Caribbean once again dominated proceedings, with US intervention in Nicaragua almost universally condemned. Honório Pueyrredón, the Argentine ambassador to the United States, championed the idea of a ‘hispano-americanismo independente’ and was openly hostile to the United States and to Brazil, which, as always, supported the United States. An editorial in the Washington Star entitled ‘Our friend Brazil’ referred to two great nations standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ in Havana. Pan-Americanism was secure if ‘Brazil in the South and the United States in the North’ remained allies.³⁶

During the 1930s the relationship with the United States remained the central pillar of Brazilian foreign policy. Relations with the Spanish American republics became even more distant, largely ‘bureaucratic’, apart from Brazilian mediation in the conflict between Colombia and Peru over Leticia in Western Amazonia and between Bolivia and Paraguay (backed by Argentina) in the Chaco War (1932–5). Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha wrote to President Getúlio Vargas in January 1935: ‘The Indo-Spanish countries are our natural enemies; they cannot inspire confidence and even today they retain suspicions towards us inherited from Iberian struggles and heightened by continental rivalries’.³⁷ As the situation in Europe deteriorated, with war ever more likely, inter-American solidarity in the interests of hemispheric security and support for the United States in a world-wide ideological struggle for democracy against fascism brought Brazil and Spanish America closer together – at the seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo (1933), a special Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace in Buenos Aires (1936) and the eighth Pan-American Conference in Lima (1938), and at meetings of American Foreign Ministers in Panama (September 1939), Havana (July 1940), after the outbreak of war in Europe, and Rio de Janeiro (January 1942), after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States. One by one the states of Spanish America followed Brazil in first breaking diplomatic relations with and then declaring war on the Axis powers. Only Chile (until 1943) and Argentina (until March 1945) remained neutral.

At the Inter-American Conference on the ‘Problems of War and Peace’ held in Mexico City (December 1944–March 1945), where Brazil once again was the most vigorous defender of Pan-Americanism (the diplomat and future US ambassador to Brazil, Adolf Berle, wrote in his diary: ‘The Brazilians want the Monroe Doctrine lock, stock and barrel and make no secret of it’),³⁸ the concept of ‘a closed hemisphere in an open world’ was broadly accepted and ‘adequate representation’ for Latin America in any new international organisation created after the War was demanded. At the San Francisco conference in April 1945, the United States proposed a permanent seat for Brazil on the Security Council of the United Nations, but (decisively) Britain and Russia were opposed – and, significantly, there was no unanimous Spanish American support. Brazil had to be satisfied with a non-permanent seat on the Security Council, as it had on the Executive Council of the League of Nations.³⁹

IV

In the period from the 1880s to the Second World War, Spanish American intellectuals were generally hostile to the United States, US imperialism, US culture and to Pan-Americanism. The catalyst was undoubtedly Cuba and the Spanish-American War of 1898.⁴⁰ The of idea of two Americas – on the one hand, the United States, and on the other, Spanish America, Hispanoamérica, América Latina, now frequently called ‘Nuestra América’, which was different from, and superior to, Anglo-Saxon America was developed further by Spanish Caribbean writers like Eugenio María de Hostos (Puerto Rico, 1839–1903) and, above all, José Martí (Cuba, 1853–95) in his articles from Washington in 1889–90 and from New York in 1891–5, published in La Revista Ilustrada (New York), El Partido Liberal (Mexico City) and La Nación (Buenos Aires).⁴¹ But it is most evident in the writings of the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917), whose Ariel (1900) and Mirador de Próspero (1913) had an enormous impact on an entire generation, particularly the young, throughout Spanish America. (Ariel was dedicated to ‘the youth of America’.) Rodó warned against ‘el perigo ianque’, which was social, cultural and moral even more than economic and political, and what he called ‘nordomanía’, which undermined ‘el espírito dos americanos latinos’.⁴² Also widely read was the Colombian José Maria Vargas Vila (1860–1933) whose Ante los bárbaros, first published in Rome in 1900 had many later, expanded editions with different subtitles (for example, El yanqui, he ahi el enemigo) before a definitive edition appeared in Barcelona in 1923.

For some Spanish American intellectuals of this generation it became more common, particularly once slavery had been abolished in Brazil in 1888 followed by the overthrow of the empire in 1889, to point to the similarities between Brazil and Spanish America in, for example, culture, religion, political structures, law and racial mixture; the term ‘Iberoamérica’ was frequently used to refer to both Spanish and Portuguese America. But, like their predecessors in the 1850s and 1860s, few showed any real interest in Brazil. A rare exception was Martín García Merou (1862–1905), Argentine minister in Brazil 1894–6, and later in the United States 1896–1905, who in 1897 wrote a series of articles on Brazilian intellectual, cultural and literary life for the journal La Biblioteca in Buenos Aires, later published as El Brasil intellectual: Impresiones y notas literárias (Buenos Aires, 1900). The great majority of Spanish American intellectuals continued to exclude Brazil from what they thought of as ‘Nuestra América’ or ‘América Latina’. The classic studies of Spanish America/Latin America’s deficiencies by those, under the influence of social Darwinism, pessimistic about its future had little if anything to say about Brazil.⁴³

An Argentine, Manuel Baldomero Ugarte (1875–1951), was perhaps the first Spanish American intellectual specifically to make the case for the inclusion of Brazil in ‘América Latina’, ‘la nación latinoamericana’, ‘la parte superior del continente’, united in opposition to US imperialism. In his early writings, for example El porvenir de América Latina. La raza, la integridad territorial y moral, la organización interior (Valencia, 1910; 2nd ed. Mexico City, 1918), which in some editions appeared with the title El porvenir de América Española, and in his many speeches in Barcelona, Paris, New York, Mexico and throughout South America in the period 1910–17, published as Mi campaña hispano-americana (Barcelona, 1922), Ugarte’s primary concern was Spanish America. A lecture he gave at Columbia University in July 1912 entitled ‘The future of Latin America’ (published in Spanish as ‘Los pueblos del Sur ante el imperialismo norteamericano’), however, included references to Brazil. And in El destino de un continente (1923; Eng. trans. The Destiny of a Continent, New York, 1925) Ugarte argued that Brazil, was simply ‘a special variant’ of ‘La Gran España’ and must be considered and treated as ‘an integral part of our family of nations [América Latina]’, all with their roots in the ‘península Hispânica’. There could be no such thing, Ugarte insisted, as ‘partial Latin Americanism’.⁴⁴

There was no great change in the attitude of most Spanish American intellectuals towards Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s. Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (Peru, 1895–1979) promoted the idea of ‘Indoamérica’ rather than ‘América Latina’ in, for example, A donde va Indoamérica? (1928), so as to include Spanish America’s Indian populations as well as its mestizos and blacks. José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru, 1895–1930) wrote about ‘América Indo-Ibérica’ in Temas de nuestra América, a collection of articles published between 1924 and 1928. But whether the preferred expression was Indoamérica, América Indo-Ibérica or América Latina, Brazil for the most part remained excluded.

Again, there were exceptions. José Vasconcelos (Mexico, 1882–1959), for example, in an essay ‘El problema del Brasil’ (1921), argued for the integration of such a future great country with the other republics of the hemisphere. He headed the Mexican mission to Brazil for the celebration of the centenary of Brazilian independence in 1922, and his major work La raza cósmica (Barcelona, 1925) originated as the introduction to his report on his journey to Brazil (and Argentina), which he called, his ‘misión de la raza ibero-americana’. The first and most famous chapter, ‘El mestizaje’, was inspired by what he learned of miscegenation in Brazil. In a later work, Bolivarismo y Monroismo: temas iberoamericanos (Santiago de Chile, 1934), however, Vasconcelos promotes bolivarismo (‘a ideal hispanoamericano de crear una federación con todos los pueblos de cultura española’), advocates ‘México para los mexicanos, Hispanoamérica para los hispanoamericanos’, and expresses his fear that Brazil was not on the side of Spanish America against the United States and had its own imperialist ambitions about which the countries of Spanish South America should be concerned. Vasconcelos was particularly outraged that Brazil had dedicated a prominent public building in Rio de Janeiro to US President Monroe.⁴⁵

José Vasconcelos had a great influence on another leading Mexican intellectual, Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), who was named ambassador to Brazil in 1930. During the following six or seven years Reyes wrote more than 50 perceptive essays on Brazilian literature and culture.⁴⁶ Reyes was, however, another exception as Spanish American writers, literary critics and intellectuals in general continued to show little interest in Brazil. Spanish Americans focussed on their own national identities and cultures. Beyond this, their concern was for Hispanic or Latin American culture, that is to say, Spanish American culture, separate and different from that of the United States – and of Brazil. An outstanding example is Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884–1946), who was born in the Dominican Republic but spent much of his life in Mexico, Cuba and Argentina and whose later works included Literary Currents in Hispanic America (Cambridge, MA, 1945), based on the Charles Eliot Norton lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1940–1, and La história de la cultura en la América Hispânica (Mexico, 1947), published after his death. Tellingly, neither included Brazil.

V

Brazilian intellectuals during the First Republic (1889–1930) had markedly different attitudes towards the United States. And those who were predominantly hostile saw some advantage in solidarity and collaboration with Brazil’s Spanish American neighbours. They were, ever conscious however that, although Brazil was now a republic, it remained different from Spanish America in culture and, above all, language. Although there was a greater awareness of the economic and political progress achieved by some Spanish American republics, especially Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, most Brazilian intellectuals viewed Spanish America in an overwhelmingly negative light. Few identified with América Latina, Nuestra América, much less Indoamérica.⁴⁷

Joaquim Nabuco (1849–1910), for example, one of Brazil’s most distinguished public intellectuals, had shown no interest in Spanish America during the late empire. When he reflected on the relations between Imperial Brazil and the rest of the world, like the majority of educated Brazilians of his generation, the young Nabuco thought above all of Europe: the historic, linguistic and cultural ties of Brazil with Portugal; the influence of France on the art and architecture of Brazil since the arrival in 1816 of the French Artistic Mission in Rio de Janeiro; the influence of France and Great Britain on Brazilian literature and intellectual life; and, not least, Brazil’s commercial and financial dependence on Great Britain. He visited Spanish America (Argentina and Uruguay) for the first time – twice – in 1889. Apart from a couple of weeks in Buenos Aires in August 1891 as a journalist, and a week in Havana in January 1909 as a special ambassador to the restored national government, he made no further visits to Spanish America and maintained no intellectual contacts there.

With the establishment of the Republic in 1889, Nabuco acknowledged that Brazil was now part of ‘a broader political system ... [Brazil] in America’ and was therefore obliged to take account of ‘the march of the Continent (a marcha do continente) ... our continent’.⁴⁸ Nevertheless Spanish America represented a terrible warning to Brazil of all that was wrong with republican government. In an open letter entitled ‘Why I remain a monarchist’ in the Diário de Comércio, 7 September 1890, Nabuco wrote that the republics of Latin America (sic) were characterised by caudhilismo [strong man rule] and military dictatorship; ‘liberty is sacrificed for order’. And in his Agredecimento aos Pernambucanos (1891), he commented on his generation’s obsession with the word ‘republic’, discredited throughout the world when accompanied with the qualification Sul-Americana’.⁴⁹ Nabuco’s diaries and correspondence are full of derogatory remarks about Spanish America as he sees Brazil (sul-americanizado) brought down to the moral and political level of Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, and even Chile.⁵⁰

Nabuco had always regarded Chile, in view of its political stability, respect for liberty and rejection of militarism and dictatorship, as an exception among the republics of the ‘raça espanhola’ in South America. Brazil’s empire and Chile’s parliamentary republic alone had avoided ‘o gênio sul-americano da ditadura’. But this had changed with the election of José Manuel Balmaceda in 1886. In the postscript ‘A questão da América Latina’ to Balmaceda (1895), his study of the Balmaceda ‘dictatorship’ and the Chilean revolution of 1891, Nabuco describes Latin America as ‘um vasto continente em estado permanente de desgoverno, de anarquia [a vast continent in a permanent state of misgovernment, of anarchy]’.⁵¹ As Brazilian ambassador in Washington (1905–10) Nambuco was a strong supporter of Pan-Americanism, as we have seen, but he never identified Brazil with Spanish America/Latin America. Apart from other factors: ‘language … isolates us from the rest of Ibero-America as it separates Portugal from Spain’.⁵² In his final telegram to Rio Branco, two days before his death in January 1910, he insisted that there were not two, but three Americas: the English, the Spanish and the Portuguese.⁵³

In his widely read and influential book A ilusão americana (1893; 2nd edn. Paris, 1895), Eduardo Prado (1860–1901) strongly condemned the territorial conquest and economic exploitation of Spanish America, especially Mexico, by the United States, its arrogant diplomacy, its use of military force. Prado however, like Nabuco a monarchist, was contemptuous of the Spanish American republics and skeptical of their capacity to unite against their common enemy. An early exponent of the idea of Brazil as ‘uma imensa ilha’, a continent in itself, Prado claimed to have been told by geologists that the Río de la Plata and the Amazon were once connected. In any event, Brazil was separated from the Spanish American republics by ‘diversidade da orígem e da língua’, and ‘nem o Brasil fisico, nem o Brasil moral formam um sistema com aquelas nações’.

The historian Manoel de Oliveira Lima (1867–1928) was one of the few intellectuals of the early republic to represent Brazil in a diplomatic post in Spanish America, spending a year in Venezuela (1905–6) during the dictatorship of Cipriano Castro. In a series of articles, written mainly in Venezuela and Argentina for O Estado de São Paulo and published as Impressões da América espanhola (1904–1906) (1907) he revealed a somewhat negative (and racist) view of the ‘países latinos do continente’, with the exception of Argentina and Chile. And in América latina e América ingleza: a evolução brasileira comparada com a hispano-americana e com a anglo-americana (Livraria Garnier, s/d [1913]; Eng. trans. The Evolution of Brazil Compared with that of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon America, 1914), based on six lectures delivered at Stanford University in October 1912, he elaborated the view that, although they needed to collaborate against the growing power of the United States in the region, Brazil and Spanish America were separate ‘and frequently hostile’ civilisations. At the same time, Oliveira Lima was one of the very few Brazilian intellectuals to spend much time in Spanish America. He was in Argentina for almost seven months immediately after the First World War and published Na Argentina (Impressões 1918–19) in 1920.

In A América Latina: males de orígem (1905), written in Paris in 1903, Manoel Bomfim (1868–1932) criticised the predominantly negative view of Latin America (that is to say, Spanish America) in the United States and Europe. Latin America was generally portrayed as backward and barbarous in order, as he said, to facilitate its domination and exploitation. Bomfim defended the idea of ‘fraternidade’ and ‘solidaridade’ between Brazil and Spanish America based on ‘uma homogeneidade de sentimentos’.⁵⁴ Twenty years later, however, in O Brasil na América: caracterização da formação brasileira (1929), mostly written in 1925, he, too, had become disillusioned with Spanish America. ‘América Latina’ was no more than ‘uma designação geográfica’ within which there were unbridgeable historical, cultural and political differences between, on the one hand, Brazil and, on the other, ‘os chamados latino-americanos’, ‘os neo-castelhanos’, ‘os outros neo-ibéricos’. Significantly, the opening chapter of O Brasil na América is entitled ‘Portugal heróica’, and the final chapter ‘Diferenças entre os neo-ibéricos’.

The journalist and literary critic José Veríssimo (1857–1916) was a rare example of a Brazilian intellectual who, while deploring US cultural influence in Spanish America (in this he is often compared with Rodó) and also in Brazil, had a unique awareness and appreciation of Spanish American literature.⁵⁵ He introduced Brazilian readers to the literature not only of Argentina and Uruguay but also Mexico and Venezuela. ‘Hispanoamericanos também somos nós [We are also hispanoamericans]’, he believed, ‘pois Portugal é Espanha [since Portugal is Spain]’. On a visit to the Academia Brasileira de Letras in 1912, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío heard José Veríssimo lament the fact that ‘filhos do mesmo continente, quase da mesma terra, oriundos de povos em suma da mesma raça ou pelo menos da mesma formação cultural, com grandes interesses comuns, vivemos nós, latinoamericanos, pouco mais que alheios e indiferentes uns aos outros, e nos ignorando quase por completo [children of the same continent, almost of the same land, from people of the same race or at least the same cultural formation, with great common interests, we, we latinamericans, live almost apart and indifferent to each other, and in almost complete ignorance of each other]’.⁵⁶

For a decade from 1903–13 and again in 1916–19, Itamaraty (the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations) funded and edited a journal, Revista Americana,⁵⁷ whose aim was to deepen political and cultural interchange between Brazil, the United States and Spanish America. It published contributions in Spanish as well as Portuguese, including articles by Spanish Americans critical of both Brazil’s close relations with the United States and Pan-Americanism, although the majority of the articles were by Brazilians and sympathetic to both. The first article in the first issue of Revista Americana was a translation of Joaquim Nabuco’s lecture ‘The share of America in civilization’ read (by this time he was too ill to deliver it himself) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in June 1909.

After the First World War there was certainly more interest in Spanish-American literature and culture among Brazilian intellectuals and writers and more cultural interchange. Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), for example, maintained a regular correspondence with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires.⁵⁸ Ronald de Carvalho (1893–1935) welcomed José Vasconcelos on his visit to Rio in 1922 and accepted an invitation to lecture on Brazilian literature in Mexico the following year. Like many of the modernists of the 1920s, however, Carvalho had a stronger sense of belonging to America as a whole (the Americas), than to América Latina. His most famous poem, Toda a América (1924) was influenced more by Walt Whitman than any Spanish-American poet.⁵⁹

In the period between the First and Second World Wars Sílvio Júlio de Albuquerque Lima (1895–1984), author of Estudos hispano-americanos (1924), Ideias e combates (1927), Cérebro e coração de Bolívar (1931), Escritores da Colômbia e Venezuela (1942), Escritores antilhanos (1944) and many other works, was the only true Hispanist in Brazil, dedicated systematically to the promotion of Spanish-American literature and culture.⁶⁰ Years later, Sílvio Júlio wrote: ‘I was – if we exclude three or four insignificant predecessors, and one truly respectable one: Oliveira Lima – the pioneer of bolivarianismo or americanismo in Brazil ... I recall well my titanic, indescribable effort between 1912 and 1930 to convince Brazilian intellectuals to, at the least, read … Ariel ! ... What idiotic smiles, what insolent disinterest I had to endure!’.⁶¹

Brazilian intellectuals between the world wars, like Spanish American intellectuals, were interested principally in the formation of their own national identity. The idea of Brazil, the roots of Brazil (indigenous peoples, the Portuguese, Africans), Brazil’s racial, social and cultural miscegenation, were the main concerns of, for example, José Francisco de Oliveira Viana in Evolução do povo brasileira (1923) and Raça e assimilação (1932); Manuel Bomfim in O Brasil na história (1930) and O Brasil nação: realidade da soberania brasileira (2 vols., 1931); Gilberto Freyre in Casa grande e senzala (1933) and Sobrados e mucambos (1936); Sergio Buarque de Holanda in Os raízes do Brasil (1936); and Caio Prado Jr in Evolução política do Brasil (1933) and Formação do Brasil contemporâneo. Colônia (1942). The government of Getúlio Vargas (1930–45), especially during the authoritarian Estado Novo (1937–45) when Gustavo Capanema was Minister of Education and Public Health, with responsibility also for Culture, used the state and intellectuals linked to the state – for example, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, Lúcio Costa and Oscar Neimeyer – to promote a Brazilian national identity. Spanish America, ‘América Latina’, was still seen as ‘a outra América’.

At the same time, especially during the Second World War, an increasing emphasis was also placed on Brazil’s American identity (‘brasilidade americanista’). From August 1941 the official newspaper of the Estado Novo, A Manhã, published a Sunday supplement with the title Pensamento da América, which promoted an interest in contemporary literary, intellectual and cultural currents in ‘todos as Américas’, including Spanish America and the United States, in a ‘espírito pan-americano’. Cassiano Ricardo, the editor of A Manhã, regarded the American continent as consisting of 21 ‘repúblicas irmãs’. (Canada, as always, was excluded.) ‘Há vinte e uma maneiras de ser americano, e não uma apenas’, Ricardo insisted; Brazil and the United States were ‘duas áncoras prendendo um só continente’.⁶² One of Brazil’s leading historians Pedro Calmon, author of Brasil e América. História de uma política (1942; 2nd edn., 1944), which celebrated ‘união continental’ to save humanity and civilisation from fascism, was a principal collaborator, along with the US historian William Spence Robertson, in a multi-volume História de las Américas (the United States, Spanish America and Brazil) under the general editorship of the Argentine historian Ricardo Levene (14 vols., Buenos Aires, 1940/1942; Portuguese edition, 1945).

VI

As early as the 1890s official US documents can be found referring to reciprocal trade treaties with ‘Latin America’, that is, the countries south of the Rio Grande, usually but not always including Brazil. In his instructions to the US delegates to the second Pan-American Conference in Mexico City in 1901 President Roosevelt expressed the desire of the United States to be the friend of ‘all the Latin American republics’.⁶³ He also referred to ‘Latin America’ in his Annual Message to Congress in 1904 (the Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine), as we have seen. In 1909 President Taft’s Secretary of State, Philander Knox, charged the First Assistant Secretary of State, Francis M. Huntington Wilson, with the task of enlarging and reorganising the State Department. For the first time regional divisions were created, including a ‘Division of Latin American Affairs’, though in practice it dealt only with Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America showing no great interest in South America.⁶⁴ The expression ‘Latin America’ to include Brazil was still not, however, widely used in the United States before the First World War. The research of João Feres Jr. has revealed that neither the Library of Congress nor the New York Public Library has a single book, journal or periodical in English with Latin America in its title published before 1900; only two titles were found in the Library of Congress published between 1900 and 1910, 23 in the decade 1911–20.⁶⁵

In 1916–7 there was an interesting debate among a group of US historians about what name to give the first academic journal devoted to the history of the countries south of the United States due to be launched in January 1918. After both the initial choice, Ibero-America, and Latin America were found unacceptable, the latter in part because at the time it signified Spanish America only, it was finally decided, by six votes to one, to call the journal the Hispanic American Historical Review. Hispania (from the Roman), it was argued, referred to the peninsula, and therefore to Spain and Portugal and by extension to both Spanish America and Brazil.⁶⁶ The HAHR was virtually the only journal to publish articles on ‘Hispanic America’ before the Second World War. In 1940 the first article with Latin America in the title was published: ‘Some cultural aspects of Latin America’ by Herbert Eugene Bolton, author of ‘The epic of Greater America’, his famous presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1932 calling for the study of the common history of the Americas.

In the first issue of another journal launched in 1918, Hispania, devoted to the language and literature of Spain and Portugal, its editor Aurelio M. Espinosa, a Stanford professor, denounced the use of the term ‘Latin America’ to refer to the region south of the United States, including Brazil, as ‘improper, unjust, unscientific’. The only appropriate names were Spanish America (sic) or Hispanic America.⁶⁷ In 1926 the American Historical Association established the Conference on Hispanic American History (renamed only in 1938 the Conference on Latin American History). In 1939 Lewis Hanke, creator and editor of The Handbook of Latin American Studies, an annual annotated bibliography of books and articles on Spanish America and Brazil, first published in 1935, became the head of a new division of the Library of Congress devoted to Portugal, Spain and Latin America. It was named the Hispanic Foundation (now Hispanic Division).

The first general history of Latin America, including Brazil, in English was by William Spence Robertson, The History of the Latin-American Nations (New York, 1922). Robertson was Professor of History at the University of Illinois where he had been teaching the history of Latin America since 1909. In the preface to his Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the Lives of their Liberators (New York, 1918) he had written of the origins, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, of his desire to study ‘the history and politics of Hispanic America, the vast region inhabited by the wayward children of Spain and Portugal’. The purpose of his new book, he wrote, was ‘to outline the chief events in the history of Latin America or, as it is sometimes called, Hispanic America’ – the history of all the ‘nations which sprang from the colonies of Spain and Portugal’. Herman G. James and Percy A. Martin, The Republics of Latin America: their History, Governments and Economic Conditions (New York, 1923) included a chapter on Brazil. Martin had been professor of history at Stanford since 1908. He was, like Robertson, one of the co-founders of the HAHR, the translator of Oliveira Lima’s Stanford lectures, and considered himself something of a ‘Brazilianist’. Another early US ‘Latinamericanist’ whose interests included Brazil was J. Fred Rippy; editor and author of the introduction to Manuel Ugarte’s Destiny of a Continent (1925).

In the aftermath of the disastrous Pan-American Conference held in Havana in 1928 the alarmingly poor state of the United States’ relations with its neighbours was highlighted. This now included relations in South America where US trade and investments had grown considerably since the First World War. Official thinking in Washington and US foreign policy began to focus more seriously on Latin America, which comprised all 20 republics south of the Rio Grande, including Brazil. This despite warnings from Edwin V. Morgan, the US ambassador in Brazil for more than 20 years (1912–33), that too many in Washington were inclined to group Brazil with the ‘South American powers of Spanish origin’. ‘This country’, he told Secretary of State Kellogg, ‘never forgets it is of Portuguese and not Spanish origin’, that like the United States it is ‘built on non-Spanish foundations’ and that it has a ‘special political and economic relationship with the United States different from that of the Spanish American republics’.⁶⁸

In the 1930s, with the United States facing an external threat not only to its economic but also to its geo-political interests in Latin America from the emerging fascist powers of Europe (Germany in particular was seen as a threat to Argentina, Chile and, above all, Brazil), the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the ‘Good Neighbor’ policy towards Latin America. As the situation in Europe deteriorated, Pan-American or inter-American solidarity, the unity of the Hemisphere, the United States and Latin America standing together in the worldwide struggle of democracy against fascism, became ever more important. From August 1940 and throughout the Second World War the Office for the Coordination of Commerce and Cultural Relations between the American Republics (renamed in 1941 the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, OCIAA), under the direction of Nelson Rockefeller, formulated and executed a programme aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Latin Americans, and especially Brazilians (because of their greater involvement in the war), through cinema, radio, music and the printed word. Many more books were now published on Latin America – over 150 in the 1940s, including Hubert Herring, Good Neighbors: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Seventeen Other Countries (1941), Latin America (1942) by the geographer Preston James, Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Latin American Policy of the United States (1943), The Green Continent: a Comprehensive View of Latin America by its Leading Writers, edited by the Colombian writer German Arciniegas and translated from the Spanish and Portuguese by Harriet de Onis et al (1944) and the high school text book by Harriet M. Brown & Helen B. Miller, Our Latin American Neighbors (New York, 1944). All included Brazil as an integral part of Latin America.⁶⁹ Beginning with Karl Loewenstein’s Brazil Under Vargas (New York, 1942) and culminating with Samuel Putnam’s translations of Jorge Amado, Euclides da Cunha and Gilberto Freyre together with his Marvellous Journey: a Survey of Four Centuries of Brazilian Writing (New York, 1948), many more books were published on Brazil itself, which was finally receiving attention as the most important country, and the most important ally of the United States, in Latin America.

The emergence of the United States as a global power during the Second World War led to a demand for more expertise for post-war military and political strategic planning. During the War a so-called Ethno-geographic Board was created, bringing together specialists from the National Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the Smithsonian Institution, to provide a structure around which to organise policy and through which to develop education and research.⁷⁰ The Board began by dividing up the world into continents – with one important exception: instead of the Western Hemisphere or the Americas or North and South America there was to be the United States and Latin America. When it later moved to dividing the world into regions with a degree of geographic, geopolitical and cultural homogeneity, Latin America presented itself as one of the most cohesive of regions in terms of religion, language and culture, history, and economic, social and political structures. The differences between Spanish America and Brazil in all these respects (except to some extent religion) and the huge disparities in size and population between Brazil and all the other countries in the region were simply ignored.⁷¹

In the immediate post-war period and the early years of the Cold War the official US view that the 20 republics south of the Rio Grande, including Brazil, constituted ‘Latin America’ influenced other governments, multilateral institutions (the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, ECLA/CEPAL, established in 1948 was the first international organisation responsible for ‘Latin America’), NGOs, foundations, learned societies and, not least, universities in both the United States and Europe, where ‘Latin American Studies’ experienced a rapid growth, further accelerating after the Cuban Revolution.⁷² Latin America as a whole (now including Brazil) was not only seen as different from the United States but also a problem area, part of what was now referred to as the ‘Third World’ – viewed as economically, socially and culturally backward, politically violent and unstable. In his theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’ Samuel P. Huntington was to argue, bizarrely, that Latin America (with Brazil as its ‘leading state’) was a ‘separate civilization’, with a ‘distinct identity which differentiates it from the West’.⁷³

For the US government, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Latin America was important for both economic (trade and investment) and geopolitical (security) reasons and not least because it initially represented the biggest single voting bloc in the UN Assembly. But, with the onset of the Cold War, hemispheric concerns increasingly gave way to global concerns. Europe, the Middle East and Asia became more important than Latin America, the one region of the world in which the USSR did not apparently pose a significant challenge to US hegemony. The United States could afford to neglect Latin America and the OCIAA was closed in May 1946. There was to be no economic development aid, no Marshall Plan for Latin America, ‘There has been a Marshall Plan for the Western Hemisphere for a century and a half’, Truman declared at a press conference in Washington in August 1947. ‘It is known as the Monroe Doctrine.’⁷⁴ As early as 1949, Adolf Berle, who had served as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America in the Roosevelt administration and ambassador to Brazil in 1945–6, complained about the ‘sheer neglect and ignorance’ of the region he found in Washington, ‘We have simply forgotten about Latin America’.⁷⁵ The Cuban Revolution led directly to President Kennedy’s proposal in 1961 for an Alliance for Progress to advance Latin America’s economic and social development. However, once the Cuban missile crisis had been peacefully resolved and the immediate external threat to its interests removed, the United States was able, relatively speaking, to neglect Latin America once again, though it remained ready to intervene, directly or indirectly, to deal with any internal threat and to save Latin America from ‘communism’, as it claimed to do, for example, in Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973 and Central America in the 1980s.

In view of the special relationship, if not unwritten alliance, Brazil had enjoyed with the United States since the beginning of the century and the support it had given during the Second World War, Brazil was disappointed to be treated by the United States after the War as simply one of twenty, albeit the biggest and perhaps the most important, Latin American republics. Brazil was afforded no special role in the post-war global order (in particular, no permanent seat on the UN Security Council) and received no special economic development assistance.⁷⁶ Although in the last analysis Brazil was always on the side of the United States and the ‘West’ in the Cold War, a more independent foreign policy emerged, first under President Getúlio Vargas, who in 1951 rejected a US request to send Brazilian troops to Korea at the head of an inter-American force.⁷⁷ Under Presidents Jânio Quadros and João Goulart (1961–4), Brazil’s política externa independente included the restoration of relations with the USSR (broken in 1947) and closer relations with China and the rest of the underdeveloped, ‘Third World’, including the countries of Africa and Asia in their struggles against colonialism and revolutionary Cuba (though not, significantly, with the other Spanish American countries).⁷⁸

During the 21-year military dictatorship that followed the US-supported military coup of 1964, while the United Sates regarded Brazil as a ‘key country’ in world affairs and its preferred partner in the Latin American region, Brazil, especially during the Médici and Geisel administrations (1969–79), was frequently in a state of low-level conflict with the United States, for example over trade and nuclear power. And although it never joined the Non-Aligned Movement (it had observer status only), it pursued independent ‘Third World’ policies often at odds with US interests and policies in, for example, the Middle East and southern Africa.⁷⁹ In Latin America, however, where it was clearly now the dominant country – between 1940 and 1980 its population had grown from 40 million to 170 million, its economy, at an average rate of seven per cent per annum, had one of the fastest rates of economic growth in the world – Brazil had neither the will nor the resources to play a leadership role, and certainly not the role of regional ‘sheriff’ the US State Department sometimes envisaged.⁸⁰

Brazil joined the Latin American Free Trade Area (ALALC) in 1960 and the Association for Latin American Integration (ALADI) in 1980. Brazil’s relations with its closest neighbour and arch-rival, Argentina, which had reached an historic low in the 1970s over incipient nuclear arms programmes and the Itaipú dam on the river Paraná, improved dramatically after democratisation in both countries in the mid 1980s. This rapprochment eventually led to the Treaty of Asunción (1991) and the creation of the Mercosur trade bloc consisting of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay (to which Chile and Bolivia later associated themselves). It is fanciful, however, to talk of a latinoamericanização of Brazilian foreign policy in these years. More than 40 years after the end of the Second World War, during which Brazil had been regarded and treated by the United States and the rest of the world as part of Latin America, during which Brazil’s economic and political development had in many ways followed a similar path to that of at least the major Spanish American republics, and during which the beginning of Brazil’s Marcha para Oeste [March to the West] had brought it in closer contact with many of its neighbours, Brazil could still not be said to have a deep engagement with the rest of the region.

VII

In the years following the Second World War there was greater interchange between Spanish American and Brazilian intellectuals, writers, artists, critics and academics. Those Spanish Americans who thought in terms of Latin America now included Brazil and were more prepared to take note of Brazilian ideas, literature and culture in their own work, but for the most part marginally and without great conviction or enthusiasm. No Spanish American intellectual wrote more about Latin America than Leopoldo Zea (Mexico, 1912–2004). Brazil, however, could hardly be said to have been treated adequately in any of his books.⁸¹ Notable exceptions were Arturo Torres-Rioseco (Chile, 1897– 1971), Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay, 1940–2015), author of the best-selling Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971), Ángel Rama (Uruguay, 1926–83) and Emir Rodríguez Monegal (Uruguay, 1921–85), who edited the two-volume Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature (New York, 1977) in which Brazil was well represented.⁸² It is not insignificant that many of those who gave most attention to Brazil taught in departments of Spanish and Portuguese studies at leading universities in the United States – Torres-Rioseco, for example, taught for over 40 years at the University of California, Berkeley, Rodríguez Monegal for over 15 years at Yale – and/or belonged to the smaller countries of Latin America (mainly Uruguay, also Brazil’s closest neighbour in Spanish America).

In Brazil there were also artists, writers and critics who gave much greater attention to Spanish American culture and ideas than hitherto. One of Brazil’s greatest poets Manuel Bandeira, for example, published Literatura hispano-americana in 1949. In the period from the 1960s to the 1980s several leading Brazilian intellectuals, mostly on the Left, even began to self-identify with ‘Latin America’. This was not merely a question of ideological affinity and solidarity with their colleagues in Spanish America during the Cold War; it was often directly a consequence of years spent in exile in Uruguay (until the coup in June 1973), Chile (until the coup there in September 1973), Mexico and Venezuela, as well as in various European countries and the United States, during the Brazilian military dictatorship. ‘It was…in Santiago [immediately after the 1964 golpe]’, Fernando Henrique Cardoso has written, ‘that I awakened to the concept of ‘‘Latin America’’. It seems quite intuitive now, but the concept of the region as a political and cultural bloc was still not popular back then. We just didn’t believe that Brazil, with its Portuguese heritage and continental size, had much in common with Peru, Venezuela or Mexico.’⁸³ Cardoso wrote (with the Chilean Enzo Faletto) the hugely influential Dependency and Development in Latin America, first published in Spanish in 1969. Celso Furtado (1920– 2004), who had been trained and influenced by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch at ECLA/CEPAL in Santiago and had therefore already been to some extent ‘Latinamericanised’, wrote Subdesenvolvimento e estagnação na América Latina (1966) and Formação econômica da América Latina (1969). Ruy Mauro Marini (1932–97) and Theotonio dos Santos (1936–2018), who were greatly influenced by the German-born ‘Latinamericanist’ André Gunder Frank, author of Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967), wrote numerous books and articles on the theory of dependency as it related to Latin America. The anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro (1922–97) wrote As Américas e a civilização: processo de formação e causa do desenvolvimento cultural desigual dos povos americanos (1970), O dilema de América Latina – estruturas de poder e forças insurgentes (1978) and, after his return from exile, an essay entitled ‘América Latina: pátria grande’ (1986). A more surprising example of a Brazilian intellectual identifying with Latin America is Gilberto Freyre, who was perhaps Brazil’s most internationally recognised intellectual at the time and who was well-known for his previous writings on Luso-Brazilian exceptionalism. In an essay ‘Americanidade e latinidade da América Latina’ published in 1963, Freyre declared: ‘O brasileiro é uma gente hispânica, sua cultura é hispãnica – no sentido ibérica..... O Brasil é duplamente hispânica (Portugal e a España) [Brazilians are a hispanic people, their culture is hispanic, in the sense of iberian.... Brazil is doubly hispanic (Portugal and Spain])’. For him the Latin American countries were all ‘países americano-tropicais’. There existed ‘uma unidade pan-hispânica…. uma cultura transnacionalmente panhispânica a que o Brasil pertence’.⁸⁴

VIII

As a result of the end of the Cold War, the profound changes in world politics that followed, the intensification of the process of globalisation and, not least, fundamental political and economic change in Brazil itself, Brazil’s presence and influence in the world grew significantly, especially under the presidencies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010). Brazil began to play an increasingly important role in North– South and South–South relations and was a key player in discussions on a whole range of global issues, including trade, reform of multilateral institutions and climate change. As a result Brazil was considered internationally, along with China and India, as one of the ‘emerging global powers’ in the first half of the 21st century.

At the same time, there was a major development in Brazil’s relations with the other states in its region. Brazil continued to support the work of the Organisation of American States, founded in 1948 at the ninth Pan-American Conference in Bogotá, and its presidents have attended all the Summits of the Americas held since December 1994, while resisting the US agenda for the economic integration of the Western Hemisphere. Brazil attended the annual meetings of the Rio Group of Latin American and Caribbean states, founded in 1986, and gave its support to the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), founded in 2010. But Brazil also, for the first time in its history, actively pursued a policy of engagement, both economic and political, with its immediate neighbours in South America. This was a conscious decision deliberately taken in 1992–3, reinforced by the fact that in 1994 Mexico joined the United States and Canada in ‘North America’. President Cardoso hosted the first summit of South American presidents in Brasília in 2000. At the third summit held in Cusco in December 2004, during the Lula administration, a South American Community of Nations was formed. It consisted of 12 nations, including Guyana and Suriname. At the summit held in Brasília in May 2008 the Community became a Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). Improved relations with its South American neighbours and, indeed, the economic and political integration of South America, was the principal focus of Brazilian foreign policy under President Lula. Also for the first time, and with a good deal of hesitancy, uncertainty and ambivalence, Brazil began to think of itself as a regional power – not only in its long-term economic and strategic interests but because, it was argued in Itamaraty, regional power was a necessary condition for global power. The region, however, was South America, not Latin America.⁸⁶

* This essay is a revised and expanded version of ‘Brazil and Latin America’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 42/3, August 2010, pp. 457–85. There is an earlier version in Portuguese: ‘O Brasil e a idéia de América Latina em perspectiva histórica’, Estudos Históricos, 44 (2009), pp. 289–321, and two later versions in Spanish: ‘Brasil y ‘América Latina’’, Prismas. Revista de historia intelectual, 16 (2012), pp. 53–78 and Istor. Revista de Historia Internacional, 67, 2016 , pp. 109–45.

1 J.L. Phelan, ‘Pan-Latinism, French intervention in Mexico (1861–7) and the genesis of the idea of Latin America’, in J.A. Ortega y Medina (ed.), Conciencia y autenticidad históricas: escritas en homenaje a Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexico D.F: UNAM, 1968), pp. 279–98.

2 See G. Martinière, ‘Michel Chevalier et la latinité de l’Amérique’, Revista NEIBA. Cadernos Argentina-Brasil III/1, (2014).

3 See A. Ardao, ‘La idea de Latinoamérica’, Marcha (Montevideo), 27 November 1965; Génesis de la idea y el nombre de América Latina (Caracas, 1980). Since the publication of Ardao’s Génesis there have been a number of articles on this subject worthy of note: for example, J.C. Torchia Estrada, ‘“América Latina”: orígen de un nombre y una idea’, Inter-American Review of Bibliography, 32 (1982) [a lengthy review of Ardao]; Monica Quijada, ‘Sobre el orígen y difusión del nombre “América Latina”. O una variación heterodoxa en torno al tema de la construcción social de la verdad’, Revista de Indias, 58, (1998); P. Estrade, ‘Del invento de “América Latina” en Paris por latinoamericanos (1856–1889)’, in J. Maurice and M.-C. Zimmerman (eds.), Paris y el mundo ibérico e iberoamericano (Université de Paris X-Nanterre, 1998); H.H. Bruit, ‘A invenção da América Latina’, in Anais electrônicos do V Encontro da Associação Nacional de Pesquisadores e Professores de História das Américas (Belo Horizonte, 2000). The concepts ‘raza latina’ and ‘América latina’, as W. Mignolo has reminded us in The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), also served the purpose of emphasising the common European roots of the ‘white’ post-colonial criollo elites of Spanish America which separated them from the mass of Indians, mestizos and blacks.

4 See M. Rojas Mix, ‘Bilbao y el hallazgo de América latina: unión continental, socialista y libertária’, Cahiers du Monde Hispanique et Luso-Brasilien – Caravelle, 46 (1986) and Los cien nombres de América Latina (San José, 1991).

5 See A. McGuinness, ‘Searching for “Latin America”. Race and sovereignty in the Americas in the 1850s’, in N.P. Appelbaum, A.S. Macpherson and K.A. Rosemblatt (eds.), Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and Path of Empire. Panama and the California Gold Rush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 2008), ch. 5, ‘U.S. empire and the boundaries of Latin America’.

6 See A. Ardao, España en el orígen del nombre América Latina (Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, 1992).

7 N. Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p. 244.

8 See G. Martin, ‘The literature, music and art of Latin America from independence to c. 1870’, in L. Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, III: From independence to c. 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

9 See the classic study by A.P. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954). On the name ‘America’ – from Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine navigator, and its first use in a map of 1507 – to describe the landmass (or two landmasses joined at the isthmus of Panama) ‘discovered’ by Europeans at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries, the classic work remains E. O’Gorman, La invención de América (Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958).

10 See K. Maxwell, Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues (New York: Routledge, 2003), ch. 9 ‘The odd couple: Jefferson and the Abbé’.

11 Quoted in D.A.G. Waddell, ‘International politics and Latin American independence’, in Bethell (ed.), Cambridge History of Latin America, III, p. 219.

12 Quoted in L. Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of US Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 10–11.

13 See I. Jaksic, Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). This excellent book, like Bello himself, chooses to completely ignore Brazil.

14 Brazil was later invited – by Vice-President Santander of Colombia – to send representatives to Panama, and two were eventually appointed. But the first never arrived and the second never even left Brazil. The United States was also invited late, but no US delegates attended the Congress.

15 On the American conferences, see A. Granados García, ‘Congresos e intelectuales en los inicios de un proyecto y de una conciencia continental latinoamericana, 1826–1860’, in A. Granados García and C. Marichal (eds.), Construcción de las identidades latinoamericanas. Ensayos de historia intelectual (siglos XIX y XX) (Mexico, D.F: El Colegio de México, 2004).

16 Quoted in L. C. Villafañe G. Santos, O Brasil entre a América e a Europa: o Império e o interamericanismo (Do Congresso do Panamá a Conferência de Washington) (São Paulo: UNESP, 2003), p. 97.

17 See L. C. Villafañe G. Santos, O Império e as Repúblicas do Pacífico. As relações do Brasil com Chile, Bolívia, Peru, Ecuador e Colômbia (1822–1889) (Curitiba: Editora da UFPR, 2002).

18 See G. Palacios, Intimidades, Conflictos e Reconciliaciones. México y Brasil, 1822–1993 (Mexico, D.F.: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 2008).

19 At the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1889, on the centenary of the French Revolution, Brazil, Le grand empire de l’Amérique du Sud, presented itself, and was treated, as an important nation, ‘civilised’ and ‘progressive’, to be compared with the United States of America. The principal objective of the Brazilian pavilion, and a 700-page book Le Brésil en 1889, was to demonstrate that ‘pour être Américains du Sud, nous n’en sommes pas moins Américains’.

20 See L. Bethell, ‘O Brasil e as Conferências Panamericanas’, in Alzira Alves de Abreu (ed.), Dicionário histórico-biográfico da Primeira República (1889–1930) (Rio de Janeiro: CPDOC/ FGV, 2012).

21 La Nación, 26 July, reproduced in the Jornal do Commercio, 4 August 1906. Cited in C. Bueno, Política Externa da Primeira República. Os anos de apogeu – de 1902 a 1918 (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2003), p. 152.

22 On the settlement of Brazil’s frontier disputes with its neighbours in South America, see S. Sampaio Goes Filho, Navegantes, bandeirantes, diplomatas: um ensaio sobre a formação da fronteiras do Brasil (São Paulo, 1999) and ‘Fronteiras: o estilo negociador do Barão do Rio Branco como paradigma da política exterior do Brasil’, in C.H. Cardim and J. Almino (eds.), Rio Branco, a América do Sul e a modernização do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro/Brasília: EMC – Edições, 2002).

23 Quoted in J. Smith, Unequal Giants. Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Brazil, 1889–1930 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsbugh Press, 1991), pp. 62–3.

24 Rio Branco to Nabuco, telegram, 22 Nov. 1909, in Joaquim Nabuco, embaixador vol. I: 1905–7, vol II: 1908–10 (Rio de Janeiro: Centro da História e Documentação Diplomática/ Brasília: Funag, 2011), II, p. 244.

25 J. Nabuco, Balmaceda (1895; São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2008), J. Almino de Alencar (ed.), Pós-escrito: A questão da América Latina, pp. 220–1.

26 J. Nabuco, Obras Completas de Joaquim Nabuco, vol. XIV: Cartas a amigos vol. II (São Paulo, 1949), p. 238: Nabuco to Rio Branco, 19 Dec. 1905.

27 J. Nabuco, Diários I 1873–1888, II 1889–1910 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Bem-Te-Vi/Recife: Editora Massangana, 2005), preface and notes by E. Cabral de Mello, vol. II pp. 346–7: Nabuco to Rodrigues, 12 Dec. 1905.

28 See L. Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no Mundo. Abolicionista, jornalista e diplomata (Rio de Janeiro: Bem-Te-Vi Produções Literárias, 2016), pp. 212–4.

29 Nabuco to Rio Branco, 20 Oct. 1907; Nabuco to Rui Barbosa, 22 Oct. 1907: Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, vol. II, pp. 291, 294.

30 Nabuco to Barbosa Lima, 7 July 1907, in Cartas a amigos vol. II, p. 277.

31 Nabuco to Alexandre Barbosa Lima 7 July 1907, Cartas a amigos, vol. II, p. 277; Nabuco to Rio Branco 18 Jan. 1908, Cartas a amigos, vol. II, pp. 301–2; Nabuco to Graça Aranha, 18 Aug., 28 Sept. 1908, cited in Anco Márcio Tenório Vieira, ‘O abolicionismo, o panamericanismo e o valor da experiência empírica em Joaquim Nabuco: Notas para uma correspondência’, in H. Cavalcanti and S. Couceiro (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco e nossa formação (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/ Editora Massangana, 2012), pp. 83–4; Nabuco to Hilário de Gouveia, 19 Jan. 1909, artas a amigos, Vol. II, p. 330. For further details on Nabuco’s thinking on Brazil, the United States and Spanish America, see Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no mundo, ch. 4.

32 See E. Vargas Garcia, Entre América e Europa: a política externa brasileira na década de 1920 (Brasília: UnB/Funag, 2006), p. 88. See also E. Vargas Garcia, O Brasil e a Liga das Nações (1919–1926) (Porto Alegre/Brasília: UFRGS/Funag, 2000).

33 A. de Melo Franco to J.F. Pacheco, 17 March 1926, quoted in S. Hilton, ‘Afrânio de Melo Franco e a diplomacia brasileira, 1917–1943’, Revista Brasileira de Politica Internacional Ano XXIX /1 (1986), p. 21.

34 Austin Chamberlain to Regis de Oliveira 4 June 1926, quoted in E. Vargas Garcia, Entre América e Europa, p. 418. A commission of the Assembly of the League in May 1926 increased the number of non-permanent members on the council from six to nine, three for Latin America – to be rotated. Chile, Colombia and El Salvador were admitted at the seventh general assembly in September 1926.

35 Pacheco to Melo Franco, telegram, 12 May 1926, quoted in Garcia, Entre América e Europa, pp. 409–10.

36 Quoted in Garcia, Entre América e Europa, p. 449.

37 Aranha to Vargas, 15 Jan 1935, quoted in S.E. Hilton, Brazil and the Great Powers, 1930–1939: The Politics of Trade Rivalry (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1975), p. 14.

38 Berle diary, 20–27 Feb. 1945, quoted in J.A. Schwarz, Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era (New York: The Free Press, 1987), p. 262.

39 Ver E. Vargas Garcia, O Sexto Membro Permanente. O Brasil e a criação da ONU (Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2012).

40 See M. Quijada, ‘Latinos y anglosajones. El 98 en el fin de siglo sudamericano’, Hispania (Madrid) LVII/2, 196 (1997).

41 See J. Martí , Nuestra América,various editions. In English, Inside the Monster by José Martí: Writings on the United States and American Imperialism ed. with an introduction by P.S. Foner (New York, 1975) and Our America by José Martí: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence ed. with introduction by P.S. Foner (New York, 1977). Also see J. Lamore, José Martí et l’Amérique 2 vols. (Paris, 1986–8).

42 On Rodó and his vision of a Latin American magna patria, see R.P. Newcomb, Nossa and Nuestra América, Inter-American Dialogues (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2012), ch. 2.

43 See, for example, C. Zumeta (Venezuela, 1860–1955) El continente enfermo (1899); F. Bulnes (Mexico, 1847–1924), El porvenir de las naciones hispanoamericanas (1899); C.O. Bunge (Argentina, 1875–1918), Nuestra América (1903); A. Arguedas (Bolivia, 1879–1946), Pueblo enfermo (1909). F. García Calderón (Peru, 1883–1953), Les democraties latines de l’Amérique (1912; eng. trans. Latin America: its rise and progress, 1918), did include one chapter on Brazil, but a chapter of ten pages only. On García Calderón, see A. Gil Lázaro, ‘Las señas de identidad de un escritor “ausente”: América Latina y Perú en la pensamiento de Francisco García Calderón’, in García and Marichal, Construcción de las identidades latinoamericanas.

44 On Ugarte’s ideas on ‘América Latina’, see J. Moyano, ‘El concepto de América Latina en el pensamiento de Manuel Ugarte y Deodoro Roca’, in García and Marichal, Construcción de las identidades latinoamericanas, and Miguel Angel Barrios, El latinoamericanismo en el pensamiento político de Manuel Ugarte (Buenos Aires, 2007).

45 The Palácio Monroe had been constructed for the third Pan American Conference held in Rio de Janeiro in 1906. From 1914 to 1922 it temporarily housed the Chamber of Deputies, and from 1922 to 1937 (when it was closed by Getúlio Vargas) and from 1946 to 1960 the Senate. It was demolished in 1976.

46 See F.P. Ellison, Alfonso Reyes e o Brasil. Um mexicano entre os cariocas (Rio de Janeiro, 2002) and Newcomb, Nossa and Nuestra América, ch. 4.

47 In ‘Brazil into Latin America: the demise of slavery and monarchy as transnational events’ (Luso-Brazilian Review, 49 (2012), pp. 96–126), Ori Preuss (University of Tel Aviv) argues, unconvincingly, that: ‘It was the cumulative effect of these two real and symbolic deaths [the abolition of slavery and the end of the empire] that would finally give birth to a Latin American consciousness in Brazil… The collapse of these twin pillars of Brazil’s singularity within the subcontinent can be interpreted as two interrelated ruptures that spiralled into a transformative historical event, disarticulating the existing mental structure’. In Bridging the Island: Brazilians’ Views of Spanish America and Themselves, 1865–1912 (Frankfurt: Iberoamericana, 2011), he writes: ‘By the first decade of the 20th century Brazilian elites [political and intellectual] had come to perceive themselves, to one extent or another, willingly or unwillingly, as Latin Americans’. Unfortunately, Preuss gives few examples of what he terms ‘outright expressions of Latin Americanism’ by either Brazilian politicians or Brazilian intellectuals during the first years of the Republic. A more nuanced view can be found in an unpublished doctoral thesis, K. Gerab Baggio, ‘A “outra” América: a América Latina na visão dos intelectuais brasileiras das primeira décadas republicanas’ (Universidade de São Paulo, 1998), Baggio has written a number of articles on this theme. See, for example, ‘Brasil e Hispano-América: representações e trocas intelectuais’, in E. de Freitas Dutra (ed.), O Brasil em dois tempos: história, pensamento social e tempo presente (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2013).

48 J. Nabuco, Balmaceda, p. 218.

49 Cited in A. Alonso, ‘Joaquim Nabuco; Diplomata Americanista’, in José Vicente de Sá Pimentel (ed.), Pensamento Diplomático Brasileiro. Formuladores e Agentes da Politica Externa (1750–1964), 3 vols. (Brasília: Fundação Alexandre Gusmão, 2013), vol. II, p. 364.

50 See Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no mundo, p. 204. On the eve of the republic José Maria da Silva Paranhos Jr., the future barão de Rio Branco, also feared that with the introduction of an elected president and a federal system of government Brazil would become like ‘todas essas ridículas repúblicas hispano-americanas’ [he gave, as examples, Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia]. The Brazilian Empire, ‘unido, grande, próspero e livre’, was the envy of the ‘turbulentes repúblicas da América do Sul’, the ‘súditos de Gusmões Blancos e Porfírios Dias [dictators of Venezuela and Mexico respectively]’. Rio Branco to barão Homem de Mello, 13 Sept. 1887(?), cited in Clodoaldo Bueno, ’O Barão do Rio Branco e o Projeto da América do Sul’, in Cardim and Almino (eds.), Rio Branco, p. 359.

51 Nabuco, Balmaceda, Pós-escrito: A questão da América Latina, pp. 215–6, 219.

52 Nabuco to Barbosa Lima, 7 July 1907, in Cartas a amigos, vol. II, pp. 277.

53 Nabuco to Rio Branco, telegram, 15 Jan. 1910, Joaquim Nabuco, Embaixador, vol. II, p. 266. For a more detailed examination of Nabuco’s thinking on Spanish America, see Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no mundo, ch. 4.

54 See F. Sussekind, ‘Shifting frontiers – Manuel Bonfim and A América Latina: an introduction’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, vol. II (2002).

55 See, for example, A educação nacional (Belem, 1890; 2nd edn. Rio, 1906) and ‘A regeneração da América Latina’ (Jornal do Comércio, 18 December 1900), a review of Rodó’s Ariel, later included in Homens e Coisas Estrangeiras (Rio de Janeiro, 1902). Also J. Verissimo, Cultura, literatura e política na América Latina, a selection of his essays published for the most part in the years immediately before the First World War, edited and with an introduction by J.A. Barbosa (São Paulo, 1986), and K. Gerab Baggio, ‘José Verissimo: uma visão brasileira sobre as Américas’, Anos Electrônicos do III Encontro da ANPHLAC (São Paulo, 1998).

56 Quoted in Ellison, Alfonso Reyes e o Brasil, p.17.

57 See A. M. Ortega, ‘A construção de uma ideologia continental no início do século XX: a Revista Americana 1909–19’ (unpublished PUC-São Paulo thesis, 2003); A. Fernandez Bravo, ‘Utópias americanistas: la posición de la Revista Americana en Brasil (1909–1919)’, in P. Alonso, Construcciones impresas: panfletas, diárias y revistas en la formación de los estados nacionales en América Latina, 1820–1920 (Buenos Aires, 2004); R. Souza de Carvalho, ‘La Revista Americana (1909–1919) y el diálogo intelectual en Latinoamérica’, Revista Iberoamericana, Jul.-Dec. 2004; K. Baggio Gerab, ‘La Revista Americana (1909–1919) et les relations entre les Amériques’, in E. de Freitas and J.-Y. Mollier (eds.), L’imprimé dans la construction de la vie politique. Brésil, Europe et Amériques (XVIIIe–XXe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015).

58 See Mário de Andrade/Borges: um diálogo dos anos 20, ed. E. Rodriguez Monegal (São Paulo, 1975); R. Antelo, Na Ilha de Marapatá (Mário de Andrade lê os hispano-americanos) (São Paulo, 1986); P. Artundo, Mário de Andrade e a Argentina (São Paulo: Edusp, 2004).

59 See K. Gerab Baggio, ‘Ronald de Carvalho e Toda a América: diplomacia, ensaísmo, poesia e impressões de viagem na sociabilidade intelectual entre o Brasil e a Hispano-América’, in J.L. Bendicho Beired, M.H. Capelato and M.L. Coelho (eds.), Intercâmbios políticos e mediações culturais nas Américas (Assis, SP: Unesp, 2010).

60 D.S. Wogan, A Literatura Hispano-americana no Brasil: 1877–1944. Bibliografia de crítica, história literária e traduções (Baton Rouge, LN: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), pp. 9–10.

61 Sílvio Júlio de Albuquerque Lima, José Enrique Rodó e o cinquentenário do seu livro ‘Ariel’ (Rio de Janeiro, 1954), quoted in Newcomb, Nossa and Nuestra América, p. 9.

62 See A.L. Beraba, América aracnidea. Teias culturais interamericanas (Rio de Janeiro, 2008), pp. 14, 27. On the ‘Americanisation’ of Brazilian culture during the Second World War, see, G. Moura, Tio Sam chega ao Brasil: a penetração cultural americana (São Paulo, 1984) and A. Pedro Tota, O imperialismo sedutor. A americanização do Brasil na época da Segunda Guerra (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000).

63 Quoted in Smith, Unequal giants, p. 52

64 See F.M. Huntington Wilson, Memoirs of an Ex-Diplomat (Boston, 1945); W.V. and M.V. Scholes, The Foreign Policy of the Taft Administration (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1970), pp. 25–7.

65 See J. Feres Jr, A história do conceito de ‘Latin America’ nos Estados Unidos (Bauru, SP: EDUSC, 2004), p. 81 and Appendix 1.

66 Feres, Historia do conceito de ‘Latin America’, pp. 82–4; H. Delpar, Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2008), p. 50.

67 A.M. Espinosa, ‘The term Latin America’, Hispania, 1 (September 1918), quoted in Delpar, Looking South, p. 29.

68 Quoted in Smith, Unequal giants, pp. 175–6, 178.

69 The French also discovered, or in their case re-discovered, ‘l’Amérique Latine’, but it now included Brazil: for example, A. Siegfried, Amérique Latine (1934) and V. Tapié, Histoire de Amérique Latine au XIXe siecle (1945), although in a famous article ‘Ya-t-il une Amérique Latine?’, Annales ESC, 4 (1948), Fernand Braudel insisted that there were many and various ‘l’Amériques Latines’. The English generally preferred the expression ‘South America’ to ‘Latin America’ – even when including Mexico and Central America. See, for example, Lord Bryce, South America: Observations and Impressions (New York, 1912) and the South American Handbook, published annually since 1924.

70 See W.C. Bennett, The Ethnogeographic Board (Washington, DC, 1947); M.W. Lewis and K.E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents. A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), p. 163.

71 Also influential in US geo-strategic thinking at this time were two books by N.J. Spykman: America’s Strategy in World Politics (1942) and The Geography of Peace (1944). Spykman emphasised the differences between Anglo-Saxon America and Latin America (which included Brazil): ‘the lands below the Rio Grande represent a different world, the world of Latin America. It is perhaps unfortunate that the English and Latin speaking (sic) parts of the continent should both be called America, thereby unconsciously evoking an expectation of similarity which does not exist’ (Spykman, America’s Strategy, p. 46). The influence of Isaiah Bowman, Director of the American Geographical Society (1915–35) and ‘territorial adviser’ to President Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference and to President Roosevelt during the Second World War, also deserves attention. See N. Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalisation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).

72 ‘Latin American studies’, especially in US universities, were, however, overwhelmingly studies of Spanish America, especially Mexico and Central America. Most ‘Latinamericanists’ did not speak or read Portuguese, knew little of Brazilian history and culture, and indeed rarely, if ever, visited Brazil.

73 S.P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 45, 46, 87.

74 Quoted in Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough (eds.), Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 22, n. 15.

75 Quoted in Jordan A. Schwartz, Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era (New York, 1987), pp. 312.

76 See Stanley E. Hilton, ‘The United States, Brazil, and the Cold War, 1945–1960: end of the special relationship’, Journal of American History, 68 (1981).

77 See Vagner Camilo Alves, Da Itália a Coréia. Decisões sobre ir ou não a guerra (Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro, 2007). It was in 1951 at a meeting of American Foreign Ministers in Washington to discuss the Korean War that the Brazilian Foreign Minister spoke, apparently for the first time,‘em nome de países latinoamericanos’. Itamaraty, Relatório, 1951, quoted in Lúis Cláudio Villafañe G. Santos, ‘A América do Sul no discurso diplomático brasileiro’, Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, 48 (2005) p. 196.

78 F.C. de San Tiago Dantas, Política externa independente (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) is a contemporary account by a key player. Also see P.G. Fagundes Vizentini, Relações exteriores do Brasil (1945–1964). O nacionalismo e a política externa independente (Petrópolis, 2004).

79 See M. Spektor, Kissinger e o Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 2009).

80 ‘The military dictatorship’, former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has written, ‘… spent far more energy on its relations with countries in Africa and the Middle East than it did on relations with its neighbors. This was due to a rather bizarre formulation of Third World power politics’ (F. H. Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir (New York, 2006), p. 220).

81 Leopoldo Zea’s works include The Latin American Mind (1963), El pensamiento latinoamericano (1963, 1976), América Latina y el mundo (1965; Eng. trans. Latin America in the World, 1969), Latinoamérica, Tercer Mundo (1977), Latinoamérica en la encrucijada de la historia (1981), América Latina en sus ideas (1986), Filosofía latinoamericana (1987) and Descubrimiento e identidad latinoamericana (1990). In the three-volume Fuentes de la cultura latinoamericana (Mexico, D. F., 1993) edited by Zea, only three of more than 100 texts were by Brazilians: Darcy Ribeiro, described as a ‘brasileño latinoamericano’ (‘La cultura latinoamericana’), João Cruz Costa (‘El pensamiento brasileño’) and Gilberto Freyre (‘Raices europeos de la historia brasileña’). But see Luciano dos Santos, ‘O Brasil como parte da América Latina: o projeto identitário-integracionista de Leopoldo Zea’, Temporalidades –Revista de História, 4 (2012).

82 On Rama and Rodríguez Monegal, see P. Rocca, Angel Rama, Emir Rodríguez Monegal y el Brasil: Dos caras de un projecto latinoamericano (Montevideo, 2006). However, the majority of Brazilian intellectuals, it is probably fair to say, like most Brazilians, continued to think of ‘Latin America’ as signifying Spanish America, of Brazil as not part of ‘Latin America’ and of themselves as not essentially ‘Latin American’.⁸⁵

83 Cardoso, The Accidental President, p. 88.

84 ‘Americanidade e latinidade da América Latina: crescente interpenetração e decrescente segregação’ [Diogene, 43 (1963); republished in Estudos Universitários, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco , 6/1 Jan.–March 1966 under the title ‘Americanidade, latinidade e tropicalidade’], in Americanidade e Latinidade da América Latina e outros textos afins (ed.) Edson Nery da Fonseca (São Paulo, 2003). See also G. Freyre, O brasileiro entre os outros hispanos: afinidades, contrastes e posseveis futuros nas suas inter-relações (Rio de Janeiro, 1975).

85 The increasing number of Brazilians living in the United States did not, and apparently still do not, think of themselves as ‘Latinos’, though more research could usefully be done on this topic.

86 A agenda internacional do Brasil. A politica externa brasileira de FHC a Lula (Rio de Janeiro, 2009), the most comprehensive survey ever undertaken of opinion within the Brazilian ‘foreign policy community’ (diplomats, senators and deputies, business leaders, academics, researchers, journalists, leaders of NGOs, etc.), commissioned by the Centro Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais (CEBRI) in Rio de Janeiro, conducted by Amaury de Souza and based on almost 100 in-depth interviews and 250 questionnaires carried out in 2001 and 2008, begins with the words: ‘In the last 20 years Brazil has expanded significantly its presence in the world and in South America’. The rest of the book has much of interest to say about Brazil’s agenda in South America in the first decade of the 21st century, about which, interestingly, opinion had become even more sharply divided in 2008 than it was in 2001. But the book has nothing at all to say about ‘América Latina’ which does not even merit an entry in the index. On Brazil and South America, see L.C. Villafañe G. Santos, A América do Sul no Discurso Diplomático Brasileiro (Brasília: Fundação Alexandre Gusmão, 2014).